Previously: Podcast 11.0A, Podcast 11.0B, Podcast 11.0C. The Story.

For the first time in the Harbaugh era Michigan returns a starting quarterback who is not clearly doomed to break a vertebrae and transfer to UCLA because of Michigan's awful pass protection. Even this is a bastardized version of Jim Harbaugh Develops Quarterbacks because the returning starter spent two years at Ole Miss. If year one to year two Harbaugh transitions still mean anything this is cause for optimism.

But with experience comes bloody fate. Michigan will once again try to get a senior quarterback through the Ohio State game unscathed. Previous attempts:

• Chad Henne, 2007: Henne's shoulder is separated during the season; he plays in the OSU game because the alternative is a maniacal Ryan Mallett but he's basically unable to throw.
• Denard Robinson, 2012: Robinson's ulnar nerve gives out midseason and he moves to running back.
• Devin Gardner, 2014: Gardner breaks his foot in the second quarter.
• Jake Rudock, 2015: Rudock is ended by Joey Bosa in the third quarter.

Here Michigan finally might have an advantage on the Great Satan at the end of the schedule. The story of OSU quarterbacking over the past decade is that when someone goes out, Kenny Guiton or Cardale Jones or Dwayne Haskins comes in. The story of Michigan quarterbacking is that John O'Korn comes in. This dynamic is reversed in the aftermath of every OSU QB bailing when Justin Fields was imported.

For the first time in a very long time Michigan might have a clear advantage at QB in The Game.

[After THE JUMP: is it a Heisman campaign if you're aiming for third place?]

QUARTERBACK: WE NAMED THE DOG NEW YORK

QUARTERBACK	Yr
Shea Patterson	Sr.
Dylan McCaffrey	So.*
Joe Milton	Fr.*

RATING: 5.

on the move [Patrick Barron]

Combine the beautifully lofted balls nestling into the outstretched arms of receivers like so many swaddling infants finding their mother's bosom…

…with vacated pockets, deep shots eschewed, and late or nonexistent throws and SHEA PATTERSON's 2018 was a beautiful thing just out of reach.

Every week Patterson demonstrated why he was a mega-recruit despite lacking traditional mega-recruit stature. Even if things weren't going that well Patterson's throws were uncannily accurate—this site had him for barely over two throws classified IN (inaccurate) per game. He became a real threat on the ground. He made a bunch of great throws and very few terrifying ones. PFF:

Patterson uncorked 22 big-time throws last season with the Wolverines. He returns a talented cast of characters to get the ball to this season and that number of 22 BTTs should only go up. Perhaps most importantly, he limited himself to just nine turnover-worthy passes.

That latter number was easily the best in the league amongst returners. He had it all, in bits.

And yet. As this space put it after the MSU game:

Patterson continues to frustrate, in part because his natural tools are superior. His accuracy is excellent. He pairs that with the kind of athleticism that's greatly aided Michigan's last two wins. The combination of those two things is uncommon. If he could just be creepy accurate and gritty fast and also throw the balls to the blindingly open guys on half-field reads with no pressure, that would be great:

Patterson doesn't have enough interceptions. There. I said it. Throw some picks! Not on purpose!

Patterson futzed and wobbled and was very good despite all that. But great is right there. He can reach it. His fingers are just touching it.

Despite all that angst, Patterson was already one of the better quarterbacks in the country last year. If you listen to PFF he was the best in the conference, beating out, uh, some guy!

The highest-graded quarterback in the B1G this season was Shea Patterson, who narrowly edged out Dwayne Haskins in overall grade. Both were spectacular this season. pic.twitter.com/lWzdRpOUEh

— PFF College (@PFF_College) February 11, 2019

PFF has taken plenty of guff from guys with twitter handles like @SmackMyMichUp in the aftermath, and it's clear that the NFL agrees with that guy since Haskins is currently in it and Patterson is still in Ann Arbor. Even your author has to scratch his head at that.

