Counterpoint: he has more reps than anyone else in the draft at calling out NFL style (most run) plays with motion, route trees, protection schemes, etc., from a huddle.
That’s worth a LOT. Completely agree that he’s nowhere near his ceiling as a passer. But as the head of a pro-level offense? More experience than anyone.
Remember that sports journalists’ top priority is NOT to make accurate predictions nor assessments: their top priority is to drive clicks. They’ll hype or drag anyone in pursuit of their precious clicks.
This isn’t limited to JJ McCarthy: every so often you come across an article which says that Caleb Williams - the first pickest of first picks that ever got picked first - doesn’t deserve to go first overall.
There was a HUGE first-mover advantage to this, and though I won’t be the least bit surprised when Michigan is the LAST school to implement this, I AM shocked that Georgia and Alabama and Texas didn’t get there first
the tattered remains of Wilton Speight held together by duct tape…and then he got injured AGAIN
PTSD Brandon Peters…who then got injured AGAIN
John “literally the worst pass play you’ll ever see” O’Korn
so there are 3 QBs who could neither pass nor run effectively. Know how many passing TDs we got that year? 9!!!! (With 10 INTs)
Know how many rushing TDs we got from QBs in 2017? Zero.
QBs rushing yards? Negative 131!
The 2017 Harbaughffense was levels of suckitude that you don’t often see. 2014’s Hoke/Nuss ‘offense’ was better than 2017. We would have been better off running the triple option. Like, a LOT better.
How Pep Hamilton kept his job while Tim Drevno only had to be gently ushered out the door, I’ll never know. It’s an indication of how beloved Harbaugh was that neither 2017 (offense) nor 2020 (defense) got him fired.
I’m going to set aside the National Championship and the obvious Ohio State game rankings (2021, 2022, 2023 in that order).
So I have a dark horse candidate: 2015 Florida
Utter domination capping off a pretty confidence inspiring season. Made a team full of NFL talent quit. Jehu Chesson burning NFL corners. Harbaugh kept the foot on the gas the whole game (maybe for the last time in his Michigan career???)
Second choice: 2019 Notre Dame
Wiping the floor with the Irish will never be a bad thing
The thing that pisses me off is that now there’s no way this whole shitshow won’t happen again.
Every single step of the way, the people who set up this smear campaign got exactly what they wanted. And now, if they had a second bullet in the chamber, they’ll fire it this season. It’s already going to be national news during the transfer window to poison recruiting, and don’t forget that “troll Michigan” is a tried and true business model for slow news days.
Let’s say the first 3 selections are Williams, Daniels, and Maye.
That’s 3 QBs who are going to be YOLO’d onto the field immediately, and if they’re very very lucky, will not get the David Carr treatment behind iffy offensive lines. The teams at the top of the draft are usually very much in flux, with coaches and/or GMs feeling their seats getting warm.
If you were McCarthy, would you even WANT to be a Top 5 pick? Maybe if someone trades up for him.
Did you have a 3 martini lunch? That’s the only way I can figure you typing up this post, thinking “yep, this is what the world needs”, and pressing Submit
God that’s a funny memory. Almost as funny as watching his Heisman campaign go up in flames as he picked turf out of his helmet and cried on the sidelines.
I’m not usually a vindictive man, but I remember watching Brady Quinn’s pained expression, as he slid further and further down the first round, with something approaching glee.
Ok, so I’m vindictive af. Started hating Quinn in 2006 and haven’t found any reason to stop.
I used to see this all the time. People often define themselves by their careers, and when they retire they sorta lose a part of themselves.
Imagine if your sense of self was “the best QB in history”; you retire…now what? Tom Brady famously went above and beyond to be able to play football for as long as he did. Now he’s got a whoooooole lotta time for thinking.
Some people just can’t be alone with their own thoughts. Especially if those thoughts involve the glory days of your playing career, and doubly so if you still have that chip on your shoulder and see the dogshit QB play that some teams have gotten recently.
It’s a whole lot easier to accept that your time has passed when you see the kids outperforming anything you’re capable of; a lot less easy when the kids are out there embarrassing themselves.
Retirement is complicated. You can’t just turn off a switch that’s defined who you are for a couple decades. That’s why I always tell people that you need to retire TO something, not FROM something.
