Michigan Spent August On Two Freshmen. The Third Receiver Job Went To A Junior With Six Starts.

Kyle Whittingham went on the Inside Michigan Football radio show on Monday night and gave away the one piece of his offense that was still open. Western Michigan is Saturday.

"Channing Goodwin's a guy that really made progress and made strides in the fall. And right now is our number three guy, and you're going to see Channing out there as well," Whittingham said, per Sam Bernardi of Maize n Brew.

That is not where August pointed. The two names attached to Michigan's third receiver spot all month were freshmen, Salesi Moa and Travis Johnson, and the projections went the same way. MGoBlog's receiver preview had Moa in the slot and Johnson as the third outside receiver.

Michigan's own week-one game notes record what the three men August preferred have done in college football.

The notes list nine receivers on this roster with game experience. Moa is not on the list. Johnson is not on the list. Both are true freshmen and neither has played a college snap. The notes then name the five receivers who have caught a pass in their careers: Andrew Marsh, Kendrick Bell, Goodwin, JJ Buchanan and Jaime Ffrench. Ffrench is the only one of the three who appears anywhere in that, and his college career is one sentence long in the club's own document. He spent 2025 at Texas, appeared in four games, and caught one pass for six yards against Sam Houston.

One catch, six yards, between the three of them.

What Goodwin has instead#

Goodwin is a junior from Charlotte, and he missed all of spring practice with an injury, which is most of why August was spent on other people. Michigan's notes credit him with 17 career games at receiver and six starting assignments, all of them last season, when he played in all 13 games and caught 12 passes for 148 yards. His longest went for 39 yards, per ESPN's 2025 team receiving table. His first career start came against New Mexico, and he caught two passes for 49 yards in it.

That is not stardom and nobody has claimed it is. It is, by a distance, the most any of these men has done.

The game notes carry a table of starting assignments, and it sorts the receiver room cleanly. Marsh has nine career starts. Buchanan has seven, all of them at Utah. Bell has seven, six of those in 2024. Goodwin has six. Ffrench, Moa and Johnson are not in the table, and the table credits starts made at other schools, which is how Buchanan's seven Utah games got there in the first place.

Bell is the strange one in that group. He is a senior with 26 career games, more than any other receiver on the roster, 10 career receptions and one touchdown, a 19-yard catch against Texas in the Citrus Bowl. He started six games in 2024 and one in 2025. The room got younger and better around him and he is now behind a junior with six starts.

The reason this job is worth an argument#

ESPN's 2025 Michigan receiving table lists five wide receivers with a catch: Marsh with 45, Donaven McCulley with 39, Semaj Morgan with 20, Goodwin with 12 and Bell with three. That is 119 receptions. McCulley and Morgan are not on the 2026 roster, and 59 of the 119 left with them.

Marsh and Buchanan cover the top of that. Marsh caught 45 passes for 651 yards and four touchdowns as a true freshman, led Michigan in all three, and was named a Freshman All-American by the Football Writers Association of America and On3. Buchanan caught 26 for 427 with five touchdowns at Utah, starting seven games, including each of that team's last six.

Everything under those two is the third spot, and close to half of last year's wide receiver work is sitting in it.

The case for the freshmen is Marsh's own file#

The argument for Johnson and Moa is not hype and it should not be dismissed as hype. It is what happened in this building last season.

Marsh finished 2025 with 45 catches for 651 yards. Michigan's notes credit him with 44 of those catches and 621 of those yards in the final nine games of 13. Subtract, and his first four games were one catch for 30 yards, a reception against Central Michigan that the notes record as the first of his career. He set the Michigan freshman receiving yardage record on the back half, and had 12 catches for 189 yards at Northwestern, a total tied for sixth-best in school history. A Michigan receiver went from nothing to the offense inside one season, and the people watching Johnson and Moa in August are describing something they recognize.

Johnson arrived from Oscar Smith in Chesapeake, Virginia, where he caught more than 40 passes for 1,200 yards and 15 touchdowns as a senior after 63 for 1,053 and 17 scores as a junior. Michigan lists him as the No. 14 receiver prospect nationally. Receivers coach Micah Simon, quoted in MGoBlog's preview, described a basketball background showing up in how he attacks the ball in the air. Marsh, in the same piece, said Johnson can go up and get it and stretch the field, and said both freshmen remind him of himself a year ago.

Moa's arrival is the one worth tracing. Michigan's notes say he signed with Utah in December 2025 and entered the transfer portal in January 2026, which means he committed to Whittingham's program and then followed the coach rather than the school. He was ranked the No. 1 player in Utah, played receiver and safety in high school, and put up 226 catches for 3,757 yards and 44 touchdowns across his career at Fremont in Ogden.

Goodwin's provenance is older than any of it. Michigan's notes say his father, Jonathan, played on the offensive line here from 1999 to 2001 and then 13 years in the NFL, and that his uncle Harold was a Michigan offensive guard in the late nineties. Both are now on the same NFL staff in Carolina.

What Whittingham actually filled#

Page 36 of the game notes prints Michigan's starting-lineup format, and the offense has 11 positions in it. Two of them are receiver. The ninth is listed as WR/TE/RB/OL.

So the number three receiver is not a starter in the way the club's own paperwork counts starters. He is the man who comes on when Michigan puts a third receiver on the grass, and how often that happens is a question about Jason Beck's personnel groupings rather than about the receiver room.

Goodwin has the job. How big a job it is belongs to Saturday.

Sources: Sam Bernardi, Maize n Brew, September 1, 2026, for Kyle Whittingham's remarks on the Inside Michigan Football radio show of August 31, including the quotation naming Channing Goodwin, which is carried independently by Isaiah Hole at Wolverines Wire on the same day, along with Goodwin's spring absence. Michigan Athletics, week-one football game notes, published August 31, 2026, read in full, for the receivers section, the career games and starts figures, the starting-assignments table, the starting-lineup format on page 36, and the biographical entries for Goodwin, Bell, Buchanan, Ffrench, Moa, Johnson and Andrew Marsh. MGoBlue.com's 2026 football roster, opened September 2, 2026, for class years, listed measurements and hometowns, and MGoBlue.com's 2026 schedule for the September 5 date, kickoff and network. ESPN's 2025 Michigan team statistics for the receiving table and the per-player 2025 lines, and ESPN's player page for Goodwin's longest 2025 reception. MGoBlog, "Preview 2026: Wide Receiver," September 1, 2026, for the projected receiver order, the editor's note revising it, Micah Simon on Travis Johnson, and Andrew Marsh on Johnson and Salesi Moa. ESPN's 2025 Utah team statistics for JJ Buchanan's Utah line.