Michigan captains speak: Bredeson on lessons learned, Hudson says new offense helping defense adapt

The Wolverines announced their football captains for the 2019 season earlier this week in offensive lineman Ben Bredeson, defensive tackle Carlo Kemp and linebacker/safety Khaleke Hudson. All three spoke to the media in Ann Arbor on Tuesday afternoon to react to the news and some of the other stories from camp so far.

For Bredeson, the senior is only the 14th two-time captain in the history of the program after being elected for the second year in a row. One of the major talking points with him had to do with lessons he learned as a captain in 2018 and how he will apply them to this season.

“I found leadership is definitely a trial and error thing,” Bredeson said. “I found some things that worked and I found some things that didn’t work. Certain guys you can motivate, some other guys you have to put your arm around. I learned, had some good and bad experiences last year and definitely using all of that to be better the second time around.

”Some times I made some decisions last year, nothing bad, just some guys you need your arm around them more than others, I would say. You learn when to try to fire up the team and when to be the calm guy in the middle. Definitely had a lot of great experience with that last year and, like I said, using that to roll into this (year).”

Bredeson also sees a much more focused team heading into this season when it comes to not looking ahead and getting better every day:

Other notes

• Khaleke Hudson on LB/DE Josh Uche: “I feel like we’re both very versatile. We both can pass rush; he’s like very skilled at pass rushing, but we can both pass rush … we can both drop back and play zone, play man to man,” he said. “Just to have two players on the field that can do that, have your defense be very versatile and not have to switch packages... just to have us out there being able to do different things is a plus for our defense.”
• How does Michigan select its captains? Hudson shared that process with the assembled media, as well.

• An underrated aspect of the new Michigan offense and how that helps the team come into the 21st century of college football is that it also gives the defense a different look and potentially some more of the things that has given them problems with in the past. Hudson explained how that is coming along and adjustments made.

• Kemp says despite the three captains, Michigan is not lacking leadership and says that the team will feed off of each other’s energy this season.

• Another note that dropped during Tuesday’s meeting with players was that Michigan has also named two alternate captains in Shea Patterson on offense and Josh Metellus on defense. The Patterson news probably does not do much to calm down sports talk radio fodder, but that’s something that will probably just need to be ignored unless it actually winds up being a concern. Which it really shouldn’t.