Not an expert on hockey, but whenever something doesn’t make a ton of sense, the reason is usually “history”. It shouldn’t be a surprise that massive organizations are usually just a pile of bandaids behind the scenes.
Whenever an organization expands or acquires a new entity, the top priority is almost always “hold the existing business harmless”; expansion teams get worse deals, or new conferences, or there are grandfathering rules applied. These things are usually meant to be temporary, but there’s no money in backend streamlining like there is in expansion/acquisition/re-negotiation, so the “hold existing business harmless” rules just keep stacking up.
Sorry, I’m feeling a little frustrated with my own company this morning.
Shoutout to Alex G and “Miracles”, great song. I’m also a huge fan of Wolf Alice’s cover of “Bobby”
As for defining “success” on offense, I DO like the idea of an Orji legs-based offense as long as it does 3 big things:
1) keep running the offense even with the backups. My biggest gripe with the Harbaughffense has long been “if you don’t practice scoring a lot when you CAN, you won’t be able to score a lot when you MUST.” We won’t always have the best defense in the nation.
2) what Brian and Seth call “college crappe.” Scheme some cheap touchdowns. Chuck it up to the guys who win matchups. Not every pass play needs to be a long-developing NFL route tree that relies on every single person perfectly executing their assignments. Not every run play needs to be set up perfectly with 6+ perfectly executed blocks.
3) steal plays from other offenses, Ernie Adams style
Reminder that an experienced defense is EXPECTED to kick the offense’s ass at this point in the process. I’d be super duper concerned if we heard that the offense was handling the defense.
My fingers are crossed for Donovan Edwards. His problem isn’t ability: we saw time and time again that he’s one cut away from the endzone basically every snap
His problem IS recognizing what’s going on in front of him; we saw him biff blitz pickup after blitz pickup, and tbh even one of his touchdown runs in the Championship was because he missed the hole, which drew the Wash LB to help tackle, then Edwards was able to bounce and just outrun everyone.
If he can process the game the way that Corum could process the game, he’s in for a special season.
If we have both a RB1 and QB1 who don’t quite have a grasp on the offense…we’re in for a bad time.
“We don’t have the funding for a new hire” is *timeless* corporate speak for “I don’t believe you when you say we need this”
I’ve heard that many many times in my career, and I’ve stopped counting the money my companies have lost (or the headaches caused by regulatory complaints) by not listening to me.
It’s always interesting to me how many arguments against equality or justice boil down to “but think of the money we could continue to make by NOT having equal rights!”
You wouldn’t believe the number of times I’ve been in closed-door meetings and heard some variant of “you CANNOT force us to treat our workforce as employees!”
I also low-key admire the people who are willing to take their lumps. Not in an “I stand by this” way, but in a “yeah I screwed up go ahead I deserve it” way.
Every year my uncle brings his herd back down to about 20 head. That means loading up all the extra calves and cows and steer for auction.
Oh, but one steer always stays behind. He will self-select by being the biggest asshole during the loadup process. This steer lives a good life for a couple more months: extra food, extra field time, generally being left alone.
I’m going to be very interested in the details of his contract. There’s GOTTA be a lot of incentives baked in, right?
I can’t believe that we underbid someone by that much. I CAN believe that we did a low guaranteed-high incentive contract. Warde did that with Harbaugh in 2020.
Realignment is so shortsighted…but I guess if your bonus is based on short-term dollar value delivery, you gotta get paid…
Nobody is trying to innovate. The current market is based on the strategy of “get as big as you can and then leverage your size to get a larger guaranteed share of the existing revenue pool.”
It’s beggar-thy-neighbor economics in fancy clothing, and I hate it. I deal with this bullshit every single day at work, and while you can debate M&A policies when they decrease admin costs and increase data synergies and reduce the number of people who get lost in inter-company handoffs, college football isn’t doing any of that. It’s straight up bullying tactics.
Draft breakdown after draft breakdown has concluded that this guy’s ceiling is in the stratosphere… as long as he gets some solid coaching to clean up his fundamentals. I’ve seen people present his footwork as somewhere between “awful” and “barely workable”. I’ve seen his ability to read a defense as anything from “bad” to “ok I guess”.
