Previously: Podcast 14.0A, 14.0B, 14.0C. The Story. 

QUARTERBACK: PARTY LIKE IT'S 1999

GRADE: 4.5

QUARTERBACK	Yr
Cade McNamara	Jr.*
JJ McCarthy	Fr.*
Davis Warren	Fr.*

Back at the tail end of the last century, Michigan had a quarterback controversy. There was a cerebral guy who didn't blow anyone away physically; there was a dual-threat guy who had all the potential in the world but was a bit younger and less proven. Tom Brady and Drew Henson split snaps for the bulk of the 1999 season as message boards rabbled about who should have the crown. A decision was only made late in the year; by the time Brady was entrusted with leading a stirring comeback against #6 Penn State in Happy Valley everyone knew who the man was, man.

Twenty-three years later we've got a remake in the works, except this time Michigan's coming off a championship. Cade McNamara led Michigan to a win over Ohio State and a Big Ten title and pretty much the entire fanbase wants to put him on the bench in favor of JJ McCarthy. "What have you done for me lately" doesn't quite cover it.

But… I mean… you know. It's not crazy. It's sufficiently sane that Harbaugh announced a slightly insane thing: McNamara will start the opener; McCarthy will start against Hawaii, and then they'll make a decision.

BRADY ANALOGUE

cade: remember this? everyone: no [Bryan Fuller]

Analogue, people. Please vacate Ann Arbor Torch & Pitchfork. Our cerebral game manager type without the electric athleticism is CADE MCNAMARA, you know, the starting quarterback for the Big Ten champion Michigan Wolverines. Everyone wants to pitch him overboard, naturally. And, I mean… ok, yeah. Pro Football Focus listed him 29th in their college-only QB projections, third in the league behind CJ Stroud and Aidan O'Connell. That's okay! It's definitely okay.

---------------------

It doesn't feel like enough to beat Ohio State, at Ohio State, without Hassan Haskins, and with a functional defensive system on the other side of the ball. The trajectory here could argue otherwise, though?

CADE MCNAMARA

	Good				Neutral			Bad					Ovr			Reads
Game	DO	CA	SCR		PR	MA		BA	TA	IN	BR		DSR	GRADE!		RPOs	ZRs
W. Michigan	3+	3(3)-						2			1		67%	+5		4/5	2/7
Washington	1	3(2)-			2	(1)			3	1(1)	2		40%	-8		5/5	4/9
NIU	2	7+ -			1	1							100%	+11		1/2	1/2
Rutgers	3+	5-			1	1				5xx	1		57%	+2.5		2/2	1/6
Wisconsin	6	13	1		1	2		1	1	4x	2x		71%	+10.5		2/3	1/2
Nebraska	3+	13(2)-			3	6		3	3	6	1x		55%	-1.5		1/3	2/2
Northwestern	2	11(5)+			2	2		1	3	4xx	1		59%	-1		5/7	5/8
Michigan St	9++	19(1)+ -	1		1	1		2	5	5	4		64%	+20.5		1/2	1/1
Indiana	4	8(1)	1		4				1	1	1		81%	+10		0/0	3/6
Penn State	4+	8+++(2)			2	4		3	3	3			57%	+0		0/0	0/1
Maryland	5	14++(1)	1			2		2	3	1	1		74%	+14.5		0/3	5/9
Ohio State	3	7++(2)	1		3	3			1	1	1x		79%	+14		3/3	-
Iowa	3++	7+(2)			2	4			2	2	1x		67%	+2		3/3	1/3
Georgia	3++	4(4)	1		3	1		2	5x	2	1x		44%	+3		0/2	1/1

That's not a full Rudockening but it's not that far away.

