Previously: The Story. 

QUARTERBACK: BEAT GEORGIA

GRADE: 5

QUARTERBACK	Yr
JJ McCarthy	Jr.
Davis Warren	So.*
Alex Orji	Fr.*

Two years ago, Michigan won the Big Ten. Hooray! They returned their starting quarterback. Also hooray! But there was this guy, you know, who'd done this as a freshman:

JJ MCCARTHY

	Good				Neutral			Bad					Ovr			Reads
Game	DO	CA	SCR		PR	MA		BA	TA	IN	BR		DSR	GRADE!		RPOs	ZRs
2021	9++++	18+(7)	3		1	7		1x	5x	11	6x		58%	+10		10/12	28/33

As always, hover over abbreviations for explanations.

Nine dead on throws in the rough equivalent of two games, just one Bad Read Xtreme, a +10 grade, excellent decisions at mesh points. Our charting for JJ McCarthy was not over the moon, but this was a true freshman getting spot duty. He wandered into games and out of them, never developing a rhythm but generally executing better than you'd expect. He flashed a crazy arm, and crazy legs. The people wanted him to win the job. The people did not expect him to win the job, because that never happens. Returning, championship QBs do not get deposed.

Then spring chatter turned into fall chatter and Jim Harbaugh announced that he'd be starting Cade McNamara in the opener and McCarthy in game two. Whether this was a genuine response to a tight competition or a way to ease a Big Ten champion starter out of his job will never be known, but McNamara bottled it and McCarthy turned in a 100% downfield success rating; Harbaugh announced the job was McCarthy's and never looked back.

The payoff was another Big Ten title, albeit one that once again leaned heavily on the ground game. Depending on your point of view, Michigan was either 127th or 5th in "run rate over expected," a metric that measures exactly what it sounds like. They finished 3rd nationally in yards per carry. If you squint you could argue that replacing McNamara was beside the point. And maybe it was, if Michigan's goal was to beat Ohio State and win the conference. It is not. Michigan's added a "Beat Georgia" drill to practice, and McCarthy is the guy who looked like he might be able to hang with the Bulldogs when Michigan got blasted in their CFP appearance two years ago.

Flipping to JJ is for this year, when his ceiling blows McNamara's out of the water. He's got to take a step forward. This is about how much of a step:

…the former top-25 recruit made the gamble pay off, winning his first 12 starts and finishing 16th in Total QBR.

Sixteenth is good, but is it national-title good? Over the past four seasons, the title-winning quarterback has averaged a 91.4 Total QBR, completing 72% of his passes at 14.2 yards per completion. McCarthy in 2022: 79.1 Total QBR, 65% completion rate, 13.1 yards per completion. He came up big in the last three games of the season (57% completion rate, but at 17.8 yards per completion). Was that a sign of things to come?

Well, Dude, we just don't know.

[After THE JUMP: salami]

THE BASELINE

Perhaps I overstated myself in the previous section. McCarthy significantly outperformed McNamara's baseline a year ago, particular when you consider that the zone read column on the far right would have read something like 5/8 for McNamara:

JJ MCCARTHY

	Good				Neutral			Bad					Ovr			Reads
Game	DO	CA	SCR		PR	MA		BA	TA	IN	BR		DSR	GRADE!		RPOs	ZRs
Colorado State		4+											100%	oops		0/0	4/4
Hawaii	4	8(1)+											100%	+14		1/1	3/3
UConn	2++	5(6)			1	2							100%	+11		1/1	1/2
Maryland	2	15(1)	1						1	5	3**		67%	+1.5		1/2	1/3
Iowa	3+	11+(4)			3	3			1	3			78%	+8		1/1	2/3
Indiana	2	22++(3)	1		1	1				2*	3		83%	+16		4/4	4/5
Penn State	3	9(5)	2		2	1		1		1(3)	2		78%	+4.5		5/6	3/3
MSU	2	12(1)++	3		2	3				3	2		77%	+8.5		2/2	1/2
Rutgers	4	12(2)+	1		2	3		1		1(1)			89%	+10		0/1	0/1
Nebraska		11+			3					3	2		69%	+4.5		1/1	0
Illinois	2	19+(3)			1	2		2	1	5*	2*		68%	+3		0/0	2/4
Ohio State	4	5(1)	1		3	7		1		3	2		67%	+13.5		0/0	7/7
Purdue
TCU	9	10(1)	4		5	3			5*	4*(1)	2*		68%	+16		3/6	2/3

McCarthy's year started out with uncanny accuracy; he dropped the first 100% downfield success rate in UFR history in his first start, and then another one the week after. After week three he had zero negatively graded plays at PFF; every other P5 QB had at least six. Things got a little bumpy the next week but McCarthy quickly recovered to post excellent numbers for much of the season, with a distinct flareup at the end.

