Michigan WR Semaj Morgan: 'Our receiver room is the best it's been since I've been here'

Michigan Wolverines football junior Semaj Morgan led the wide receiving corps with 27 catches last season, but he averaged only 5.1 yards per reception and posted just 1 touchdown. The quarterbacks struggled, receivers weren’t productive and offense was ineffective.

But it’s a new season, and Morgan is ready to make plays with the football. He’s less “goofy” this year — “more mature” — and bought into the system under first-year coordinator Chip Lindsey, who came to Ann Arbor after two seasons running the offense at North Carolina.

“Coach Lindsey just told me, ‘Get lined up fast,'” Morgan said of what he has to do to get his touches. “As long as we do that, we’re gonna be good. And then just like on kickoff and punt return, too. Not saying teams are going to be scoring that many points on us where they’re going to be kicking it off, but our defense is gonna be lockdown, so there are gonna be a lot of punts.”

The 5-foot-10, 174-pound Detroit native isn’t the only Michigan wide receiver that’s expected to have a productive season. Morgan believes the position group has improved as a whole.

“I feel like our receiver room is the best it’s been since I’ve been here,” said Morgan, who won a national championship as a freshman in 2023. “We got [graduate] Donaven McCulley, myself, [junior] Fred Moore. We got KB [junior Kendrick Bell], [graduate] Peyton [O’Leary] — those are some of our older guys. And then we got Simp [graduate Anthony Simpson], he transferred in [from Massachusetts] as an older guy, and [graduate] Joe T[aylor].

“And then our young guys like Stew [sophomore I’Marion Stewart], [freshmen] Andrew [Marsh], Jamar [Browder] and Jacob [Washington], and also [sophomore] Channing [Goodwin] too — those guys are doing phenomenal right now. They all look way ahead of the game, to be honest with you. That’s really good, because you never know what might happen.

“One of us might go down, and one of them might have to step up — and we feel comfortable with them being able to step up. It’s looking really good right now.”

In 2023 — Morgan’s freshman season — the Wolverines had two wide receivers go for more than 600 yards: Cornelius Johnson (604) and Roman Wilson (789), who led the team with 12 touchdown grabs. When asked if McCulley — who earned the iconic No. 1 jersey that Wilson sported as a senior — is on the same level, Morgan said the following:

“I feel like Roman Wilson was kinda a guy like myself, a slot guy who can go in and out. But I feel like McCulley is on a different level. He’s a true outside guy. He’s gonna go up and get the ball, he’s gonna be physical in the run game. He can run slant routes, he can run intermediate routes, short routes, things like that. I feel like he’s a true outside guy. And I love that.”

The praise for McCulley — a 6-foot-5, 215-pound Indiana transfer — continued.

“He’s a dawg,” Morgan said of his Michigan teammate. “His mentality, the way he goes about his business, with that confidence, with that dawg mentality, me and him are a really good match from that aspect.”

McCulley caught 48 passes for 644 yards and 6 touchdowns in his most productive college football season, doing so for a three-win Indiana team in 2023.

Morgan has played most of his snaps in the slot and figures to again this season, but he’s been vocal about his desire to get more involved in the downfield passing game. Overall, he said, he just wants the ball whenever he can get it, and to help the offense however he can.

“I’m a leader,” Morgan said. “I’m a person that’s gonna get us started with energy, or if we’re in a slump, I’m the type of person that’s gonna get us out of that slump.”

The Michigan wideouts have built chemistry with the quarterbacks — most notably freshman Bryce Underwood — over the long offseason.

“To be honest with you, since I already knew Bryce, he already knew what I can do and believes in me,” Morgan said, referring to his relationship with Underwood that’s dated back to high school. “I believe in him, too, and our other quarterbacks. All of our quarterbacks really believe with us and our abilities.

“That’s why I feel like this year and this camp has been so much different. We’re really getting the ball, for real.

“But building that chemistry is really not that hard, because in practice we go with every quarterback. So, it’s not hard. We can just keep doing what we do in practice, and throughout the summer, we were doing receivers and tight ends and quarterbacks, coming to work out by ourselves. It wasn’t really hard to get the chemistry.”