McNamara got a ton of time in high school and was the kind of guy who's got a QB coach by the time he's in middle school, and that paid off. Seth frequently talked about McNamara's ability to read the defense before the snap and get Michigan into good plays (or pick the best option when he had a passing down). There was no better example of this than Roman Wilson's skinny post touchdown against Penn State, when PSU's adjustment to Michigan's running game provided McNamara with the opportunity to see a guy playing cover one on a a hashmark—not down the middle of the field:

…if you scroll back up to the video you can see PSU was leaving their other safety on the hash mark. Gattis picked up on that and used it to score Michigan’s first touchdown. Here again you see Brisker, #1, walking down on our right, and #16 staying much higher on the field side. But #16 still has to play one-high, meaning he’s in the wrong spot to help in cover 1 if you send a fast Hawaiian down the seam.

Press man across the board on third and fifteen? No problem, back shoulder.

When the presnap alignment of the defense didn't give away the game, things were considerably rockier. One of the ongoing themes of Sam Webb's WTKA segments with Devin Gardner was Gardner (presumably) clutching his head in agony at the shots that were there but un-taken. Some quarterbacks will fling the ball into double coverage; McNamara almost did not attempt a bomb when the receiver was plausibly covered one-on-one. In part this was the nature of the receiving corps, what with the running by everyone, but Cornelius Johnson is a large leaping person and was almost never given a go-get-it ball.

The real shame of it was that when McNamara did unleash the dragon the results were close to great. Seth clipped a ton of dead-on bombs, zips down the seam, and in-stride shots:

McNamara wasn't perfect—Northwestern was oddly his nadir in this department—but what stands out in all these clips is how the catches are made. Nobody's laying out or high-pointing a ball that's way too short. All of them are bang on the money. The flip side of the hesitancy was that McNamara didn't get bailed out by Nico Collins mossing some guy. When he hits a guy it's in stride.

PFF had him fifth nationally in passer rating on throws of 20+ yards (which does not include the Andrel Anthony TD against MSU), and even though there's a bunch of YAC in there you can't say McNamara didn't earn it. He not only put it on guys running deep, he put it on them such that they could go run another 40 yards. The casual nature of this flea-flicker TD is a thing:

McNamara was able to put it on guys running flat out with a step or two on their defender and also ease into some of the most catchable deep balls this space has ever seen from a Michigan quarterback when the coverage was way off. This is also game managing.

As befits a game manager, McNamara's bad-thing-not-happen stuff was superior. He threw just two interceptions that were primarily his fault. There was the bad one against Ohio State, yes, and a similar play against Nebraska. Two "oof" picks in a season is amazing, and it looked like Nebraska jumped offsides on that play—McNamara may have thought he had a free shot. His other interceptions were either pinball deflections, absurdly uncalled pass interference, or miscommunication with his wide receiver.

He also contributed quite a bit to Michigan's national-best sack rate:

McNamara also short-circuited what I thought was Ohio State’s main gameplan for Michigan, which was to get pressure with exotic six-man pressures and cover his first read. McNamara remained cool, knew where his checkdowns were going to be, and hit them accurately.

 

One of the holes in our grading system is we don’t have a way to account for the quarterback in our protection metrics. Some QBs run themselves into trouble, some run out of clean pockets, and many stick to the script like they’re operating an insurance commercial not a college offense. On the above play Ohio State used the speed of their second level to create a surprise six-man pressure that overwhelmed the left side—even if Hayes comes off the LB and picks up one of those outside blitzers there’s one more guy than Michigan has a hat for. We got into a play earlier this year when McNamara took his first sack and I argued that he has to save himself on those.

Well, he saved himself. Those two blitzers never get home, because Cade comes off the three-man read on the left side he won’t have time for and gets the ball to a tight end with leverage. It sets up 3rd and short. The chains keep moving. Nobody remarks that Ohio State drew up a way to get two free blitzers versus an empty formation and didn’t get so much as a shot on the QB for it. I’ve beat the drum all year that McNamara is a brainy quarterback who does the reading before the snap to speed up his decisions after it. That makes him a very difficult guy to blitz—it’s one thing if you can cover his first read and he doesn’t know where to go from there; it’s not easy to fool him pre-snap but it can be done. It’s another thing entirely if he can flip from Read 1 to Read 4 because he knows if you’re blitzing from Y and Z you don’t have leverage in D.

