Michigan Named Its Two Running Backs In May And Fall Camp Has Not Moved Them
Kyle Whittingham said Jordan Marshall is RB1, make no mistake, and that a true freshman would be getting carries from game one. He said both of those things in the first week of May, after the spring game and three months before anybody in Ann Arbor put on a helmet. Twenty-three days from Western Michigan, neither sentence has been revised.
Michigan opened fall camp on August 5. Nine days in, there is still no announced offensive line, which is normal, because that is what August is for.
The running backs are not in August. The running backs were finished in May.
Kyle Whittingham went on Jake Butt's podcast, The Blue Print, in the first week of May, and closed the position twice in one conversation. First the starter, and note that nobody made him rank anybody: "Jordan Marshall is RB1, make no mistake. Came out of spring ball, he's a terrific player, terrific leader. Can't say enough good things about him."
Then the freshman, who at that point had been on campus for exactly one spring and had never carried a ball in a college game. "He's going to be a contributor for us this year without a doubt." And, a few sentences later, in case anybody was planning to hedge on his behalf: "His future starts now. He'll be getting carries from game one."
Game one is Western Michigan, September 5, 7:30 at night in Ann Arbor, on NBC. That is twenty-three days from today.
The freshman is Savion Hiter, No. 5 on Michigan's roster, listed there at 5-11 and 212 pounds. He is eighteen years old, and Andrew Ivins at 247Sports puts his birth month in May of 2008, which means he turned eighteen after he was already on campus.
(Whittingham described him in the same conversation as "about 6 feet, 220 pounds, not an ounce of fat on the kid." The published measurements for this young man span twenty pounds, from 200 to Whittingham's 220, and Michigan's own roster page is at neither end of the spread. Everybody is guessing about a teenager and doing it out loud.)
Whittingham makes a habit of this. On July 30 at Big Ten Media Days he named a different true freshman, Tommy Carr, his backup quarterback over a graduate transfer, and he used the identical three words to do it: without a doubt. Two positions, two true freshmen, no hedge on either.
Anyway. There is a reason the carries are there to promise.
The man who is not in the room#
Justice Haynes played seven games for Michigan last season and gained 857 yards in them, on 121 carries, with ten touchdowns. That is 7.1 yards a carry and 122.4 rushing yards per game, and the denominator is doing real work in both of those, because a broken foot ended his season in late October.
Nobody else on that roster ran the ball that efficiently at anything like that volume. Jordan Marshall finished with more total yards, 932, and he needed 150 carries to get them, at 6.2 a pop. Bryson Kuzdzal, who matters later, took 76 for 326. Two Michigan players did finish the season with a better average than Haynes. One of them carried the ball eleven times. The other carried it once.
Haynes entered the transfer portal in January and is at Georgia Tech now, wearing 22, listed as a senior. 247Sports rates him the best running back in the entire 2026 transfer class and the 13th-best transfer at any position.
Why he left is contested, and the accounts do not agree. Seth Fisher at MGoBlog wrote this week that Michigan "cleared out" Haynes to make room for Hiter, and that the program was fine with it because it rated Marshall plus Hiter as good or better than Marshall plus Haynes. That is a claim about what a coaching staff was thinking, made from outside the coaching staff. Haynes has offered his own version, to Jack Leo of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in June: "First and foremost, the opportunity to come back home, that was crucial. To put on for Atlanta, where I grew up, where I was born and raised."
Both can be true. Neither is checkable from here.
The part where the numbers side with the staff#
Here is where a piece like this is supposed to say Michigan gave away its best runner and will pay for it in the fall, and the game log declines to cooperate.
Michigan ran the ball 502 times for 2,732 yards across thirteen games in 2025. Split that season at the injury and you get two samples.
In the seven games Haynes played, Michigan carried it 257 times for 1,485 yards, 5.8 a carry. In the six games it played without him, 245 times for 1,247 yards, 5.1. That looks like a real fall until you look at what is sitting inside the first seven, which is New Mexico and Central Michigan. Take those two out and the Haynes-era average drops to 5.3, against 5.1 for a six-game stretch containing Ohio State and Texas.
The yards per game barely move at all: 212.1 with him, 207.8 without.
What moved was the price. Michigan needed 36.7 carries a game to get there with Haynes and 40.8 without him. The offense replaced a runner with volume, ran it more, gained about the same, and went 4-2 doing it on the way to 9-4.
That is the argument for what this staff did, and it is a real one. You can cover a good back's yards with carries. You just need somebody to take the carries.
Which is the actual bet#
Marshall is the returning leading rusher and a captain, voted by his teammates in the spring, and he has said out loud that this season ends with a choice about whether to come back to college or go to the NFL. That is a man with reasons to want all 150 of last year's carries and then some.
Hiter is eighteen and has never played a college snap, and a head coach promised him game one four months before game one, in a season where the offensive line in front of him has not been named and the quarterback is a sophomore.
There is a third man in the room, and he is the one this actually happens to.
Bryson Kuzdzal walked on at Michigan in 2023 out of Grand Rapids. Last November, with Haynes finished for the year and Marshall banged up, he made the first start of his career against Maryland and ran for 100 yards and three touchdowns. He ended the season with 76 carries for 326 yards and four scores, the second-most of any running back returning to this roster. In January he entered the transfer portal. Two weeks later he withdrew and came back to Ann Arbor, which Seth Berry reported at Sports Illustrated on January 21.
Four months after he chose to stay, his head coach went on a podcast and guaranteed carries in the opener to somebody who has never played one.
That is what "you just need somebody to take the carries" looks like from the other end. The last time this hole opened, in November, Kuzdzal is who filled it, and nobody has promised him anything.
Michigan has now been in camp for nine days and has said nothing that changes a word of any of it. The rest of this roster spent August competing. The backfield spent it confirming a decision from the first week of May.
Somebody should probably go check on the offensive line.
Sources: Sports Reference College Football's 2025 Michigan rushing and receiving table and 2025 team game log for Justice Haynes's and Jordan Marshall's season lines, Michigan's per-game rushing splits and the 9-4 record. Alejandro Zuniga, 247Sports, May 2, 2026, for Kyle Whittingham's remarks on "The Blue Print" with Jake Butt, including the Marshall and Hiter quotations, Whittingham's description of Hiter's build, and Marshall's own remarks on his captaincy and his decision about the NFL. Seth Fisher, MGoBlog, August 12, 2026, for the Hiter freshman profile, the measurement spread and the Haynes framing. Andrew Ivins, 247Sports, for Hiter's birth month. Jack Leo, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 12, 2026, for Haynes's own account of his transfer. 247Sports' player page for Haynes's Georgia Tech listing and transfer rankings. Seth Berry, Sports Illustrated, January 21, 2026, for Bryson Kuzdzal's withdrawal from the transfer portal and his November 22 start against Maryland. MGoBlue.com for the 2026 roster, jersey numbers and listed measurements, and for the September 5 opener against Western Michigan.