The step up from McNamara may be best expressed via the lens of our wide receiver charting. We put catchable passes in three bins: routine, tough, and circus. We charted 30 circus opportunities last year and 25 tough ones versus 75 and 69 a year ago when McNamara was the starter. That is almost a two-thirds drop in tough asks since McNamara/McCarthy combined for 347 attempts in 2022 and 386 in 2021. Context matters, of course—I expect the "tough" numbers to go up next year because Colston Loveland is going to get a bunch of contested opportunities—but this was very close to the same personnel.

Despite having easier overall opportunities, his receivers did not help him out. McCarthy's accuracy outstrips his stats. Bill Connelly:

…among last year's CFP quarterbacks, J.J. McCarthy got far less help than the others when it came to receivers making contested catches. Passing stats for contested passes, per Sports Info Solutions: Stetson Bennett, Georgia: 42% completion rate, 7.4 yards per dropback; C.J. Stroud, Ohio State: 41%, 6.2 Max Duggan, TCU: 36%, 6.0 McCarthy: 28%, 3.7.

This will come in for more discussion in the wide receivers article, but this should significantly improve since the most frequent culprits on contested incompletions are no longer on the team and the returners did improbably well, albeit on light volume.

Michigan's playcalling hampered McCarthy as well. McCarthy led P5 quarterbacks with at least 25 play action dropbacks in YPA by a huge margin. McCarthy's 13.9 YPA is a full 2.3 yards clear of #2 Stetson Bennett, a gap equal to the distance between Bennett and #26 Dorian Thompson-Robinson. McCarthy was PFF's highest-graded QB on play action. This makes sense what with the Corum and the Joe "Sherrone" Moore award OL. What does not make sense is that of 78 qualifying QBs, McCarthy was 67th in percentage of play action throws.

Also in playcalling issues: if we're looking solely through the lens of offensive efficiency and not getting your QB to the OSU game healthy, McCarthy had nowhere near the number of called runs he should have a year ago, and there was only one big game—Penn State—where his legs were at full flight.

All of this adds up to a program-wide set of training wheels. This makes perfect sense when you have the two-time Joe "Sherrone" Moore winning OL and Blake Corum; nothing about what Michigan did last year is difficult to understand. But to Beat Georgia, the training wheels must come off.

AHEAD OF HIS YEARS

more mature than this picture makes it look [Barron]

McCarthy did the "new quarterback, run around like an insane person" thing in one game, against Maryland. There were two plays I dubbbed Ishtars 1 and 2 where he wandered around behind the line of scrimmage for aeons before pulling a rabbit out of his hat (on the first) or dying ignominiously (on the second). The rabbit event:

Good outcome, terrible process as McCarthy has a wide open Roman Wilson for an easy conversion. That week's UFR spent a lot of time evaluating McCarthy's decision-making process:

Okay, but the decisions.

Yeah… okay. Sam Webb has talked with some folks inside the program and was told that Maryland hit Michigan with a bunch of coverages they had not put on film and that a lot of McCarthy's hesitation was because he hadn't seen evolution X of defense Y yet, and that he'd get better down the road. I have no doubt that's true, but that does not explain away everything.

The next week Michigan rolled into Kinnick, the place where young quarterbacks go to throw balls directly into the chest of zone defenders popping up out of nowhere. You can check the chart above: McCarthy turned in no Bad Reads in my charting and one Throwaway, that a decision not to take a shot at a fade downfield that was covered but not bracketed.

What issues McCarthy had were usually about reading the coverage fast enough. Here's an example from the Iowa UFR:

This is the right play. It's past the sticks and it is there, but when McCarthy decides on it he tries to move to it to make the throw shorter when he should just be hammering it in. At this point ball needs to be coming out:

By the time it does come out the safety is driving on the ball:

This is the worst decision I have this week? Probably? 