Anyone who watched Shea Patterson's senior year knows that a QB can sack himself; McNamara never did that. His impulse to check down did have that upside. This was reflected in the numbers. He was PFF's highest-graded Big Ten passer—ahead of Stroud and O'Connell—against the blitz. When Seth crunched UFR data McNamara scored an impressive 68% on passing-down downfield success rate—and remember that we're not handing out CAs for five yard checkdowns on third and ten. He also had 22(!) plays on which we gave him a plus for dealing with pressure against just 14 plays on which we decided pressure prevented him from having a reasonable chance at doing anything. That ratio is nuts for a first year starter.

So you can call him a game manager but if you do you have to admit that he manages the dang game. Seth:

He checked into that, and makes 30 more checks a game that have probably borne out in the very good running game but no fan can or will be able to see on tape.

McNamara is also capable of altering throws based on what's in front of him. He does not have the biggest arm in the world but he makes up for it with a deft touch and an awareness of when to use it. Yeah, you could hammer this in before the linebacker gets his hand on it if you're Joe Milton, or you could just use parabolas to your advantage:

Michigan had a lot of touch passes in the playbook last year and they went extremely well. McNamara is able to complete these even under duress and from different arm angles:

He was excellent at getting balls over the hands of linebackers in zone coverage.

All this adds up to 7.9 YPA, 15 TDs, 6 interceptions, and 64% completions for his first year as a starter, and more or less his second in the program. That's exactly what Michigan needed last year: a steady hand to check into the right bulldozings and, when Michigan didn't score, provide long fields that gave the defensive ends time to consume the souls of their opposition. To, you know, manage the game.This season Michigan needs something more than that. Thus all the rabbling.

McNamara can get there. His reads got better as the season went along. His accuracy is high-end. His main issue is not seeing a large number of bombs he's excellent at throwing. That is fixable in film room, especially since McNamara has displayed good information processing in many other aspects of his game.

Just don't ask him to keep it.

ON THE GROUND, things did not go as well. It says something about something that Michigan converted a third and twelve in the Big Ten championship game by motioning Donovan Edwards out, leaving McNamara with a four man box against man two under. McNamara scored a 47% on Seth's charting of his post-snap mesh point decisions. On the podcast Seth characterized this as "no better than flipping a coin," but it felt worse than that. McNamara either had a pathological determination not to keep the ball or a lot of the "reads" weren't reads at all. I mean:

Guys would turn their body almost 90 degrees away from square and charge at Haskins and McNamara would still give the ball. This caused Seth to descend into MGoBlog Who Are We Reading Spittle Paragraphs™ with some frequency. (It was very Dread Pirate Roberts of him.) The most gloriously spittle-flecked was after Wisconsin, and related to the embed above:

I think Arc Read is still in the playbook, but they still can’t get McNamara to keep no matter how good the look. … Pre-snap notice that Erick All is pointing at the OLB lining up inside of him.

He’s also looking at McNamara. Something is being communicated, and the most sensical thing that could be is “RIGHT HERE CADE. THIS GUY IS COMING INSIDE OF ME. READ THAT!” He doesn’t read that.

And when All gets up after that he’s like “What the HELL man?”

…In this way the starting quarterback has once again become a major drag on the run game. Defenses can run willy-nilly at the edges Michigan wants to attack, and either deliver an unblocked extra man to the RB at the line of scrimmage or better yet an unblocked, unread edge defender directly into the backfield.

Wisconsin is the best example here because they have to be taken seriously in ways that MAC teams and Rutgers—ye gods, remember that game—do not. But the vibes from the Rutgers game are a pretty good summary:

Fake zone reads are not THE problem but they're the most obvious and frustrating part of the Jim Harbaugh Rutgers Game Plan experience. I don’t know if they’re expecting the QB to read it pre-snap, if McNamara is just screwing them up consistently, if the slider is just set to an extreme and defenses have learned how to maximize that, or if they figured 20 points against Rutgers was plenty so why do anything more dangerous than fart for a half and leave your opponents with a bunch of nonsense to scout.

Seth briefly issued a cyan to McCarthy, causing the message boards to explode into a civil war, largely because of this. I disagreed at the time, but I do understand. I too have been in the UFR salt mines getting wild-eyed about this exact thing. It changes you, this UFR.

