shea patterson

Will JJ McCarthy... BECOME SHEA PATTERSON? [Bryan Fuller]

Yesterday I answered a number of your burning questions for our summer mailbag, but there were enough good questions and enough long answers to break this into two pieces. Today we tackle the remaining questions I liked, starting with good old fashioned QB PARANOIA: 

 

Is there any reason to fear (sorry for being paranoid) JJ regresses like prior QBs in year 2 starting under Harbaugh given recent history? (-yoyo)

This question has been in the back of my head for some time, so let's take a look at the evidence about QB "regression" under Harbaugh. Harbaugh has had the following QBs return for a second year at the helm of the offense during his time at Michigan: Speight 2017, Patterson 2019, McNamara 2022 (Cade doesn't count as a returner for 2021 because he obviously didn't play enough in 2020). That's an extremely short list to begin with. You always have to be careful with concluding that something is a pattern based on the evidence when the sample size of evidence isn't large, but let's break it down based on our three player sample size. 

Speight in 2017 was definitely a case of regression, if we're comparing him to his pre-injury 2016 self. But I'm not sure how much regression there was compared to the post-injury 2016 Speight, who was also not particularly spectacular. He threw two pick sixes against Florida to start 2017, okay, well let me tell you about some interceptions he threw against Ohio State in 2016 (*ducks*). For me the story of Wilton Speight's career was the injury and how much it changed him. Before the '16 Iowa game, Speight had an average passer rating of 158.0 in the 2016 season. From Iowa through the Orange Bowl, his rating was 97.6. In 2017 up until his second injury against Purdue, Speight had an average rating of 121.9. He wasn't the same player he'd been in early 2016, but 2017 looks like a mere extension of late 2016. Does that qualify as "regression" overall? I'm not so sure. 

With Shea, I would say that his 2019 year was worse than 2018, though perhaps not dramatically so. His Y/A and TD/INT ratios were nearly identical, but a lower completion percentage. Shea was a bit worse in '19, but it felt so much worse because we'd been expecting significant improvement. He didn't make a leap, he instead got a little bit worse. Again, perhaps not massive "regression" but definitely not good either. Finally, with Cade in 2022, it's a very small amount of tape to go off of because McNamara was only playing parts of the first couple games before getting injured. He wasn't very good, but it's not like he'd been a worldbeater previously, and again, we're talking about 25 total throws that Cade attempted before injury. Not a whole lot to speak of and I think the best way to phrase this example is "incomplete" due to insufficient evidence. 

So what are we left with? One case of mild regression and two players who were not great, with injury mixed in and who didn't make it out of September of that next season healthy. If anything, this review of the examples should make you more terrified about an injury to JJ than regression, because that is anecdotally what tends to happen more often. But as for "regression" itself, I don't know. People can be as paranoid as they want, but I tend to think that the Shea regression was due to questionable work ethic (the infamous golfing remark) than something fundamentally wrong with the coaching. JJ on the other hand seems dedicated and a hard-worker. He's also younger than Shea, 20 during his returning starter season vs. 22 for Patterson, which perhaps means there's more physical upside to tap into that could mitigate any potential regression. I guess the long way of looking at this is it's a possibility but I wouldn't rate it as a super high one and using the past as a guaranteed roadmap for the future is only so useful with only three examples to go off of. 

[AFTER THE JUMP: deep threats, hot dogs, bowl games, and non-revenue sports]

three for three [Patrick Barron]

This Week's Obsession:

Ten Michigan players were drafted and everyone's angry about it. Where do you fall on the "everything is fine" vs "panic and run around screaming" continuum?

Ace: Should we explain why people are angry? I’ve stayed off the internet this weekend and had no idea this was a thing.

David: Yeah, I missed why everyone is angry, too.

Brian: There's a combination of things.

  1. Josh Uche went in the second round and Michigan took heat for his low snap counts
  2. Michigan had the same number of draft picks as OSU and got nuked for the second consecutive year
  3. Bleed-over recruiting anger because the first round was 24 four or five star players and M hasn't recruited a four star defender.

Seth: Without looking I'm going to guess the responses to today's hello post for a 3-star cornerback from one of the biggest schools in the country will tell you all you need to know about the current fan zeitgeist.

Brian: So this weekend was a resurgence of the fanbase schism. Fun! But also what else we gonna talk about.

Ace: Ah. So the draft bit I think is most worth pointing out in this context is that, despite Michigan getting ten players off the board, Shea Patterson very much wasn’t one of them.

David: That's a very big point...I don't even think he signed a FA deal, yet?

Ace: He has not.

Brian:

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┻┳| •.•)  maybe the charting guy was

┳┻|⊂ノ     right about patterson

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Seth: Neither was Lavert Hill for whatever that's worth. This doesn't so much apply to Shea, but sometimes there's no accounting for NFL taste.

Ace: Hill got snatched up within hours (possibly minutes?) of the draft ending. Also: quarterback is a very important position.

David: Yeah, McKeon signed right after well...so, 12/13 guys had an NFL team by Saturday night.

Brian: Princeton's QB signed with Cleveland.

[Hit THE JUMP for, eventually, a rundown on where Michigan's players went in the draft, plus more of this.]

alas [Bryan Fuller]

Sponsor Note. Let's say you've cloned a hundred duck-sized horses and want people to fight them. That sounds like something with a lot of legal complications. Is cloning… within the city… that ain't legal either? What happens if someone gets hurt? When someone gets hurt, more like it. It's a tough balance between the incredible appeal of finding out whether you can beat 100 duck-sized horses in a fight and the potential to be sued into the ground.

Well, have I got the guy for you.

hoeglaw_thumb[1]

Richard Hoeg knows this stuff, backwards and forwards. He's a business lawyer from the law factory who can tell you whether or not you should proceed with your idea. (Even if he says no you clearly should.) He'll get you set up with a legal framework to cope with the inevitable disasters if you decide to proceed (which you clearly will). And insofar as anyone can be protected from the law while running a business that is essentially cockfighting between miniaturized charismatic megafauna and humans, you will be.

What other lawyer can say that?

SNACKS! Sometimes there's a thing that gets put in your twitter feed 20 times and every time you click on it. This is one of those things:

Jackson State was super efficient at feeding Snacks shots; he got four up in his two minutes. This led to a Kenpom glitch: Snacks finishes his career with 82% usage and, uh, took 137% of JSU shots when he was on the floor?

image

A legendary Kenpom page.

You may remember Snacks from the quintessential Tacko Fall reaction video:

Someone's gotta hire the play by play guy. Anyone who can exclaim "SNACKS" like that needs to be doing the NCAA tournament.

[After THE JUMP: distressing times at Arkansas-Pine Bluff.]

did Ronnie Bell have the worst hands in the country? 

it was not, after all, in the face

as it turns out, alabama is quite good

you can capitalize your team nickname only if you retcon it into an acronym

ah crap now i have hope 

just when i think i'm out they pull me back in

keep doing that, please

speed in space is here 

just when you think you've got Mark Dantonio he brings out the strawberries 

it's over