"JJ needs to get to this faster" was a running sub-theme in UFRs and PFF's stats seem to confirm this. PFF will charge pressures suffered to the quarterback, and JJ's rate of 32% was second-worst in the P5. If "worst" is really the right word here. The rest of the top five: Alabama's Bryce Young, Louisville's Malik Cunningham, Oklahoma's Dillon Gabriel, and USC's Caleb Williams. This starts to look like real nice company. It's possible this is more of an OL ranking than a QB ranking.

The two pick-sixes against TCU obscure a lack of dangerous throws over the course of the season. PFF charted McCarthy for 16 "turnover-worthy passes" on the year, a 3.4% rate that's basically identical to CJ Stroud and Will Levis, older players who went in the first round of the draft. The top of this stat is naturally dominated by guys with buckets of experience. The top five was Jayden Daniels, Hendon Hooker, Dillon Gabriel, Michael Penix, and Tommy DeVito, all of whom had 500+ college passing attempts entering last year. McCarthy should improve from an already good baseline, especially since some of is TWPs were events like "I do not think this Indiana linebacker can carry Ronnie Bell down the seam":

That's pretty understandable; obviously something you want to eliminate going forward but qualitatively different than chucking into someone's chest.

Meanwhile, our charting was even more optimistic in this regard. Turnover-worthy plays are either INX (a ball that's so inaccurate it's interceptable) or BRX (throw into LB's chest). We have seven of those and there was certainly an eighth in the un-charted Purdue game (apologies; my hard drive imploded).

The disparity there is probably because we don't file things like the no-no-no-yes Corum heave against Penn State as X plays because that was not McCarthy's intent; he was trying to get that out of bounds. Like the Indiana interception, that feels like a different, lesser kind of problem.

Given McCarthy's youth and lack of experience this bodes well. He doesn't have to get radically better here; he just has to progress at a normal rate.

THE WHOLE SUITE

rollouts are no problem even when the throw is 30 yards [Barron]

Dane Brugler ranked McCarthy the #3 QB prospect in the upcoming draft not based on his current production but his toolbox:

McCarthy is far from a polished product, but his tools have scouts excited for his future. A fleet-of-foot athlete, he uses his quick acceleration to outpace pursuit when on the move. His arm strength is above-average and allows him to rip throws down the seam or into the void up the sideline. McCarthy is a tad lean, but the frame is there for him to continue filling out and adding functional bulk. Aside from the physical traits, his coaches also rave about his smarts and competitiveness — two non-negotiable qualities for the next level. …

There is no question McCarthy has the talent. Time will tell whether he translates his tools into more consistent production in 2023, but he could be one of the first three quarterbacks drafted if that happens.

McCarthy isn't Joe Milton but he can make every throw. He can hit cover-two hole shots against the masters of cover two…

…to super deep rollouts…

…delicate lofted balls over pressure…

…calmly efficient pocket escapes…

… and back foot ropes to the sideline:

That last embed is a play you've probably burned into your brain, but how about this call from Seth after the 2021 Maryland game:

The five-star arm literally pops.

…you heard that catch on the broadcast, as the ball arrives so quickly on a hitch Johnson has to figure out what to do with the time he wasn’t planning to have before the DB arrives. He was going to shield the ball, so he just falls backwards for a few extra. In future circumstances these are going to turn into big YAC opportunities.

Boy howdy, didn't they.

McCarthy was a five star when the book on his movement skills was "can get outside of the pocket a little bit"; now that he's demonstrated that's way short of the reality there's really nothing that McCarthy cannot—at least hypothetically—do on the football field. The ceiling here is massive.

THEY SAID THE KID COULDN'T THROW THE DEEP BALL

note: this is not a picture of JJ McCarthy [Barron]

Sure, I'll embed it:

Maybe I just watched it nine times like it was the "Planet Of The Bass" clip. Maybe you did too. Mmm.

What was I talking about? Oh, right: they said the kid couldn't throw the deep ball. Prior to McCarthy's explosive finish to the season—air-yard chunks of 75, 45, 50, 43, 34, and 44 yards against OSU and TCU—Michigan's inability to complete a genuine deep ball was the season's outstanding frustration. The UFR after game 10, against Nebraska, spent a chunk of time rending its garments:

We will never complete a bomb.