Michigan dumped McNamara run reads from the offense by the time of the Ohio State game—Seth charted zero zone reads—and that went… just fine! Pretty great, actually! The problem with projecting that down the road is that the Ohio State defense was a mid-season patch job and Michigan was vastly ahead of the curve schematically in a way that is not likely to recur. If McNamara's going to stay ahead of his competition he's going to have to be a Brady-like savant at reading defenses and getting the ball out. This isn't getting better to the point where McNamara features in opposition planning like McCarthy is.

HENSON ANALOGUE

meep meep [Patrick Barron]

And then there's the other guy. Here's JJ MCCARTHY [recruiting profile] doing the throwing thing pretty well:

Yes, that is a 20-yard out to the field. No, he didn't really step into the throw.

Here's McCarthy catching Blake Corum(!!!) in the Big Ten championship game:

This + that == holy shit. McCarthy threw for 8.7 yards an attempt with 5 TDs and 2 INTs and ran for 5.5 yards a carry as a true freshman, with a fair number of those snaps coming in competitive portions of games. It is completely understandable that the Michigan fanbase is looking at the five star-laden rosters of Ohio State and hypothetical playoff opponents and pounding the table for McCarthy as the great equalizer.

It is also completely understandable that the Michigan coaching staff hasn't shown the same level of reckless enthusiasm. They like McCarthy just fine; unlike big portions of the fanbase they're not yet ready to anoint him as the chosen one. Because while the freshman stuff was relatively muted, it wasn't exactly absent:

Yeah, it worked. Other events were less dramatically freshman and had less sanguine outcomes. (For the record, Infamous Fumble Against MSU is charged to Blake Corum, per Harbaugh himself.) This is our concern, dude.

This shows up in Seth's charting… sort of. Data is so thin here on a game-to-game basis that we'll just compress it all into a one-line chart:

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.

This covers 53 of McCarthy's 59 throws last year, so about two games worth for a Harbaugh quarterback. This is a wild ride with a ton of NFL-level DOs and a hair or two too many events in the "bad" category. But does this look like a capital-F freshman? No. Extra-bad X events are relatively rare; bad reads are generally non-catastrophic; his mesh point decisions are fan-dang-tastic (even if you have some skepticism about our ability to deduce these things).

Two things are true. One is that McCarthy's per-snap +/- grading is considerably adrift of McNamara's final six games. Two is that this chart looks like a rocket two seconds after ignition. It's not going very fast right now, but there's a hell of a lot of fire coming out of the back of it.

Let's drill down.

HENSON ANALOGUE DOES THE THROWING. Sometimes… there's a man. And you just know he's a different kind of dude. JJ McCarthy is that man. His version of the Denard fumble TD was a ridiculous cross-body throw to Daylen Baldwin that came right at me in the stands. At first I thought this thing was going to be intercepted; so did Daylen Baldwin. Then the arc of the ball became clear—much more quickly for Baldwin than myself—and all that was left was Pikachu face. The broadcast angle does not do it justice:

Later in the season Seth caught a pop off of Cornelius Johnson's pads that said something. Volume up for this one:

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.

When provided an opportunity to hit a hitch against off coverage McCarthy frequently got the ball out fast enough to allow his wide receiver to turn and go upfield. And if his deep ball is less proven than McNamara that's only because of reps. Early indications are McCarthy is right there with him:

McCarthy also displayed some of the subtler arts during his opportunities. Andrel Anthony's Braylon cosplay will re-appear in this preview series; for purposes of this post it's illuminating because this is a corner route on which the DB hops outside; McCarthy's throw is the right one despite the unexpected situation:

When he's flushed from the pocket he keeps his eyes downfield and doesn't mindlessly go into run mode despite his athleticism. And while McCarthy is capable of breaking the pocket when necessary, he did not use it as a crutch—much, anyway. He was perfectly willing to sit in the pocket if he got enough time to get a pass off:

On top of all that, McCarthy's athleticism allows him to make something out of nothing even when he gets an unblocked, good Iowa linebacker coming at him:

Hard to see that being anything other than a throwaway if McNamara gets that rush.