My attempt to figure out how that grade came about: 1) Haskins was largely miserable on the ground while Patterson had a midseason renaissance and 2) OSU's offense was a ton of short stuff to fast guys while Michigan's was less frequent and had a higher degree of difficulty. Patterson was extremely good at doing Shea Patterson things:

By having a 51.9% adjusted completion percentage on deep passes last season, Shea Patterson leads the returning contingent of B1G Quarterbacks. pic.twitter.com/MlfUfxF31B

— PFF College (@PFF_College) July 8, 2019

MSU:

…there are few QBs I'd rather have throwing a deep ball to an open receiver.

I watch college football in giant 14-hour blocks and those throws are flung anywhere but the receiver more often than not. Patterson's deep ball is deadly.

He was super accurate. A large chunk of Patterson's missed passes were miscommunication or hesitation on passes that were right where they needed to be. He puts the ball where it needs to go, away from defensive backs and into areas where yards after the catch beckon.

This wasn't just a pocket thing. Patterson added a healthy dose of productive improvisation. He was hardly less accurate on the run.

His ability to escape and then do something productive was mostly a blessing, especially early in the season when it felt like any dropback was liable to result in disaster. A relentlessly accurate quarterback who can escape the pocket and run 81 yards against Wisconsin is a thing.

But once Michigan fans settled in with the idea of having a non-infamous quarterback, certain Patterson traits began to bother. Foremost amongst these was his tendency to bust out of a clean pocket just before he had a throw. This was a trait he learned the hard way at Ole Miss. When I went over his game against Alabama two years ago, this was the takeaway:

Probably a lot of useful information from this game against one of the nation's top defenses, right?

nooooooooope

Why not?

Imagine last year's Michigan OL playing Bama. … During one stretch Patterson was sacked on five of eight dropbacks. If you're not a chart-reader, about halfway through the game I got frustrated by typing the same thing about a Virtually Unblocked Guy Up the Gut and started typing VUGUG when that happened.

When the walls caved in against Notre Dame, Patterson must have thought he was in for another season of surviving as his vagrant ancestors did: constantly on the move.

Adjusting to the new reality was a process, one that was still, uh, in process deep into the season. MSU:

…we continue to get a few plays a game where Patterson does not have the required patience. This is a blitz pickup that sets the outside MSU player free. Patterson does have time to sit in the pocket and find someone, but leaves early:

He has time to wait for Gentry to clear the LB here; he also has DPJ on an out. Gentry's exiting the screen to the middle here; he and DPJ are splitting a safety.

That LB is drifting outside; there is a big area in the middle of the field Patterson would be able to throw Gentry into if he had stood his ground. Instead, a bail and hurried throwaway.

This popped up against PSU as well; he's got drags underneath here and a clean pocket but doesn't have the faith to stand in:

Sometimes it felt like he'd be anticipating a need to leave the pocket and actually generate his own pressure. Michigan picks up this double A gap blitz against Wisconsin, but Patterson drifts left and kills the blocking angles:

This got better over time. After Penn State:

Patterson's pocket awareness is getting better as his protection becomes more consistent. He's still leaving clean pockets on occasion. Sometimes this results in TDs to Donovan Peoples-Jones; more often it results in throwaways:

That's a clean-ish pocket in which he can drift right a step or two and find one of his short routes for something. Too often Patterson goes for the full bug-out instead of repositioning. The above notwithstanding, Patterson's doing a much better job of hanging in the pocket for his guys to get open.

But as that passage indicates by pointing out another early exit, while Patterson's pocket presence improved it always remained an issue.

That combined with Patterson's other major bother: reading defenses quickly enough to get the ball out. This was particularly a struggle against zones. The high school crap Patterson was running at Ole Miss was no preparation for Pep Hamilton's NFL-esque system, and the first time Michigan got in a game against a good bend-but-don't-break defense it was a grind. That was against Northwestern:

…sitting in the pocket and firing things didn't go so well. Michigan toasts a cornerback on a slant and go here, but Patterson has a "loading" swirly thing pop up mid-play and inexplicably waits:

Michigan got the look they wanted. Let it rip. If that's out as soon as Patterson reloads it's a chunk. … this points to a quarterback who was very uncomfortable. … Northwestern plays a ton of zone, almost never blitzed, frequently dropped eight, and rarely bit on play action. The reads and windows were tight. Patterson didn't make them quickly enough in many cases; in others he didn't trust his protection and exited a clean pocket before his WRs broke open.

