Michigan Has Played Eight Of The Nineteen Offensive Linemen On Its Roster

Michigan's official roster lists nineteen offensive linemen. Two games into the season, eight of them have taken a snap on offense.

That is mostly how it is supposed to work. An offensive line is meant to be boring. Five men play, the other fourteen hold bags and wait their turn, and the best season a line can have is the one where you never learn the other fourteen names. This line has not been boring since the first week of August. On Monday morning Kyle Whittingham explained why in one clause, and then spent the rest of the availability making it worse.

"We shuffled the lineup due to injury, not due to anything other than that."

Start with what got shuffled. Against Western Michigan on September 5, Michigan started Blake Frazier at left tackle, Evan Link at left guard, Jake Guarnera at center, Brady Norton at right guard and Andrew Sprague at right tackle. That was Link's first career start at guard. Michigan's own postgame notes for that game record seventeen earlier starts at tackle, six on the left and eleven on the right. Seven days later, against the eleventh-ranked team in the country, four of those five started again. Link was not on the paperwork at all. Not a starter, not a backup, not one of the forty-three names in the special teams block at the bottom of the page. Nathan Efobi, listed second behind both guards in the opener, started at left guard in his place.

Nobody said why. The participation release went up on Saturday afternoon, Michigan won 17-10, and Sunday came and went without a reason attached to it. The reason arrived Monday.

"We hope to get Evan Link back," Whittingham said, in the full transcript published by Alejandro Zuniga of MGoBlog. "In fact, we should have him back this week, barring anything unforeseen. But Nate Efobi stepped in and did a nice job at left guard. You may see a rotation there this week with those two; that's to be determined."

So the left guard was hurt, the left guard is coming back, and the job may turn into a two-man arrangement on Saturday. Lines survive that. Lines survive it every year.

Here is the harder half, and Whittingham got to it later, when somebody asked about two players at once.

"Carter should be good to go this week. Andrew, setback. And so we're going to have to work through some things, and he will not be available in the near future, unfortunately."

Carter is Carter Meadows, a true freshman edge rusher who has missed both games and who now looks likely to make his debut on Saturday. Andrew is Andrew Babalola, who arrived in 2025 as a five-star recruit and has still never played a down of college football. A torn anterior cruciate ligament in fall camp last year cost him the entire season, as Charles Post and Von Lozon of Maize n Brew have both reported. He got healthy. This August he was competing with Blake Frazier for the starting left tackle job, per Post, and then he got hurt again, and Michigan has not said what the injury is. Fourteen months, two fall camps, no snaps.

Now count what Michigan actually has.

The Oklahoma participation release lists one name at each of the five offensive line positions. Frazier, Efobi, Guarnera, Norton, Sprague, and underneath them nothing. The opener had put Efobi's name second at both guard spots, which is what a line with a spare part looks like on paper. Against Oklahoma there was no spare part. The only other linemen who played were Manuel Beigel and Avery Gach, and both of them played the Rhino, Jason Beck's sixth-lineman package, which adds a man to the formation rather than replacing one in it. Michigan beat Oklahoma without relieving a single one of its five, and nobody else took a snap at any of those five spots.

The nineteen thins out quickly once you read past the top of it. Ace Hamilton, a true freshman that Blake Frazier had been raving about in August ("Ace Hamilton is going to be a guy," the left tackle told Sam Webb of 247Sports), is gone for the season with a lower-leg injury; Whittingham announced that on August 21, and Lozon quoted him saying Hamilton "will be out for the year, so that one is unfortunate. Very unfortunate." Babalola is out with no date on it. Houston Ka'aha'aina-Torres, Peter Donini and Marky Walbridge have each appeared in both games on special teams and nowhere else. The other eight, Babalola among them, have not been in a game.

None of that is a crisis and it would be daft to file it as one. Michigan is 2-0 with a win over Oklahoma, Whittingham said the line graded better in week two than in week one, and he described the effort as markedly different from the opener. The scoreboard is not arguing with him.

It is just that the shortest sentence Whittingham said on Monday is the one that explains the season. The staff did not move Efobi to left guard because Efobi won a competition. It moved him because the man in front of him could not go, and it kept him there all afternoon because there was nobody behind him either. Whittingham said so himself, in plain words, two days after the game. A five that cannot be relieved is a five that is one ankle away from being a four.

UTEP is in Ann Arbor on Saturday at 3:30 on Big Ten Network, and UTEP is the last opponent on this schedule against whom that arithmetic will not matter. Iowa opens the Big Ten the following week. Minnesota is the week after that. The bye is October 10, three games from now, and the only reinforcement anyone has promised before it is a man Michigan already had two weeks ago.

The pick is that the man gets his job back. Efobi did nothing wrong and may well share the position, but the head coach has already said on the record that the only reason the lineup moved was that Link could not play, and that reason is reportedly going away this week. Michigan will publish its Player Participation release on Saturday night, the way it does after every game, and the first name at left guard will settle it.

Sources#

• Michigan Athletics, the Player Participation releases for the Western Michigan game of September 5, 2026 and the Oklahoma game of September 12, 2026, both at mgoblue.com.
• Michigan Athletics, the postgame notes for the Western Michigan game of September 5, 2026, for Evan Link's career starts by position.
• Michigan Athletics, official 2026 football roster and 2026 football schedule, mgoblue.com, read September 15, 2026.
• Kyle Whittingham's UTEP-week press conference, Monday September 14, 2026. Full transcript published by Alejandro Zuniga (MGoBlog); also reported by Charles Post and Von Lozon (Maize n Brew).
• Von Lozon (Maize n Brew), August 21, 2026, on Ace Hamilton's season-ending lower-leg injury, including Blake Frazier's assessment of Hamilton to Sam Webb of 247Sports.