Seems like the Bears are just going to YOLO him onto the field, and he’s going to have to learn an entire playbook at the same time as he’s learning the finer points of NFL quarterbacking.
QBs can be broken. Between running for his life and not understanding what defenses are doing and trying to remember to plant his back foot at just the right moment…dude, it took Patrick f’ing Mahomes a year behind Alex Smith to become Patrick f’ing Mahomes.
That was what I wrote in Iowatch that week: I posited that it was absolutely an intentional INT from Deacon Hill, because they knew that Nebraska’s passing offense with Chubba Purdy was almost sure to give them the ball right back.
Sure enough, Purdy threw the ball straight to an Iowa LB. One run later, they kicked the game winning field goal to win the Corn Rows Trophy (a trophy I just made up but should absolutely be real)
Yes. Entire halves of football were more about ending the game quicker than scoring points. But considering that our best PPD and SP+ year was the year we won the national championship, I’d say that it demonstrates how important it is to, you know, score.
Also, there’s an enduring gripe that I have with Harbaugh: if you don’t practice scoring a lot when you CAN, you won’t be able to score a lot when you MUST. There’s been at least one game every single year where I was screaming at the TV “you don’t have all day to make up this deficit!”
I swear to god, sometimes it seemed like Harbaugh thought games were 8 quarters long, that we ALWAYS had the #1 defense in the nation, and that ANY scoring gap could be made up in the final 30 seconds of the game.
Would love to see him back here for one last shot.
USC’s offense was - to my relatively uninformed eyes - a “just win your matchup” offense predicated on full Death From Above concepts. This led to some pretty scoring plays.
There’s two concerns here: 1) if he was capable of being the jump ball guy, you’d think he’d have been playing a lot, and 2) has he practiced complex route concepts? Michigan’s recent offensive schemes don’t require that your receivers be amazing, but you’re asked to do some hard stuff, including blocking some of the best LBs and DEs in the country…
Serious answer 1: Warde has demonstrated that he will make decisions when he has no other option left, when the situation cannot be dragged out any further.
Serious answer 2: Firing someone takes more than 48 hours. And it takes even longer if you’re trying to negotiate a face-saving “please resign” deal. There’s buyouts. Mediation. Calling in favors. Legal reviews. PR. And the all-important aspect of “who’s on our short list for replacement, and how do we keep our players here while we lock someone down?”
My hope is that we change our style. If we try to run the 2022-2023 offense without JJ, Corum, and a dozen upperclassmen NFL-level OL…we’re gonna have a bad time.
Many many other teams seem to be able to scheme an offense around players’ strengths. Nebraska ran the triple option, ffs. This is going to be a good year to gauge how adaptable Sherrone Moore is.
Great analysis. A good QB makes the entire offense better, not just the passing game.
The most interesting thing to me is HOW each of these QBs arrived at their stats. Very different styles represented. Penix is the pocket passer-iest pocket passer who ever passed from the pocket - if I’m a GM, I’m comping him to Stroud.
JJ was the field general for the most complex running scheme in the country. The Alabama game in particular was PhD-level football, and he had to call all of it. And look at the results: an effective offense. There were zero gimmicks used at Michigan this year, we earned every point.
Recent Comments
Counterpoint: he has more reps than anyone else in the draft at calling out NFL style (most run) plays with motion, route trees, protection schemes, etc., from a huddle.
That’s worth a LOT. Completely agree that he’s nowhere near his ceiling as a passer. But as the head of a pro-level offense? More experience than anyone.
Michigan-Alabama was PhD-level football.
Remember that sports journalists’ top priority is NOT to make accurate predictions nor assessments: their top priority is to drive clicks. They’ll hype or drag anyone in pursuit of their precious clicks.
This isn’t limited to JJ McCarthy: every so often you come across an article which says that Caleb Williams - the first pickest of first picks that ever got picked first - doesn’t deserve to go first overall.
Partially. Admissions ruled that only 66% of their coaching experience could transfer to Michigan
There was a HUGE first-mover advantage to this, and though I won’t be the least bit surprised when Michigan is the LAST school to implement this, I AM shocked that Georgia and Alabama and Texas didn’t get there first
Fair shout to him, that’s a solid apology.
Not even close to 2017.