This deficit really popped out when I was drafting the Nico Collins section of this year's preview. Many of Collins's catches were obviously good ideas well before Patterson actually pulled the trigger. The resulting throws tested the limits of Patterson's arm and were often short:

That's in the air for 60 yards; if it's in the air for 50 because he throws it two beats sooner the chances it's a touchdown are much improved. This too popped up across much of the season, creating a genre of Patterson throws that were exactingly accurate but late and therefore incomplete.

The angel was in the throws; the devil was in the details.

BONUS: DENARD, BUT SLOW! NOT THAT SLOW, JUST SLOWER THAN DENARD!

faster than he first appeared [Bryan Fuller]

Patterson surged midseason as a runner. Your author must admit that a few games in I thought he was hardly better than Haskins on the ground, a "not in the face" kind of guy. After SMU:

It really seems like he does not want to pull the ball. This third and one should be a conversion. Michigan's running RR's old zone belly play and the DE crashes. With a TE arcing out to the second level a Patterson pull here is an easy win:

…I wonder if Patterson's not making these pulls because he doesn't want to be running around with the ball.

This turned out to be unfair. Patterson's reticence to keep the ball was in part because Ole Miss almost never asked him to. He had only 28 non-sack carries in his sophomore year at Ole Miss, a number barely above the background radiation of scrambles and sneaks. (There is a proverb: do not hire a Sonic manager to replace Hugh Freeze.) I'm dubious Michigan planned on asking him to keep it, either, until the Notre Dame debacle and the ensuing Warinner takeover of the ground game.

So things were bumpy. You probably remember moaning involuntarily in the aftermath of this:

"Someone in the box took off his hat and slowly ate it in anger after that." –MSU UFR

That was eight games deep into the season; the decision-making there was always slanted to the give. With the exception of Rutgers (when Patterson did not run at all), Patterson had at least one of these facepalm moments every game.

And maybe that was fine? Patterson came out of that MSU game +2 on the ground, and the next week he was +6 against Penn State because the dorfs, while painful, became outliers. By midseason Patterson was a reliable source of yards and confusion, frequently when Michigan was trying to close out games and score critical points. Michigan's game-sealing drive at MSU saw Patterson keep on fourth and short and then set Michigan up with first and goal:

Patterson put Michigan up two scores against Wisconsin on a third and one run; up eight in the fourth quarter against Indiana Patterson was the four-minute drill. The higher leverage the situation, the more likely Patterson was going to be running the ball.

Once activated as a runner he displayed a surprising turn of speed—just ask Wisconsin—and even a little wiggle:

Patterson wasn't Denard but neither was he a Not In The Face guy. He got after it. Michigan came to rely on it in critical situations, and that's all the testimony you need.

Because Michigan was judicious with Patterson's involvement the numbers weren't big. Patterson was –2 over the first four games*; he was +13 from Northwestern to Indiana. This swing had an outsized effect. The story of the last 20 years of college football is that playing 11 vs 11 on the ground while having a functional passing offense is a gamechanger.

*[I deleted a –3 for a fumbled snap irrelevant to an all-gun offense.]

This had a glancing effect on the passing game despite the general lack of connection to the running offense. (Arc play action attempts: 0.) Patterson got a lot better at going deep into mesh points on play action, and opposing front sevens found themselves frozen far more often than they did early in the season—more about this in Five Questions, Five Answers. Michigan started getting some easy chunks:

This is something Gattis can work with.

