What happened to Dylan McCaffrey (rhetorical with explanation)
Of course, we know that Dylan McCaffrey is at Northern Colorado with his dad, but did you know that he finished 91st out of 96 FCS QBs in passing efficiency last year?
The Northern Colorado stadium seats 8533. They didn't play at all in 2020 and only won 7 games in the previous 3 seasons combined, so it was going to be a steep uphill battle for anyone.
He played in 10 of 11 games for a team that went 3-8 which was an improvement over the previous 2 seasons. He passed for 1,332 yards completing 60.4% of his attempts with 5 TDs and 7 INTs. Our old friend Tru Wilson was the 2nd leading rusher with 228 yards edging out McCaffrey with 227 yards.
He obviously left because he wasn't going to be the starting QB, and I didn't understand why he hadn't gotten the start after watching Joe Milton through a handful of horrific games, but I'm still a little surprised at how poorly this has gone. In the midst of the 2020 debacle, it appeared that Harbaugh had lost the team and that this was one more thesis to nail to the door.
The reality is that life is path dependent, and this might have all been for the best for Michigan. Looking back, I wonder how things would have turned out for him or UM if he had been willing to be the backup ahead of Cade in 2020. Having said that, last year's performance gives credence that he left because Harbaugh could see the limitations and that he had actually fallen to 3rd on the depth chart.
In any case, the one thing that seems obvious now is that Those who stay will be Champions!
He left. He's dead to me.
Like Putin is to me. But not HP.
I would have liked to see him move to WR, a la Devin Gardner.
I mean he's clearly a "smart" and "hard working" player, I'm just not sure he's as "athletic" a player as Gardner.
November 11th, 2022 at 10:37 AM ^
But he's scrappy and a real gym rat.
Guess he wasn't all he was cracked up to be. Also know that bad WRs and bad O-line can cause some issues, including interceptions. Would love to see if these were self-induced or part of the team challenges.
Anyway, we're good at UofM. Best wishes to Dylan.
Thanks for the analysis.
This. Devin Gardner threw 10 TD to 15 interceptions his senior year, and I think most UM fans would agree he was probably a better QB than those stats would suggest.
That being said, we will never know about Dylan had he stuck around, but I'm pretty glad Cade ended up starting last season regardless.
Poor Devin Gardner's stats got worse every year he was at Michigan. A lot of that was on the OL, but coaching was a big factor as well.
I think one of the (many) mistakes Hoke made with the offense was not to have a dedicated quarterback coach like he did his first stint at San Diego State (i.e., Brian Sipe).
I know it's utter sacrilege to say this, but by all accounts Devin Gardner is a great dude, and I occasionally feel bad for him that he picked Michigan over OSU. I think he could have been a star with a coach and a system that knew how to use him (of course, I would hate him if he were a Buckeye, but I wouldn't blame him).
Devin could have picked other schools, but OSU would not have been a good one. He would have been behind Pryor and Miller
November 11th, 2022 at 10:39 AM ^
I feel bad for him because the coaching staff failed to develop him and build around him. It's sad, as I think his talent was wasted.
His Dad is a terrible HC and has basically lost that team. Dylan is a damn good QB but is in a no win situation
If Ed McCaffrey is terrible as a coach, hopefully he improves. He's only early 50s right? Sticking close to Denver, spent so much of his career in Denver, raised his kids in Denver. He has a good base and support system to get better even if it doesnt help Dylan much now.
Just saying this for all the dads who are terrible at stuff who over time became a little less terrible. Gotta keep on keeping on.
He made a bad decision.
But he might have been behind both Cade and JJ last year. Probably better for him to play, even if at a losing No Col program.
Too bad he wasn't just a few years older. He would have been given a $5M "NIL" signing bonus to go somewhere. It will be interesting to see which big NIL deal turns out to be the biggest bust.
I think you mean a few years younger. If older, he still would have missed out on NIL.
Yeah, good catch. Math is hard.
username checks out
November 11th, 2022 at 10:41 AM ^
Did he? He went to go play for his dad, who is the head coach at Northern Colorado, probably knowing that he'd get the starting job.
I don't know he gets to play as much anywhere else. So in terms of getting on the field it might actually have been the right play.
Theory: Harbaugh's lack of elite teams at UM is largely due to bad QB luck.
2015: An Iowa transfer who doesn't transfer until the summer finishes the season very strong.
2016: Harbaugh starts a generic 3* and misses the playoffs because the generic 3* snapped his collarbone and there was no backup due to recruiting malpractice at the end of the Hoke era.
2017: Everyone gets injured and O'Korn turns out to be very, very bad.
2018: Patterson turns in a solid season, but he permanently has the jitters because he constantly ran for his life at Ole Miss (the Devin Gardner).
2019: Patterson gets injured. The backup options (see OP) are not good at football.
2020: The starter is a practice superstar who is terrible when the lights turn on. Two 4* QBs in a row turned out to be bad. They transferred and were still bad under different coaches.
2021: We go to the playoffs with a steady and consistent quarterback who doesn't do anything spectacular. The backup shows flashes of brilliance.
He didn't inherit a great situation and there was definitely some bad luck, but Harbaugh evaluated Peters, McCaffrey, and Milton as recruits and chose them. Those were all misses to some degree. I wouldn't subtract many points for O'Korn, as he needed some depth (after eyeballing Morris and Malzone and, probably, passing). Patterson was worth a swing, too, and was the best of the bunch.
While it is true that these guys didn’t pan out Harbaugh does have an eye for talented QBs. He wanted Josh Rosen, Jarrett Stidham, and CJ Stroud (among others) very badly. It just didn’t go our way. If any of those guys chose Michigan things look different. There is the identification part and the commitment part. Securing top flight QBs is difficult each and every recruiting season. Cade and JJ seem like obvious wins.
