Michigan Wolverines Football: Josh Gattis – Quarterbacks Are ‘Dead Even’
Michigan’s football coaches are allowed eight hours per week to meet with players virtually, and offensive coordinator Josh Gattis is using the Zoom app to maximize his productivity and time with his kids. He’s spent a lot of it on the quarterbacks, obviously, with his first step to prepare them for a battle when they get back on campus.
Gattis works with the whole offensive unit on Mondays and individually with groups on Wednesdays and Fridays for about an hour, hour and a half he said Thursday. Because spring ball was cancelled, a lot of it is reintroducing guys to football.
“We’re doing one install per week, diving into the details. Unfortunately, not having spring ball, we’ve stayed on the schedule with spring install … going back and watching all our last season cutups with our players, creating new cutups and study ideas,” Gattis said.
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The quarterback competition essentially started during Citrus Bowl practices in December. Though Shea Patterson was the clear No. 1 and got the majority of reps, Gattis challenged Dylan McCaffrey, Joe Milton and Cade McNamara to act as though their audition started then.
Though there weren’t getting all the reps they needed, all three were challenged to ‘step up and show me any kind of way you can lead this team, show me can lead this offense … we’ve got to start now,’” Gattis said.
“I was challenging the mentality of those guys,” he said.
That’s continued through the COVID-19 pandemic. All three have shown great leadership, Gattis added, but nobody is at the forefront.
“We lost our quarterback, so we are nowhere near having a frontrunner,” Gattis said. “We lost our starter, obviously. We’re in a three-man competition coming into the spring with Joe, Dylan and Cade. No one has got an advantage over either one.
“We’re excited about the guys we have on our roster. We’ve got to solve that situation down the road when we get the opportunity. No one has a leg up. It’s not based on depth chart last year, not based on skill set this year. Every guy is equal, and every guy is going to get the right opportunity to go out and compete and lead this team.
“When we have that answer is when they’ll know. Right now, we haven’t even come close to starting that battle yet, missing the time [we’ve missed].”
Gattis wouldn’t go into specifics on each quarterback’s strengths and weaknesses, other than to say they all had different areas in which they excel and different areas in which they still need to grow.
“I don’t think anyone is the finished product,” he said. “If anyone was the finished product, we’d have a starter. It’s a huge challenge that I’ve put on those guys’ plates that we’re going to continue to address. We’ll continue to address the positives, but also working on improving on some things we need to improve on."
Ideally Gattis said, they would have used the spring to split the reps equally between the three quarterbacks and let them compete.
“Obviously, we missed that significant chunk of time with spring ball being cancelled, but I’ve really been encouraged by the things we can control, the mental reps, the engagement in the meetings rooms,” he said. “Especially our quarterbacks. They’ve been really engaged. We’ve challenged all three of those guys to take on bigger leadership roles on the team, breaking the team into small groups and seeing those guys become better leaders. It’s challenging when you look at the quarterback position. A lot of times people want to know who’s going to be the starter or the captain. I encouraged all those guys that they’re all leaders.
“They’ve done a really good job with leadership, but we definitely did miss the timing, the competitive reps, the good on good. But we’ll pick back up. We’re going through something everybody else is going through. Only a handful of teams in college football were able to get spring practice in. We unfortunately weren’t, but we can’t control what we can’t control. We’ve just got to pick the pieces back up when we get the opportunity to.”
NOTES
Gattis said it was unlikely the Wolverines would go with a two-man platoon in the first few games of the season.
“They were all even going into this pandemic. The two-quarterback deal of playing two quarterbacks, the opinion of two quarterback plays … I don’t think that’s an option,” he said. “We’ve got to get the reps, get the battle going to figure out who’s going to be our quarterback. They’re all dead even. Nobody is out front, nobody left behind. Each guy is different, different strengths and weaknesses than the other guys.
“We’ve got to understand who is going to give us the best opportunity to win games.”
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