Early issues reading things—like that time against Western where he had eyes only for AJ Henning on a dig/post that sucked up the exact safety he should be reading and left Roman Wilson wide open for six—didn't linger. By the time he got flung in the deep end in the Georgia game he was zipping darts in front of certified dudes*:

McCarthy wasn't ready to take Michigan down the field repeatedly against Georgia but it didn't take a lot of squinting to see how he could get there.

And then there's the other half of being a quarterback these days.

*[Perhaps backup certified dudes but just look up UGA recruiting; the backups are about to be one of CFB's best defenses again.]

HENSON ANALOGUE DOES THE RUNNING. McCarthy's ability on the ground was frankly shocking. His recruiting profile has a couple mentions of his ability to break the pocket and ESPN did rank him as a dual threat, but Mike Farrell and Allen Trieu are quoted as saying he "can run when needed" and he's "not a big big running threat," respectively.  I don't think anyone was expecting multiple clips where he WOOPed Big Ten linebackers.

He even fumbled a snap and scored, just like Denard! From five yards out instead of sixty zillion, sure. But just like Denard. Shh. Shh. Just like Denard.

Seth even liked McCarthy's decision-making, which is a brutally high bar to clear. The nature of UFR is to Zapruder every play and then be like DUDE YOU MISSED THIS CREASE, which is not entirely fair. We know this and have tried to keep that in mind, but for the purposes of this section it's illuminating that the freshman QB fielded this comment from Seth after the Maryland game:

…Denard was never very good at making option reads [ed: SLANDERLIBEL], and McCarthy has those and the RPOs pretty much down. My Jim Harbaugh 2.0 comp from the preseason is holding up, but we’re still talking Harbaugh circa 1982 or ’83 (QBs come more advanced these days). For now the coaches have to be wondering how they can use that without having a freshman moment cost them The Game.

They had a package for McCarthy in the freakin' Game with a bunch of reads and he just… did them right.

After McCarthy's ability to motor was on film you could see the impact on Michigan's ground game. There's the Iowa run above, yeah. Here Hassan Haskins doesn't have to cut this back because Maryland, but look at how much attention McCarthy draws. If Haskins needed to put his foot in the ground and get vertical that's there too.

The best backs for spread systems where it's really 11-on-11 tend to be home run hitters, because you break one tackle and everyone else is occupied. Michigan has home run hitters at running back. So if you've got the guy who you have to overreact to when he's the backup QB with a package, and he's actually making the reads, and he's actually a passer first and foremost… well. This is a potential stew.

HENSON ANALOGUE IS NOT PROJECTABLE? Here's the bit where you project what's going to happen, except I don't know. McCarthy could get stuck on the bench; he could rescue Michigan against Iowa and then just be the starting quarterback. Since this is the #1 Question hovering over the team this year, the outcome of the battle here is addressed more fully in 5Q5A.

FILE UNDER DON’T WANNA KNOW

Davis Warren has potential we absolutely do not want to explore [Marc-Gregor Campredon]

With McCarthy out and McNamara limited to a couple of drives, Michigan fans got an extended look at the depths of the, uh, depth chart during the spring game. This preview will not spend a whole lot of time going over it.

Jon [Gruden] asked Tom [Moore, the Colts offensive coordinator,] why he wasn’t giving some snaps to Peyton’s backups…He looked at us both in the eye, paused for a moment, then said in that gravelly voice of his, “Fellas, if ‘18’ goes down, we’re fucked.  And we don’t practice fucked.”

Texas Tech transfer ALAN BOWMAN and walk-on-with-a-story DAVIS WARREN 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.

Realistically, if Michigan gets down here they'll just be scrambling to survive.

One last note: freshman ALEX ORJI [recruiting profile] looked somewhat interesting as a dual threat quarterback but miles away as a passer; with McCarthy's evident running ability it would be shocking if he did not redshirt unless they really need a power back. JAYDEN DENEGAL [recruiting profile] is a sure redshirt.