Maybe not. I do think they're close, and JJ is accurate in a way that makes me believe this is a matter of time. … Even the one that was the closest to being completed was a difficult ask from the WR:

I kind of thought Johnson stumbled a bit and wandered inside the numbers by a step or two, and a step is the only difference between a tough leaping attempt and something in stride. In a similar vein, there's good news and bad news about a later fade to Bell:

The bad news is that Bell does not win this route at all and appears to be looking for a back shoulder throw, and that is not the throw that is attempted. The good news is that if Bell does get over the top this is right on point.

This despair lasted another week, and then all was well.

This shows up in PFF's grading, where McCarthy comes in with a 91(!) on balls of 20+ yards. I'm not sure this bin is mostly bombs, but I kind of think it might be. I kept looking for passes that were 20 yard ropes and kept coming up with stuff like this:

Those are all ~18 air yards. I had a real struggle to find something that was over 20 air yards and not at least 30 that wasn't the occasional deep crossing route on a waggle. So I think that's mostly what were taking about: deep balls.

You're probably thinking the 91 is outlandish, but that's because there are some serious quirks in PFF's grading system. 91 is only good for 24th of 76 qualifying QBs. He wasn't elite. But that grade confirms the eye test: McCarthy's deep ball was fine-to-good.

When you start going through some clips you find that Michigan could reasonably be described as snakebit a year ago. Look…

…I mean, these are accurate…

…they just don't come off:

Even the ones that looked complete got called back after replay.

There's a separate category of balls in a gray area that may or may not be on the wide receiver. Andrel Anthony figures heavily in these, but there were a couple of deep balls against Nebraska that were more or less perfect except for the fact that Ronnie Bell couldn't get over the top of the coverage and was (legally) impeded from getting to his spot, and then one that is (maybe) a subtle loss of gait from Johnson from being a completion:

The upshot of all of this is that deep balls are rare and high variance, McCarthy's accuracy on them was far better than it felt prior to Ohio State, and that late season explosion is closer to reality than the vast desert that preceded it. McCarthy was solidly above average, all things considered. It's just that all the successes were at the start and tail end of the season, so the middle felt real bad.

It's hard to make a prediction here because of the aforementioned variance, but this should improve. After the Maryland game, which featured five deep misses, McCarthy had an odd explanation for it:

McCarthy chalked them up to his arm being "110%," which is sort of weird until you remember that he had offseason surgery to correct something in his shoulder. If that sapped some power, and then McCarthy adjusted, and now he's back to where he was, that would make sense. His early throws were long and—as Devin Gardner pointed out in WTKA's MMQB segment—featured a sort of exaggerated pitcher-like movement on the follow through.

And the general trajectory of the season, which went from outright misses early to near misses to bad luck to the mass defenestration of the OSU secondary, supports that narrative. McCarthy without offseason surgery and with a receiving corps much better suited to getting downfield (you're migrating Ronnie Bell targets to Roman Wilson, Donovan Edwards, and Colston Loveland) should make this one-time bugaboo a distant memory by midseason.

CATS CAN HAVE A LITTLE DENARD, AS A TREAT

got a little zang in his zing zang or whatever [Barron]

Jim Harbaugh has historically used his quarterbacks' legs as if they were… well… Jim Harbaugh. Harbaugh was a pass-first quarterback whose mobility came into play occasionally. During his NFL prime he'd pick up a couple hundred yards over the course of the season. It was enough to keep opposing defenses aware of the threat and pick up the occasional chunk play without getting Harbaugh beheaded.

That recipe was more or less exactly what JJ McCarthy put together in 2022. PFF helpfully separates sacks from scrambles and designed runs and has him for 43 non-sack attempts for 402 yards a year ago; those were split about evenly between scrambles and designed runs. Those numbers might have been higher if Michigan didn't spend much of the year sitting on opponents' heads—or maybe not since McCarthy didn't have a called run in the first half of the OSU or TCU games. Who is to say?

McCarthy's legs were at their apex in the Penn State game, when he rushed for 62 yards on six carries and only failed to crack 100 because two separate plays that were blocked to the safety weren't actually, you know, blocked to the safety:

Michigan dialed him up two touchdowns, one on double arc and the second on a play that used to torment Michigan when JT Barrett was running it at Ohio State: bash QB counter.

