Michigan football is ‘getting better and better,’ embracing ‘TNT’ motto

Michigan Wolverines footballis two weeks into fall camp practices, set to enter a four-day period where physicality and intensity will be ramped up. The Maize and Blue have improved over the first half of the month and are looking ahead to the Aug. 30 opener against New Mexico.

“We’re in a really good place,” head coach Sherrone Moore said. “I feel like our football team is getting better and better.”

Michigan has multiple taglines the players have embraced, including “team over me.” A new one this fall camp is “TNT.”

“We’re really living by this motto of ‘TNT’ — today, not tomorrow,” Moore revealed.

“So, everything we can do today to get better, that’s what we’re trying to do. Not worried about tomorrow — it’s not promised, and yesterday’s gone. So, any mistakes, anything that took place the day before of anything that we did really well, we’re not just going to harp on those things. We’re gonna try to get better in that moment today.”

The motto was created by Michigan director of character development Robby Emery, a Christian pastor who’s been with the program in some capacity since he led his first bible study with players in 2016.

It also lines up with lessons that the late, great Greg Harden has taught thousands of athletes and people. Harden, an athletic counselor at Michigan, passed away in September 2024.

“Today,” Moore said. “Control today. People worry about all the things that you can look at and try to stress about — what can go on tomorrow or what went on yesterday — and you don’t have control over it, so why worry about it?”

That incremental, daily improvement has been paying off for Michigan this camp, Moore believes.

“It’s been good. We’re making a lot of progress,” he said. “We’re becoming a physical football team, a football team with great discipline, a great passion and togetherness, so we’re excited about where our team is at right now.”

Lessons learned for Sherrone Moore in first season

Moore was at Michigan for six seasons before taking over as head coach in January 2024, but nothing prepares one for that job other than doing it — much like, as Moore says, playing football is the best way to get better at it.

Comfortable isn’t typically a word associated with football, but Moore is feeling more of that heading into his second season at the helm.

“I don’t think ‘at ease’ is the answer, but yeah, it is different,” Moore said. “Whenever you do anything in life, it’s different. There’s a form of maybe not being comfortable but less uncomfortable than you were before. 

“And you think you know everything about being a head coach, especially the head coach at Michigan — and I thought I knew everything, because I was obviously coordinator and position coach here and been here for so long — but you don’t really know until you get in it. 

“Being able to go through a full calendar year of planning, of positioning, of putting things and the people in place and even the staff being here another year and having a whole year with the same staff has been awesome for me. It’s been an incredible experience for me.

“It is different, but it’s something that I love. It’s something that I come here excited about. And you’re never going to stop learning. You’re always going to learn about yourself and your team.

“But the things are the planning, the process, what I look for, what I see, the communication between me and the staff, the communication between me and the players and how that all is aligned, I think that’s changed in a great way. The players have taught me so much, the coaches have — and we’re definitely in a really good place.”

Scheduling Michigan’s fall camp is something that Moore pointed to when he was asked what he thought he knew a year ago but didn’t. He made tweaks this year and was prepared much earlier for what he wanted this month to look like.

“As I went through this past year and went into the spring and the summer, I had a great opportunity to sit with our strength staff. I sat with [strength] Coach [Justin] Tress and Zach Higginbotham, my director of sports science, and we planned out training camp three months before training camp happened,” the Michigan coach explained.

“That allowed me to have a vision of what it was like, what it’s been like since I’ve been here, based on injuries that we’ve had, based on soft tissue things, to make sure we can get the most out of our players from a physicality standpoint but also not break them down to the point where they’re not available when we need them to be.

“So, those are the biggest things that I’ve learned. And then what I look at, at practice, and being able to be on both sides of the ball and all three phases has been really helpful for me.”