All week long, the Michigan football team knew that its tight ends had to be more involved in the passing game. Given the talent in the room and the unproductive past few weeks, a breakout performance was bound to take place.
So it wasn’t much of a shock that a tight end led the Wolverines in receiving yards Saturday. The surprising part was that it wasn’t senior Marlin Klein nor sophomore Hogan Hansen but Zack Marshall, the third-string sophomore tight end who caught five passes for 72 yards and a touchdown in Michigan’s decisive win over Washington.
Before the game — but after the Wolverines reworked their offensive diet to allow for more tight end targets — Klein was ruled out. Hansen, absent from the injury report, watched the game out of uniform from the sidelines.
“They’ll return soon, but that room is deep,” Michigan coach Sherrone Moore said. “I think (tight ends coach Steve Casula) does a really good job coaching those guys. And all those guys have ability, and you (that) saw today in the run and pass game. We think really highly of Marshall and really highly of (junior tight end) Deakon Tonielli. We always talk about next man up, and in that room, it’s just the next guy’s got to go. It doesn’t really matter who it is, what number it is, you gotta go. So the decision was already made before that even happened.”
Ahead of Saturday’s game, Marshall had three catches for 29 yards this season. Tonielli hadn’t even logged a target, playing a majority of snaps on special teams. But with Klein and Hansen both out, the Wolverines’ offense turned to the unproven duo.
Freshman quarterback Bryce Underwood’s first completion, although short of the sticks by a few yards, was a quick pass to Tonielli across the middle on third down. Two drives later, Marshall leaked from the line, catching the ball at midfield and extending the play with his legs for a first down.
Marshall didn’t stop there, getting open again late in the first quarter for a 19-yard gain to set up Michigan’s sole score of the first half. Amid a sloppy offensive half on both sides, Tonielli and Marshall were fairly reliable targets for Underwood.
“You prepare every game like you’re gonna be the starter,” Marshall said. “So one goes down, two goes down. You just prepare. That’s what you do.”
It’s easy to preach a next man up mentality when Hansen and Klein top out the depth chart. It’s much harder to actually execute on that promise when both of them are ruled out, and third- or fourth-string tight ends like Marshall and Tonielli are thrust into the starting lineup.
Yet in the fourth quarter, the two continued to make plays.
First it was Tonielli, catching a dot on a deep route to turn a third-and-11 into a first down. Underwood’s 28-yard throw, placed perfectly to hit Tonielli in stride, was the longest play of the game.
Then, with the Wolverines up 14-7 and back in the red zone, it was Marshall’s turn. Selling a post route before committing to the corner, Marshall found himself wide open in the end zone as Underwood rolled to his right.
“(I saw) a lot of grass. It was pretty fun,” Marshall said with a smile plastered across his face. “No, you make it look like a crack, and then you go take a corner out of it. So, they attached the (defensive) back, I got open, that’s how you draw it up.”
Converting plays that were almost certainly not designed for them, Marshall and Tonielli answered Michigan’s tight end questions — as unexpected as that would’ve sounded just a few days ago.
Related articles