The jet sweep fake holds the backside of the defense, eliminating two box defenders and giving Oluwatimi a really easy block on the third. Two guys dropping into coverage are easy outs and the DE sells out on pass rush. Your QB has the ball and one PSU safety is bailing to the other side of the field, so if Ryan Hayes just runs at the safety instead of thinking "this is too good to be true" that is a 50 yard touchdown.

The other play mentioned saw Michigan get two blockers to the safety only for that guy to make the tackle. These missed opportunities did not lead to touchdowns but did lead to Michigan's massive back-to-back touchdown runs in the second half, when Penn State defenders were influenced by the threat of McCarthy:

And then your whole deal about how it changes your run game etc.

I mean… right? I already talked about this in the game column but both of Michigan's home runs in this game went from 10-20 yards to touchdowns because Penn State was concerned with JJ McCarthy's legs. The Hayes block on the Edwards run is great but it is eased by the fact that the backside LB isn't tearing after a pin and pull. PNP is not subtle. It features two different OL pulling. Neither is it something you can reasonably abort into play action. There's zero reason you wouldn't go after it immediately unless you were worried the QB might have the ball:

PSU LB #43

Hayes gets his Mason Cole on and it's the combination of the hesitation step and that block that gets Edwards past the second level fast enough that he can cut back behind the crumpled safety and go the distance.

The ensuing Blake Corum run sees Kalen King spend the whole play checking McCarthy:

You have to have the blocking to get to the safety level whether or not you've got a QB run game; QB run game makes those chunk runs much more likely because it takes a guy out of the equation. In the end, PSU was freaking out about Edwards and Corum when McCarthy had the ball and vice versa.

Add in six to eight McCarthy carries per game to Corum, Edwards, and a highly functional passing game and defensive coordinators just might walk into the sea.

McCarthy appears to have the chops for this. Our charting includes zone read decisions, and by our reckoning he was 30/40 on them last year. (I appear to have clipped almost half of the misses, because nothing's more likely to get a UFR clip than a play that should have worked but didn't.) This might be pessimistic. We aren't always sure if reads are live or not, and since he was 7/7 when the kitchen sink was thrown at Ohio State it's reasonable to assume that some of the misses weren't actually live reads. It says something about something that Seth charted McCarthy's 2021 zone read decisions—when he was a promising backup and not the whole store—at an even better 33/40. That's as many read decisions as a change of pace backup than as a starter for 13 of 14 games.

In any case, McCarthy can read an end, sometimes even in situations where the defensive end is technically squared up but is leaning to the back:

Another year of refinement, especially when he's going from a true sophomore to a junior, should make this an increment or two better from an already good starting spot. One caveat: as a result of the infrequency in which he's used as a runner, occasional forays into non-zone-read option game didn't go well. When Michigan brought out a speed option against Iowa he pitched it way too early to absorb a linebacker, for instance.

McCarthy is fast and has some movement to him but he's a pocket QB with some bonus wheels, not a guy you can rely on to rescue a bad decision. There were a couple of incidents where he made bad decisions a running back wouldn't have a whole lot of trouble with. Here he's got an opportunity to cut upfield and get something but instead goes with the dreaded No Cut Run and leaves a bunch of yards on the field:

He's able to slide through some tackles from the side; Denard he is not. He's not Steven Threet; he's able to juke more than the occasional linebacker. Nor is he a workhorse; he's not that big and isn't going to break tackles on the interior. He's limited to being a change-up, keep-em-honest option, which is perfectly fine. Because if they're not honest he's fast enough to house it.

The open question here is not whether McCarthy will hit that 6-8 carries number but by how much he'll miss it. He averaged about two called runs a game last year, and even against real opponents like Iowa there seemed to be instructions to get out of bounds whenever possible. Early games saw McCarthy take out the arc read for the occasional test drive only, seemingly to get some live-fire reps and put it on film for opponents to think about. Late in the season I spent a lot of time equivocating about whether or not a seemingly obvious missed read was actually live.

My preference for QB run shenanigans is to get it on the field early in the game so that the defenders are thinking about it, a la Penn State. Unfortunately, Michigan appears to be so dead set on avoiding hits to McCarthy that they limit his involvement, and frequently mute it by asking him to get out of bounds. I doubt that changes much this year, which is fine against ~10 of the twelve regular season opponents. I do have concerns that the peripheral nature of the QB run game for most of the year means that it's not prioritized consistently enough in the big games. But that's probably a take for 5Q5A.