In 2017, our trio of QBs was:
so there are 3 QBs who could neither pass nor run effectively. Know how many passing TDs we got that year? 9!!!! (With 10 INTs)
Know how many rushing TDs we got from QBs in 2017? Zero.
QBs rushing yards? Negative 131!
The 2017 Harbaughffense was levels of suckitude that you don’t often see. 2014’s Hoke/Nuss ‘offense’ was better than 2017. We would have been better off running the triple option. Like, a LOT better.
How Pep Hamilton kept his job while Tim Drevno only had to be gently ushered out the door, I’ll never know. It’s an indication of how beloved Harbaugh was that neither 2017 (offense) nor 2020 (defense) got him fired.
+1 Aladdin references!
I’m going to set aside the National Championship and the obvious Ohio State game rankings (2021, 2022, 2023 in that order).
So I have a dark horse candidate: 2015 Florida
Utter domination capping off a pretty confidence inspiring season. Made a team full of NFL talent quit. Jehu Chesson burning NFL corners. Harbaugh kept the foot on the gas the whole game (maybe for the last time in his Michigan career???)
Second choice: 2019 Notre Dame
Wiping the floor with the Irish will never be a bad thing
The thing that pisses me off is that now there’s no way this whole shitshow won’t happen again.
Every single step of the way, the people who set up this smear campaign got exactly what they wanted. And now, if they had a second bullet in the chamber, they’ll fire it this season. It’s already going to be national news during the transfer window to poison recruiting, and don’t forget that “troll Michigan” is a tried and true business model for slow news days.
Let’s say the first 3 selections are Williams, Daniels, and Maye.
That’s 3 QBs who are going to be YOLO’d onto the field immediately, and if they’re very very lucky, will not get the David Carr treatment behind iffy offensive lines. The teams at the top of the draft are usually very much in flux, with coaches and/or GMs feeling their seats getting warm.
If you were McCarthy, would you even WANT to be a Top 5 pick? Maybe if someone trades up for him.
Did you have a 3 martini lunch? That’s the only way I can figure you typing up this post, thinking “yep, this is what the world needs”, and pressing Submit
God that’s a funny memory. Almost as funny as watching his Heisman campaign go up in flames as he picked turf out of his helmet and cried on the sidelines.
Hang on, I gotta rewatch those game highlights.
I’m not usually a vindictive man, but I remember watching Brady Quinn’s pained expression, as he slid further and further down the first round, with something approaching glee.
Ok, so I’m vindictive af. Started hating Quinn in 2006 and haven’t found any reason to stop.
I used to see this all the time. People often define themselves by their careers, and when they retire they sorta lose a part of themselves.
Imagine if your sense of self was “the best QB in history”; you retire…now what? Tom Brady famously went above and beyond to be able to play football for as long as he did. Now he’s got a whoooooole lotta time for thinking.
Some people just can’t be alone with their own thoughts. Especially if those thoughts involve the glory days of your playing career, and doubly so if you still have that chip on your shoulder and see the dogshit QB play that some teams have gotten recently.
It’s a whole lot easier to accept that your time has passed when you see the kids outperforming anything you’re capable of; a lot less easy when the kids are out there embarrassing themselves.
Retirement is complicated. You can’t just turn off a switch that’s defined who you are for a couple decades. That’s why I always tell people that you need to retire TO something, not FROM something.
This is a great Diary series!
Not a Jew
I guess I’m a product of my times, but seeing RB #2 at pick #77 is still wild to me.
Pulp >>>>>>> no pulp
Your question spurred me to Google exactly what’s going on with Sparty these days re: Tuck.
So. Tuck wants his full $80M
Ms. Tracy is suing MSU for $75M
Jonathan Smith has a $53M contract (over 7 years)
Assistant coaches collectively make $11M/year
And I would bet every penny of the above that Engler and his cronies embezzled millions of dollars that we don’t even know about yet.
That’s debatable
I live for fun-and-mostly-useless info!
Considering who our RB coach is, I’d be amazed if there WASN’T at least a phone call on the topic.
Not an expert on hockey, but whenever something doesn’t make a ton of sense, the reason is usually “history”. It shouldn’t be a surprise that massive organizations are usually just a pile of bandaids behind the scenes.
