Jim Harding Moved Two Tackles To Guard And Put A Date On The Rest

Michigan's offensive line has five jobs in it. Two of them are spoken for.

The other three are being contested by, among other people, two players who lined up at tackle last season and are taking reps at guard right now. That is the most informative thing to come out of Michigan's first week of fall camp, and it did not come from the head coach, who has not spoken to reporters yet.

Jim Harding is the offensive line coach and the assistant head coach. He gave his first availability on Thursday afternoon, after the second practice, and Anthony Broome of On3 wrote it up. Michigan has held four coaching availabilities this camp, all of them assistants: Jason Beck and Jay Hill on Wednesday, Harding and Kerry Coombs on Thursday. Harding is the first of the four to say anything that moves a depth chart.

Start with what he settled, because it is short.

Andrew Sprague has right tackle. Harding: "I'd say it's his to lose... he's put himself in a position where my expectation now is: you're pretty locked into what you're doing, so I need you to be more vocal." When a position coach stops coaching your feet and starts asking you to talk more, you have the job. Sprague went on the Outland Trophy watch list in May, which is the kind of thing that tends to follow a player who is not in danger of losing his spot.

Jake Guarnera has center, and Harding put it more bluntly than anyone on this staff has put anything: "It would take him really screwing something up for me to not feel comfortable playing him on the 5th of September." Guarnera moves over from right guard full-time. He started at center in the Citrus Bowl, so this is a return rather than an experiment, and Harding's stated reason is that the room listens to him. "The kids have a lot of confidence in how he directs the line of scrimmage, the calls and such."

Two down. Now the interesting part.

Brady Norton played tackle for Michigan last season. He is at guard. "Brady played primarily guard all spring, so he's got a good sample size there," Harding said. Evan Link also played tackle last season. He is at guard too, with a much thinner sample, because he missed the start of spring practice and got back for about four of them.

So Michigan's answer to having three open interior and edge spots was not to find guards. It was to take tackles and ask them to be guards.

Harding has not committed to it, and he said so in a way worth reading twice: "I've told him we can't forget about tackle in case things don't shape up the way I hope... we've got to get him reps and keep that brushed up as practices go on." That is a coach hedging on the record, which is more useful than a coach who sounds certain. Link is being kept warm at his old position in case the new one does not take.

Left tackle, meanwhile, is a straight two-man competition between Blake Frazier and Andrew Babalola. Asked whether Frazier might slide inside if he loses it, Harding said Michigan has not tried that yet: "We haven't moved him these last two days, but it goes back to finding the best five."

The best five. Not the five best. Broome's own framing of Harding's job is that he is looking for the best five, or six counting a package we will get to, regardless of talent or experience within the program, and the moves are the evidence for it. You do not shuffle two tackles inside if you are ranking players one through fifteen and taking the top five. You do it if you think the unit is the thing being evaluated.

Here is the line that gave it away, and Harding volunteered it rather than being asked. He said the lineup at Wednesday's practice was not the lineup at Thursday's. Then: "Today there was no sulking, nobody upset about playing a different spot than the day before."

Coaches do not mention the absence of sulking unless sulking was on their mind. Michigan's line coach is two practices into his first camp here and he is already reporting on how his players took being moved. Read that next to a staff that inherited a group with four tackles and no settled guards, and the priority is visible without anyone stating it.

Andrew Babalola is the other genuine piece of news, and it needs to be said precisely. Harding said Babalola "has been a full participant these last two days" and is "certainly in the mix to be one of the top five guys." That is his position coach, on the record, and it is a considerable upgrade on where the reporting was a week ago. It is also not a medical clearance and not a percentage. Babalola did not play in 2025. Broome's own read is that he is knocking rust off after nearly a year away from football. Full participant in helmets and shoulder pads for two August practices is a real fact and it is the only one available; anything past it is somebody's guess.

Then Harding did the thing that makes this worth writing down instead of filing.

Asked for a timeline, he refused to give a date and then gave one anyway. "I don't want to paint myself into a corner and say 'by August such-and-such.' But the way Coach runs camp, we'll have essentially two scrimmages. You want that thing dialed in as best you can by the end of the second scrimmage. That gives us a mock game week before the normal game week leading into Western Michigan. So approximately two weeks out, you'd love to have it solidified."

Western Michigan is September 5. Two weeks out is about August 22, which is fifteen days from today. Nobody made him say that. He is now on the record, in the first week of camp, with a self-imposed deadline that anybody can check, on a unit with three unfilled jobs and a sophomore left tackle candidate who has not played in a year.

One last thing, unresolved. Harding described his assignment as finding the best five, "or 6, counting the Rhino position." Rhino is a sixth-lineman package that appears to have arrived with the Utah offensive staff. No source read here has explained what it does, what personnel it uses, or when it comes out.

So that is the state of Michigan's offensive line. Two starters, three vacancies, two tackles learning guard, a deadline in fifteen days, and a rhinoceros nobody will define.

Sources: Anthony Broome, On3 (The Wolverine), August 6, 2026, for Jim Harding's first camp availability and all quotations. MGoBlue.com for the press conference listing and date, the 2026 roster, and Andrew Sprague's May 26 Outland Trophy watch list release. Michigan's 2026 schedule for the September 5 opener against Western Michigan.