EXPECTATIONS

I guess the consensus is that McCarthy needs to be more accurate. Brugler says he's "accurate for a college quarterback" but needs to hit another level if he's going to be an NFL first-rounder, and PFF's grading is… interesting. McCarthy's in an eight-way tie for 11th in the P5 on YPA on short passes at 7.4, and his completion rate there is 78%—also more or less in a dead heat. His grade, though, is a meh 62 while everyone in this dead heat except Arizona's Jayden De Laura is in the 78-70 range. I'm not sure what warrants the gap. But, yes, it is the opinion of various observers that McCarthy needs to clean it up on the short stuff.

Other than that, McCarthy needs to do a couple things. One is to read defenses faster and get to the correct option. This is already at a B/B+ level. The other is to maintain his deep ball accuracy from the final three games—or at least stay somewhere in the ballpark.

It really doesn't take a whole lot of projection to get McCarthy to an All-American level. He's going from a true sophomore first-time starter to a junior with a season under his belt; a big step forward is likely. I'm expecting him to be in a small tier behind Caleb Williams and maybe Drake Maye when the conversation turns to the best QBs in America.

BACKUPS

Uma, Oprah. Tuttle, Tittle. [Barron]

It's a little dubious back here. There's no clarity on who QB2 is. Indiana transfer JACK TUTTLE is the guy with the most experience, which is less than ideal. Tuttle is a former four-star who ranked just outside the top 100 on the 247 composite when he enrolled at Utah as a member of the 2018 class. Almost all of that shine is gone five years and two transfers later. Tuttle left Utah after a redshirt year and proceeded to be a backup for the Hoosiers for four years. Idling behind Michael Penix is no shame, but after Penix alit for Washington last year Tuttle was quickly superseded by Mizzou transfer Connor Bazelak, who held the job virtually all year despite an ugly stat line: 5.4 YPA, 13 TD, 10 INT, 55% completion rate.

Tuttle couldn't match those stats in 159 attempts across nine appearances in 2020 and 2021. He averaged 5 yards an attempt with 4 TDs and 6 INTs. The state of the Indiana offense might have something to do with it—future NFLer Penix experienced a severe dropoff in 2021, and Alex has spent two years warning people that the Hoosier OL is eye bleach—but anyone who watched Bazelak last year can't have a whole lot of optimism about a guy who couldn't beat that guy out.

That said, Tuttle was highly regarded as a recruit and has some tools:

If he ends up playing meaningful snaps he could surprise. He'll get to hand off a bunch and dropping back will feel luxurious since there will not be a rabid ferret in his face two nanoseconds after the snap. Best not to find out, though. 

lookit this guy running away from Derrick Moore [Campredon]

Michigan's other options here are DAVIS WARREN and ALEX ORJI [recruiting profile]. Warren appeared to be the #2 last year after Cade McNamara left the team, and turned in an interesting-enough spring game performance to draw mention in last year's edition of this post:

DAVIS WARREN [and Alan Bowman] went head-to-head for most of the afternoon. Most observers thought Warren was better, which came as a major surprise despite some positive spring practice chatter about Warren. Bowman has over 600 career attempts as Texas Tech’s starter and Warren barely played in high school, let alone college. Talk is talk is talk; Warren put a little something behind the talk.

Warren does have a pile of caveats to point at. His senior year was derailed by a leukemia diagnosis—chemotherapy left him 30 pounds lighter than his previous playing weight—and then a grad-year transfer to a school in Connecticut got blown up by COVID. If nothing else, Warren is a worthy successor to Drake Johnson’s throne as the Certainly Definitely Cursed member of the Michigan roster.