Whenever an organization expands or acquires a new entity, the top priority is almost always “hold the existing business harmless”; expansion teams get worse deals, or new conferences, or there are grandfathering rules applied. These things are usually meant to be temporary, but there’s no money in backend streamlining like there is in expansion/acquisition/re-negotiation, so the “hold existing business harmless” rules just keep stacking up.
Sorry, I’m feeling a little frustrated with my own company this morning.
Shoutout to Alex G and “Miracles”, great song. I’m also a huge fan of Wolf Alice’s cover of “Bobby”
As for defining “success” on offense, I DO like the idea of an Orji legs-based offense as long as it does 3 big things:
1) keep running the offense even with the backups. My biggest gripe with the Harbaughffense has long been “if you don’t practice scoring a lot when you CAN, you won’t be able to score a lot when you MUST.” We won’t always have the best defense in the nation.
2) what Brian and Seth call “college crappe.” Scheme some cheap touchdowns. Chuck it up to the guys who win matchups. Not every pass play needs to be a long-developing NFL route tree that relies on every single person perfectly executing their assignments. Not every run play needs to be set up perfectly with 6+ perfectly executed blocks.
3) steal plays from other offenses, Ernie Adams style
Reminder that an experienced defense is EXPECTED to kick the offense’s ass at this point in the process. I’d be super duper concerned if we heard that the offense was handling the defense.
My fingers are crossed for Donovan Edwards. His problem isn’t ability: we saw time and time again that he’s one cut away from the endzone basically every snap
His problem IS recognizing what’s going on in front of him; we saw him biff blitz pickup after blitz pickup, and tbh even one of his touchdown runs in the Championship was because he missed the hole, which drew the Wash LB to help tackle, then Edwards was able to bounce and just outrun everyone.
If he can process the game the way that Corum could process the game, he’s in for a special season.
If we have both a RB1 and QB1 who don’t quite have a grasp on the offense…we’re in for a bad time.
“We don’t have the funding for a new hire” is *timeless* corporate speak for “I don’t believe you when you say we need this”
I’ve heard that many many times in my career, and I’ve stopped counting the money my companies have lost (or the headaches caused by regulatory complaints) by not listening to me.
I really need Mason to stick on the roster and do something noteworthy this season. The world needs a Ben Mason press conference.
Olivia Olson and Syla Swords sound like Adam Sandler movie main characters/love interests
man loved himself some alliterative names
I have spent many moons searching for a good polo. Any suggestions?
”+1 Blink182” is not an award often given out. Congrats sir
Same way there’s about 3 “Game of the Century” games every season
oh, and as a fan of Princess Bride, that pic irks me to no end. It gets the quote wrong!
”You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
https://youtu.be/dTRKCXC0JFg?si=m97ZdiV-XKnVlXcl
edit: thx!
It’s always interesting to me how many arguments against equality or justice boil down to “but think of the money we could continue to make by NOT having equal rights!”
You wouldn’t believe the number of times I’ve been in closed-door meetings and heard some variant of “you CANNOT force us to treat our workforce as employees!”
Marvin Harrison Jr. is a no-brainer.
The Harbaugh Answer is probably Brock Bowers.
I actually wonder if the Chargers would trade back in the first round and grab Malik Nabers, or even further back and grab Rome Odunze
I also low-key admire the people who are willing to take their lumps. Not in an “I stand by this” way, but in a “yeah I screwed up go ahead I deserve it” way.
Every year my uncle brings his herd back down to about 20 head. That means loading up all the extra calves and cows and steer for auction.
Oh, but one steer always stays behind. He will self-select by being the biggest asshole during the loadup process. This steer lives a good life for a couple more months: extra food, extra field time, generally being left alone.
Then he becomes steak. Mmm steak.
Tony Pettiti is on the phone with his lawyers trying to suspend Harbaugh right now
I’m going to be very interested in the details of his contract. There’s GOTTA be a lot of incentives baked in, right?
I can’t believe that we underbid someone by that much. I CAN believe that we did a low guaranteed-high incentive contract. Warde did that with Harbaugh in 2020.
Realignment is so shortsighted…but I guess if your bonus is based on short-term dollar value delivery, you gotta get paid…
Nobody is trying to innovate. The current market is based on the strategy of “get as big as you can and then leverage your size to get a larger guaranteed share of the existing revenue pool.”
