GUEST COLUMN: Will Michigan ever have 'that guy' at quarterback?
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In this submission, guest columnist Scott Kier discusses J.J. McCarthy's first start.
At both the college and pro levels, the game of football has evolved strikingly since the turn of the century. Gone from the big conferences are the wishbone and option offenses that would often see a quarterback attempt only a dozen passes in a game, or attacks built almost exclusively around a mauling ground game. Systems like what we’re accustomed to seeing from Wisconsin, or what we saw at Michigan last season, are still balanced offenses in the context of the game we used to know.
When evaluating quarterback recruits, a “dual-threat” used to imply that he was a runner first, who even-money was going to end up playing another position at the college level. Today, those are passers who can ALSO run.
Consider this stat line for a Heisman finalist quarterback in the ‘80s:
65% completions, 2729 yards in 13 games (a little over 200 per game), 10 touchdowns, 11 interceptions. And he rushed for 118 yards on the season, but with 8 touchdowns, mostly running the option in goal-to-go situations.
If you hadn’t guessed, those numbers belong to Jim Harbaugh from his 1986 season, which earned him a trip to New York, a third-place finish in the Heisman balloting and a draft slot in the first round courtesy of the Chicago Bears.
Today, if you throw 11 picks in 277 pass attempts against only 10 touchdowns, your coach is wondering if your backup might be viable! In the mid-’80s, however, you could do that and still be considered great.
Harbaugh was what passed for a top quarterback during the Reagan presidency, but Michigan QB excellence has not trickled down to today’s game. Michigan has never once had “that guy” who would make Michigan great again. There has been a wall between Michigan and explosive, modern offensive football, and if you look at Ohio State’s last three quarterbacks, it sure seems like the Buckeyes paid for it!
A different game, it was.
Consider the production required to be considered an elite quarterback now:
Dwayne Haskins 2018: 4831 yards on 70% completions, 50 TD : 8 INT
Justin Fields 2019: 3273 yards on 70.2% completions, 41 TD : 3 INT, 383 yards rushing, 5 TD
Joe Burrow 2019: 5671 yards on 76.3% completions, 60 TD : 6 INT, 384 yards rushing, 5 TD
CJ Stroud 2021: 4435 yards on 71.9% completions, 44 TD : 6 INT
Bryce Young 2021: 4872 yards on 66.9% completions, 47 TD : 7 INT
These numbers dwarf even the Heisman-winning numbers of guys like Carson Palmer and Matt Leinart 20 years ago. Yes, you could find some gaudy outliers in the major conferences like Kliff Kingsbury, Sam Bradford, or Vince Young in the defense-optional Big 12. Tim Couch posted yards, completion percentages and touchdowns that would fit in with the elite today, but with 34 picks over his last two years at Kentucky. Peyton Manning’s best year at Tennessee, 1997: 3819 yards on only 60.2% completions, 36 TD : 11 INT.
One of the following stat lines is Aaron Rodgers’ last year at Cal. The other is Cade McNamara last year.
2576 yards on 64.2%, 15 TD : 6 INT
2566 yards on 66.1%, 24 TD : 8 INT
You don’t need to know which is which. You just need to see that the goalposts have moved… a lot. Which is why comparing McNamara to past Michigan QB’s is a perspective that comes up well short. Comparing Cade McNamara to the likes of Brian Griese and Chad Henne hearkens back to a time when often as not you won WITH a quarterback as opposed to winning BECAUSE OF a quarterback.
Yes, sometimes you can, indeed, do that, as Georgia just demonstrated last year. If a team is dominant in all the other phases of the game, simply having a good huddle presence, making the conservative read and a subsequent on-time throw is a recipe for winning football. That’s how guys like Ken Dorsey, Craig Krenzel and, yes, Brian Griese helmed National Championship teams, too.
But no one would suggest Stetson Bennett is a better quarterback than Bryce Young because Georgia beat Alabama.
Michigan has had a number of Bennetts but never a Young - Bryce, Vince or Steve.
EVER.
While the rest of us were shaking off our Millennium Eve hangovers, Tom Brady appeared to blossom into “that guy” in literally his last game in maize & blue. The wild Orange Bowl against Alabama, in which Brady went “Red Wedding” on the Crimson Tide to the tune of 34-of-45 for 369 yards and 4 touchdowns, was too late for pro scouts who had already made up their minds on him to adjust their priors. Little did the NFL know that winter was coming.
One more year in Ann Arbor and Drew Henson might have been “that guy”. The fact that he, in the final tally, started only 7 games in a winged helmet is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.
Chad Henne wasn’t “that guy", although, in his (and Lloyd Carr’s) final game in the Capital One Bowl against newly-crowned Heisman winner Tim Tebow and Florida, he engineered a magnum opus in out-dueling his chaste but decorated counterpart that made you contemplate what might have been for Henne with a different offensive philosophy.
Denard Robinson was something utterly novel: an electric running back who also took snaps and happened to be able to (intermittently) do the passing part of the job well, too, and he was an elite football player for half a season before an up-and-down next two seasons resulted in his losing the job.
Go back and watch Under The Lights II against Notre Dame and remember how U-M won that game entirely because #98 was on our team and not theirs, or watch Devin Gardner almost singlehandedly will us to a win over Ohio State, playing on a broken foot in the second half. There’s an alternate universe where Devin chooses a healthier program than what Michigan’s was at the time and becomes a DeShaun Watson-level menace to defenses (but presumably not to massage therapists.) Alas, the Gardner era, which for a moment looked headed for, I daresay, a happy ending instead wound down with a concussion-addled Shane Morris on the field.
Dylan McCaffrey might have had a chance to be “that guy”, but in the opinion of this writer was never quite right after the vicious blow to the head he took against Wisconsin. Dirty hits from Badgers ending promising Michigan careers have been an ugly feature of the last decade of Big Ten football. (See also: Newsome, Grant.)
Shea Patterson was a five-star who turned out… OK. But definitely not “that guy”. On the bright side, he worked out better than our last five-star QB, Ryan Mallett. So there’s that.
Now we find ourselves on the eve of our first look at our latest hope for having “that guy” at the helm. Qualitatively, we have never had a quarterback with his combination of tangible arm talent and athleticism - and neither have most other programs. This is someone who has the tools of a Burrow or Fields, and we haven’t seen that here before.
Yes, to win at the highest level, you need all the Krenzel/Dorsey/McNamara intangibles. We don’t know - and won’t until he gets his chance - whether McCarthy has them. But that moment, J.J.’s moment, has arrived. He’s young, scrappy and hungry and you simply cannot downplay the possibilities at hand if he does not throw away his shot. Two years of “that guy” quarterbacking Michigan could be program-changing. It can elevate the brand in the way only signature greatness can.
No pressure, young man. It’s only the hopes and dreams of hundreds of thousands of Michigan fans and the chance at a Heisman finalist & top ten draft future for you!
Whatever the McCarthy era will be, it begins under the Big House lights on Saturday. Will he be the first “that guy” at Michigan, or the heir to the Henson, Mallett & Gardner legacies of what might have been?
How could anyone not feel a spine-tingling sense of anticipation of the possibilities before us?