EXPECTATIONS: TAKE ME DOWN TO RPO CITY WHERE THE RUN GAME CONNECTS AND THE LINEBACKERS RAGE-QUITTY

Patterson's 2018 was good, but hung up on a bunch of stuff that was not his wheelhouse. He'd never sat in the pocket after a seven-step drop. He didn't seem comfortable getting through his progressions quickly. And for whatever reasons, Michigan's much-hyped RPO adoption fizzled out into almost nothing. The "almost" bit of it sticks in the craw, because the RPOs Michigan did run were almost universally successful:

Patterson never looked more comfortable than when he yoinked the ball from his running back and let fly. This became obvious enough for Harbaugh to pull the trigger on one Josh Gattis:

“We found that Shea was better in the shotgun,” Harbaugh said. “We went more to it as the season went on last year. Also, Dylan’s ability to get out and go and run — there’s a tremendous running ability there that he has.

“I think Shea is also comfortable in that up-tempo offense, and being spread out just a little bit more helps the quarterbacks. It’s really driven by that.”

Offseason talk about Patterson suggests the above is wisdom. Patterson is "sharp and quick with his reads in the new offense" per 247; Gattis said something about Patterson playing too much golf over the offseason but had to admit he was locked in:

Gattis joked last week that he was briefly concerned because this summer Patterson played so much golf, a game he picked up in the past year. When Patterson arrived at camp, Gattis saw his quarterback was refreshed and polished.

“He’s playing lights out, he really is. His playmaking ability, his ball placement, his footwork within the pocket, I’ve been really, really pleased,” Gattis said. “He’s playing at a really big-time level and so he sets the standard and, really, the bar high for our offense, and the other players around him see it.”

New systems have transition costs; here they should be relatively minor since Patterson is moving to his wheelhouse.

So: expectations? Big ones. Patterson's PFF grade this year bumped up about four points from his abbreviated sophomore year. If he can replicate that he's in the 90 range. Usually players start leveling off as they get older, but quarterbacks are an exception, and he's got a ton of weapons and is locked in by all reports. He's probably going to set some records, and it's 50/50 whether he gets to shake Tua Tagovailoa or Trevor Lawrence's hand in New York this December.

THE OSTRICH HEIR

McCaffrey gonna McCaffrey [Patrick Barron]

Last year DYLAN MCCAFFREY [recruiting profile] was the last of the four QBs on the roster covered in this post. Brandon Peters had started a number of games; Joe Milton was the whiz-bang guy with an infinite ceiling. But when Patterson was briefly knocked out of the Notre Dame game, it was McCaffrey who came in. And he looked… fine:

He was fine on some short stuff. Michigan ran a few copies of America's Rollout Out to convert third downs. Grant Perry was open, because Grant Perry, and McCaffrey found him.

He missed badly once and his wobbly passes didn't inspire a ton of confidence. Calm, though. Needs to amp up that arm strength insofar as he can.

That is not nothing for a redshirt freshman chucked in against a tough defense on the road. Clearly McCaffrey had passed Peters, who seemed vaguely competent a year ago and is now the starter at Illinois. It wasn't enough to cause Michigan fans to do much more than go "hmm" over a snifter of brandy.

Then:

Even though that got called back somewhat dubiously, a new era of hype had begun. McCaffrey got to keep his long rushing TD against Wisconsin…

…and by the end of the season he'd racked up 99 yards on 10 carries even without the 75-yard Nebraska TD.

He also chipped in a 3/8 day passing in the second half of the Nebraska game, but that number doesn't do it justice. Six of his eight throws charted positively in UFR, with one inch-perfect bomb to Ronnie Bell salting the Cornhusker wounds:

Ambry Thomas and Oliver Martin could not bring in on-point throws; three of his four long balls were on the money. One of the takeaways from that game:

McCaffrey makes a statement. He's calm, he makes good decisions, and if he's going to hit 3/4 deep balls on a regular basis the Joe Milton hype train might have to wait.

McCaffrey didn't get a chance to impress further because a broken collarbone against PSU ended his season. It was still enough to spring McCaffrey into offseason fever dreams about the Next Great Michigan Quarterback—at least when coupled with a torrent of hype from within the program itself.