It’s beggar-thy-neighbor economics in fancy clothing, and I hate it. I deal with this bullshit every single day at work, and while you can debate M&A policies when they decrease admin costs and increase data synergies and reduce the number of people who get lost in inter-company handoffs, college football isn’t doing any of that. It’s straight up bullying tactics.
“Why should a little thing like wins/losses take away from my ability to receive a championship?!”
I feel bad for Caleb Williams.
Draft breakdown after draft breakdown has concluded that this guy’s ceiling is in the stratosphere… as long as he gets some solid coaching to clean up his fundamentals. I’ve seen people present his footwork as somewhere between “awful” and “barely workable”. I’ve seen his ability to read a defense as anything from “bad” to “ok I guess”.
Seems like the Bears are just going to YOLO him onto the field, and he’s going to have to learn an entire playbook at the same time as he’s learning the finer points of NFL quarterbacking.
QBs can be broken. Between running for his life and not understanding what defenses are doing and trying to remember to plant his back foot at just the right moment…dude, it took Patrick f’ing Mahomes a year behind Alex Smith to become Patrick f’ing Mahomes.
That was what I wrote in Iowatch that week: I posited that it was absolutely an intentional INT from Deacon Hill, because they knew that Nebraska’s passing offense with Chubba Purdy was almost sure to give them the ball right back.
Sure enough, Purdy threw the ball straight to an Iowa LB. One run later, they kicked the game winning field goal to win the Corn Rows Trophy (a trophy I just made up but should absolutely be real)
Yes. Entire halves of football were more about ending the game quicker than scoring points. But considering that our best PPD and SP+ year was the year we won the national championship, I’d say that it demonstrates how important it is to, you know, score.
Also, there’s an enduring gripe that I have with Harbaugh: if you don’t practice scoring a lot when you CAN, you won’t be able to score a lot when you MUST. There’s been at least one game every single year where I was screaming at the TV “you don’t have all day to make up this deficit!”
I swear to god, sometimes it seemed like Harbaugh thought games were 8 quarters long, that we ALWAYS had the #1 defense in the nation, and that ANY scoring gap could be made up in the final 30 seconds of the game.
My wife and I are avoiding downtown like the plague. St. Paddy’s day in Chicago is amateur hour at its finest
Would love to see him back here for one last shot.
USC’s offense was - to my relatively uninformed eyes - a “just win your matchup” offense predicated on full Death From Above concepts. This led to some pretty scoring plays.
There’s two concerns here: 1) if he was capable of being the jump ball guy, you’d think he’d have been playing a lot, and 2) has he practiced complex route concepts? Michigan’s recent offensive schemes don’t require that your receivers be amazing, but you’re asked to do some hard stuff, including blocking some of the best LBs and DEs in the country…
…
See ‘Serious Answer 1’
Warde gonna Warde.
We all know, we were just told not to tell you.
Serious answer 1: Warde has demonstrated that he will make decisions when he has no other option left, when the situation cannot be dragged out any further.
Serious answer 2: Firing someone takes more than 48 hours. And it takes even longer if you’re trying to negotiate a face-saving “please resign” deal. There’s buyouts. Mediation. Calling in favors. Legal reviews. PR. And the all-important aspect of “who’s on our short list for replacement, and how do we keep our players here while we lock someone down?”
If that was a subtle dig at Juwan, I’m all for it lol
My hope is that we change our style. If we try to run the 2022-2023 offense without JJ, Corum, and a dozen upperclassmen NFL-level OL…we’re gonna have a bad time.
Many many other teams seem to be able to scheme an offense around players’ strengths. Nebraska ran the triple option, ffs. This is going to be a good year to gauge how adaptable Sherrone Moore is.
Great analysis. A good QB makes the entire offense better, not just the passing game.
The most interesting thing to me is HOW each of these QBs arrived at their stats. Very different styles represented. Penix is the pocket passer-iest pocket passer who ever passed from the pocket - if I’m a GM, I’m comping him to Stroud.
JJ was the field general for the most complex running scheme in the country. The Alabama game in particular was PhD-level football, and he had to call all of it. And look at the results: an effective offense. There were zero gimmicks used at Michigan this year, we earned every point.
I do this, and my wife duly rolls her eyes