Warren added a few garbage time attempts to his resume over the course of last season, demonstrating at least reasonable arm strength, accuracy, and mobility. He even had a certifiably bad-ass throw against Hawaii:

Michigan's irritating habit of completely dominating first halves only to lead 14-13 prevented much in the way of Warren run-outs for the rest of the season. After the nonconference schedule he had just three pass attempts, all against Nebraska. He popped back up in the spring game, alternating struggles under pressure—Michigan's backup OL got a bit overwhelmed—with eyebrow-raising darts like this shoulda-been touchdown to Matt Hibner…

…and a couple of bonafide cover-two hole shots to Peyton O'Leary…

…with a horrendous decision on a pump fake deep ball that was all kinds of covered. The crowning moment was when Warren got pressure up the gut, tried to break the pocket, found that wasn't an option, stopped, and rifled a back-shoulder throw to O'Leary:

Yes, this guy can play QB in the Big Ten. I mean, maybe. He does not look like an overwhelmed walk-on, he looks like a serious option. Next year. Late breaking news suggests that Warren has won the QB2 spot, which bodes well.

don't say it [Fuller]

Orji, meanwhile, has set Twitter a-titter a couple times but his freshman year was almost entirely limited to running the ball. This is intriguing because he's a bonafide hoss listed at 236 in the most recent phonebooks. If he provides any passing threat at all there's a lot to work with here:

Arm tackles aren't going to cut it against our dude. No sir:

Alex Orji doesn't care if it's the spring game.@devingardnerXCI absolutely loved the QB delivering the boom here.@AlexORJ1 x @UMichFootball pic.twitter.com/cFbwekjCKP

— Michigan On BTN (@MichiganOnBTN) April 1, 2023

And if you would like someone talking like Orji is Baby Gronk, here you go:

Michigan’s secret weapon @AlexORJ1 @The33rdTeamFB @OldSchoolQB pic.twitter.com/BLnbowMB5d

— Quarterback Plug (@QuarterbackPlug) May 26, 2023

If we're talking upside, Orji is the clear option amongst the backups. Last year Harbaugh said "it's like looking at Herschel Walker playing quarterback," and a couple weeks ago he said that Orij was an option as a kick returner(!?!). Actually, wait, he said this: "he's got a chance to be one of the greatest kick returners of all time." Eyes dot emoji.

Naturally, Orji was one of four Wolverines to feature on Bruce Feldman's Freaks list:

The 6-3, 237-pound sophomore quarterback ranks No. 1 on the team in its cumulative KPI score, which is made up of 48 Key Performance Indicators they use to track frame analysis: flexibility/mobility; strength/power; and agility/speed. Orji vertical-jumped 41 inches and did 2.34 in the reactive plyo stairs; broad-jumped 10-6; and did 3.97 in the shuttle and 6.65 in the 3-cone.

Those numbers are probably impressive!

Unfortunately, the answer to the question "why was the 235 pound athletic beast a three-star" is self-evident. Orji completed 49% of his passes as a high school senior, which is Joe Milton territory. Milton is set to start for Tennessee this year and might be pretty good… in his sixth year of college. Orji had a long way to go last year and probably still has a long way to go this year. Spring game results are encouraging, as he went from 1/7 as a freshman to 4/6 this year with one nice downfield hit:

This sample size is so small as to be offensive to the very notion. And yet: hope.

Even last year the insider types were saying that there are "special packages designed for him," and with McCarthy's athleticism QB run game is going to be a reasonably large part of the offense they're repping in practice. It is possible that Orji carves out a role in short yardage and in the redzone. Harbaugh asserted that he probably wasn't going to let Orji return kicks unless the blocking in front of him improved, implying he might see some time on offense. Tim Tebow demonstrated that having a YAC monster playing quarterback is brutal on opposition defenses when it comes to getting a team off the field, and last year the Eagles and 225-pound Jalen Hurts made the QB sneak so effective that the NFL considered banning it. If Michigan wants to take some miles off McCarthy and Corum, Orji is an intriguing option. 

If McCarthy enters the 2024 NFL draft, Orji will be either the best- or worst-case option to replace him next year. Here's hoping for some mop-up time where he looks like a quantum leap has occurred.

JAYDEN DENEGAL [recruiting profile] and KENDRICK BELL [recruiting profile pending] round out the scholarship options on the roster. Bell is a low three-star freshman who Michigan hopes is just as overlooked as his brother Ronnie; Denegal is a high three-star redshirt freshman who has drawn one mention on the site since last year's preview, that a brief aside from Harbaugh saying that Denegal was off to a "hot start" in one of those podcast interviews where he mentions everyone on the roster. If either sees the field in any capacity outside of Michigan leading by a gorillion things have gone Bortenschlager levels of wrong.