Dylan has WHEEEEEELS! #GoBlue x @dcaf20 pic.twitter.com/V72hDHz7Ba

— Michigan Football (@UMichFootball) April 13, 2019

Spring only reinforced newly lofty expectations:

Dylan McCaffrey continues to make onlookers blink and look owlishly at their drinks whenever he starts moving. His family's entire raison d'être is to be inexplicably fast ostrich people, and he is the final evolution. He didn't actually do a ton of passing because he had so many called runs, and he looked exactly like he did last year.

He did not seem to have the command of the offense that Patterson does, which is in direct contradiction of various practice reports. Those should be taken with a grain of salt, as always. I expect that McCaffrey had an off day passing. He's going to be the least disastrous backup QB in a minute, and next year he'll enter as the presumed starter.

24/7 reported that insiders assert McCaffrey "would be a starting quarterback at 'a ton' of other programs"; Rivals called him a "lock for two-time captain" and asserted he has "the 'it' factor," echoing what Harbaugh said about him last year:

"Very athletic, very heady," Harbaugh said. "He's got that 'it' thing. He's got that 6-5 frame and he's getting strong so he can really get everything coordinated with the throwing motion. He's working hard on that. He's on that path. You like everything about him."

Harbaugh strikes on an important reason to believe in a swift McCaffrey rise: he was a skinny tall kid with pop-gun arm strength coming out of high school, and amping that arm up was going to take some time. Nebraska thinks that box is checked.

By the time Jim Harbaugh told the assembled media in Chicago his audacious plans…

"Yeah, I do [envision scenarios where both play],” Harbaugh said. “Where it stands right now — and that could change later or not — is I see them both playing. … I see it as maybe redefining what a starter is. …you want to get both on the field."

…it felt like it made sense.

McCaffrey's done as much as he can to prove himself without actually playing a lot of live-fire snaps. Next up is getting a drive or two in most games and keeping the hype train rolling with 50 throws and 20 runs.

FUTURES

still first in first off the bus [Patrick Barron]

As all Harbaugh quarterbacks do, JOE MILTON [recruiting profile] spent his first year on campus taking a redshirt. Because the NCAA loosened up their rules, he saw the field on occasion. He didn't get to throw the ball until garbage time against Florida and Ohio State, so any information newer than the stuff in last year's preview is from this offseason.

Per this site Milton "looked like a guy who's a year away" after the spring game, in which he alternated slick fades down the sideline with… less slick throws.

Mike Barrett with a nice INT! #GoBlue x @mikebarrett_MB1 pic.twitter.com/7vPKP6S1uL

— Michigan Football (@UMichFootball) April 13, 2019

Your author in the aftermath:

He ran decently, but not as well as McCaffrey. His accuracy was improved, but not on Patterson's level. Milton was always going to be a multi-year project after a sub-50% completion percentage in high school, and he's still in the building phase.

This take has not been budged by a bunch of fall hype. Milton drew a reasonably positive mention from Harbaugh ("…getting a lot of reps; you can see all that he has in his tool box") in one presser and has not come up otherwise through either official or unofficial channels.

Milton did reshape expectations a little by moving the ball on the ground. Despite being rated as a dual-threat guy by Rivals and ESPN, Milton was very much a pocket passer in high school with about 250 total rushing yards over the course of his career. Harbaugh QBs have to have a little giddyup, and on one weaving run against Wisconsin Milton demonstrated that he does indeed have some:

He's not the fastest guy in the world but he's got some agility and at 245 pounds he has the potential to give off Tim Tebow/Cardale Jones QB/FB vibes.

Michigan is going to want to keep Milton engaged so they can have a real quarterback battle in the aftermath of Patterson's departure, so he'll get much or all of garbage time and could have a small package of stuff he's good at that Michigan deploys in certain games. The general vibe around the program is that he's not going to wait around if he's not named the starter next year; hopefully Michigan can forestall a transfer. QB depth like they have this year is a luxury to be maintained.

Finally, freshman CADE MCNAMARA [recruiting profile] enrolled early and had some time in the spring game. All Harbaugh QBs redshirt and he'll be no different. Down the road he projects as another scrambly gunslinger.