Cade and JJ seem like obvious wins.
McNamara was 3rd in passer rating in B1G play last season, which is fine. But Patterson was 2nd and 4th in his two years. Speight was 2nd; Rudock was 3rd. So, it was the same caliber of performance that Harbaugh has gotten most of his time here. (In fact, McNamara’s B1G rating was lower than both of Patterson’s and Rudock’s.)
But the ranking of a QB with the passer ratings depends on who the other QBs in the league are as well as the quality of defeneses faced.
For instance, Speight didn't play against as strong of a B1G as McNamara did last year and there certainly wasn't a Stroud-level QB around either.
As we can see from Carr and Dante Moore, it appears that Harbaugh is just a bad QB recruiter.
Carr didn't want to go to Michigan, and Dante wanted to go somewhere that offered the biggest bag. I don't blame either kid for this, and don't blame Harbaugh for the kids' priorities not lining up with what Michigan had to offer.
Not sure if you've forgot, but we do have a 5-star sophomore QB on the roster that Harbagh did recruit, so I'm not sure if he's all that bad of a QB recruiter?
I’ve always thought this but it’s very easy to counter with “that’s Harbaugh’s fault”
It's Harbaugh's fault that Speight got injured two years in a row and Hoke left him with no one else that was plausible?
Cade MacNamara is the only QB who has started a football game under Jim Harbaugh who didn’t either transfer in or transfer out… yet. This is the nature of the QB beast in 2022.
Why does it matter if someone transferred in? Is LSU's National Championship somehow tainted because Joe Burrows originally committed to Ohio State?
This is a pretty cool fact.
I agree, that's the reality of the business right now.
That is a great summary of sad state of our QB situation for 7 years. A lot of bad luck and some risky developmental prospects and injuries at the bad times. Yet, we were this close to beating OSU twice.
The one year where we had two QBs with no serious injury, we went on to beat OSU convincingly. Harbaugh must be truly worried about protecting his QBs and not run them that often until OSU game.
7 years??? Our sad QB state starts after John Navarre...
Perhaps you're not old enough to know that John Navarre had lots of detractors too at the time! Even though the team did pretty well during his tenure, and he was very good in retrospect.
I will never forget the hottest M game I have ever attended, watching Navarre at UCLA in the third game of that season which was unfortunately lost. Over 100 deg after the game was over and my wife stayed in the car with A/C on during the entire game. (Hopefully, future B1G schedules will have conference games there after September is over!)
*before John Navarre
Is Henne just chopped liver around here?
He did get hurt at a couple inopportune times, if we're talking "bad luck" (plus he got thrust in as a Freshman due to injury too).
I'm trying to remember how badly injured Patterson was in 2019. I do remember the first several games were NOT pretty. But that was a whole team issue, not just the QB.
What concerns me is the rare instances where we had a QB start a second season (Patterson and Speight) there was very noticeable drop-off. Speight in particular, before his season ending injury, was nothing like the year before. Remember the two pick sixes in one minute against Florida and him missing the wide open receivers? We won 33-17 but that was a game we SHOULD have won 52-17.
I believe Patterson was hurt on the very first offensive play of the season in 2019. He was banged up from then on.
It was an oblique injury. Seems like that led to tbe fake reads becoming part of the offense
I want to believe that fake reads must now a staple of every Michigan offense.
Those second seasons for starting QBs were certainly strange in their regression. Not coincidentally, they both featured new OCs, Pep and Gattis. I seem to remember Wilton was vibes very well with Jedd Fisch and less so with Pep.
I personally did not like the offense under Pep. The route combinations seemed to take a while to develop and the receivers didn’t seem to get open. 2017 also featured super young receivers. The run game seemed to be less diverse too.
The initial issues with Gattis were well documented around these parts.
I'll admit at the time not understanding how Milton beat him out because (in my eyes) it would have meant Milton made just a spectacular improvement from the guy we saw in spot duty the season before. What I hadn't really expected was that McCaffrey had apparently regressed significantly from the semi-competent player he looked while spotting Patterson.
I am surprised he struggled this much at the FCS level (Northern Colorado was quite bad before his dad showed up so my guess is his struggles aren't completely due to the QB), but sometimes that happens. I wish no ill will to him but seems UM has a much better QB situation than we all thought they'd be in 2 years ago.
He prolly should’ve gone to a top FCS team or a MAC type team. Difficult to say if he would’ve done well. Similar to what you said, if the team sucks, it may not matter if the team adds one good player.
Yeah, it's difficult to tell how good or bad a guy is when the team around him isn't particularly good (and to be fair, his skill position players could be suffering if he's playing poorly so the struggles go both ways), but it's weird that both him and his brother Luke have bounced around a ton and have largely struggled the past couple of years regardless of where they landed. I mean, Luke is apparently switching from QB to WR at Rice after not being able to earn much playing time there.
There are current D3 QBs who could start at Rice. It's arguably the worst QB situation in FBS football right now. So if Luke can't start there he's not an FBS QB.
I will state in Dylan's defense that if Harbaugh had told him Milton is the starter, I would have transferred also. It was an epic misevaluation and it makes sense that it would completely sour, as it did this board in 2020, his opinion of him as both a QB coach and a head coach.
It's an epic misevaluation that Tennessee also made, starting Milton in front of Hendon Hooker. Which is also mystifying, since Hooker wound up finishing third in NCAA passing efficiency, just below CJ Stroud and just above Stetson Bennett.
Seeing it happen twice leads me to suspect that it's something about Milton. I suspect he just looks a hell of a lot better in practice than he does in the field.
Chicks dig the long ball.