Michigan Would Not Name Its Two Starting Guards Because Three Seniors Are Going To Split The Job

Michigan's offensive coordinator was asked on Wednesday afternoon who plays guard on Saturday night. He answered with a number.

Three.

Evan Link, Nathan Efobi and Brady Norton will "all play and play fairly similar snaps" at the two guard positions, Jason Beck said, and the staff intends to "let them all play and see where it goes from there." Clayton Sayfie of On3, who has worked this line all through camp, reported that the arrangement may hold for more than one game.

So the answer arrived, and it is not the answer anybody was waiting for. A starting five has been the open question on this offense since the first week of August, when line coach Jim Harding said out loud that he wanted the group solidified by roughly August 22. That date came and went. What Beck said on Wednesday is that two of the five jobs are not going to be assigned to one man each, at least not this week, and possibly not for a while.

Look at the roster and the shape of it makes sense. Michigan lists 118 players. Nineteen of them are listed as OL, with no position attached to a single one. The defense on the same page is broken out to the man: ten ends, nine tackles, eleven cornerbacks, ten safeties. Michigan will tell you which side of the defensive line somebody plays. On the other side of the ball it tells you he is a lineman.

The three guards are three seniors, which is the part that makes the rotation defensible rather than evasive. Link has been the projected left guard most of the summer. Efobi and Norton have been the competition on the right, and Beck said both may take snaps at left guard as well. All three have played college football, and Beck's stated problem is that keeping any one of them off the field is hard.

Everything else up front has a name on it. Blake Frazier is the left tackle, Jake Guarnera is the center, Andrew Sprague is the right tackle. Frazier's job got easier to award when Andrew Babalola, the sophomore who was supposed to push him for it, got hurt again. Beck's own words on that were a hedge, that Babalola had a setback and may not be available for the first week. Sayfie's flat sentence in the same piece is that Babalola will be out for the opener. Both of those are on the record and only one of them is a quotation. Michigan is under no obligation to settle it either way, because the Big Ten's availability reporting covers conference games and Michigan's first conference game is on September 26.

There is a sixth lineman in all this too. Michigan runs a package it calls the rhino, an extra offensive lineman brought on in certain sets, and Norton told Trent Knoop of Wolverine Digest this week who has been taking those snaps. "Mainly the Rhino spot has been Manuel Beigel, who transferred from D-tackle," Norton said. "Avery Gach and Marky Walbridge have also been repping that spot as well." Beigel arrived in Ann Arbor as a defensive tackle. Michigan's roster now lists him at OL.

The defensive coordinator took the same kind of question that afternoon and gave names.

Trey Pierce and Enow Etta, both seniors, "have cemented themselves as the starters on the interior," Zach Edwards wrote at Maize n Brew on Thursday morning, out of Jay Hill's Wednesday availability. Behind them Hill expects Jonah Lea'ea, Bobby Kanka and Deyvid Palepale to play. On the edge it is Dom Nichols and John Henry Daley for the majority of the snaps with Cam Brandt close behind, and then a second group of Nate Marshall, Benny Patterson III and the freshman Tariq Boney. Daley spent the offseason hurt. Hill said Michigan expects him to be full go.

Hill has a depth chart in his head and no apparent difficulty saying it into a microphone. Beck, earlier the same afternoon, would not give two names. The two answers are not a difference in how much each man is willing to say. Hill has starters because his front sorted itself out. Beck does not name two guards because two is not the number he has.

Kalamazoo got its version of this question answered by a surgeon.

Jeremy Schleicher won the Western Michigan center job out of camp last year, got hurt in week three, had season-ending surgery, and worked all offseason to come back. He had a setback over the summer that required another operation and he will miss 2026. So will defensive end Noah Bishop, whose year went the same way, week three of 2025 and then the same summer news. "My heart hurts for those guys," head coach Lance Taylor said on Monday. "So close to returning to play and all that they invested."

The Broncos will start somebody in the middle who has barely played, out of a group Taylor put at "probably six or seven guys that can play for us." That is the ordinary version of an offensive line problem in September, which is not enough bodies, with one more taken away over the summer.

Michigan's problem is the other one. It has three seniors who can play two positions and no reason yet to prefer one of them, so it is going to play all three and find out on the field, in a game, against a team that has been watching four different schools' tape trying to figure out what this offense even looks like.

Somebody will run out at left guard on Saturday night. He will have won the first snap and nothing else, and Beck has already said so, in September, which is not the month college football coaches usually spend telling you what they have not decided yet.

Sources: Jason Beck and Jay Hill press conferences, September 2, 2026, as reported by Clayton Sayfie at On3, Zach Edwards at Maize n Brew and Andrew Graham at Mitten Football; Trent Knoop, Wolverine Digest, September 2, 2026, quoting Brady Norton on the rhino snaps; MGoBlue.com official football roster, read September 3, 2026; Andrew Graham, Mitten Football, August 31 and September 2, 2026, on Western Michigan's offensive line and the Schleicher and Bishop injuries; BigTen.org availability reporting release, August 28, 2026.