Newsstand: ESPN analyst weighs in on Michigan's QB decision
Michigan football’s plan for the quarterback position has drawn plenty of reactions over the last few days. Instead of choosing a starter, the Wolverines are letting Cade McNamara and JJ McCarthy duke it out into the regular season.
McNamara will start Week 1 for the Wolverines, while McCarthy gets the nod in Week 2 against Hawaii. Michigan will make a further determination from there.
ESPN’s Pete Thamel spoke on the College GameDay Podcast this week and theorizes this is to save face and keep both camps happy, namely McCarthy.
“Actually doing this is one thing. Announcing it and sort of trumpeting it as a topic for the next essentially three weeks is different,” Thamel said. “It makes me theorize that somebody is unhappy. JJ McCarthy was a highly regarded quarterback out of Florida. He probably could have gone somewhere better than Michigan — and quite frankly, there are only seven or eight places better than Michigan — but he’s a little bit of a thin guy. That hurt him and the bluest of the blue bloods. He’s a guy who’s progressed. All these quarterbacks have camps now. Quarterbacks are their own ecosystem and rightfully so. They are the engines of a billion-dollar business. So, to me, this [is] an appeasement to the McCarthy camp.”
The insinuation is also that McNamara could be slighted by the move.
“If I’m in the McNamara camp, there’s a little bit of Colt McCoy/Chris Sims here,” Thamel said. “Now, McCarthy wasn’t Chris Sims, but it’s like (McNamara) won you the Big Ten. You haven’t won the Big Ten in a longtime. You haven’t beaten Ohio State with a full-time coach in a generation. And McCarthy went in and cost them the Michigan State game. There was some quarterback fumbling going on in that game.
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“I just think this is a little bit of a window into the modern reality of where we are. Like, ‘OK let’s make sure that JJ’s happy.’ This is a way to kind of calm everybody down and say, ‘You’re gonna get your chance.’ We’re gonna announce on Week 0 this really unique quarterback plan. Announcing that plan doesn’t sound like it’s the best thing for Michigan football, it sounds like it’s the best thing to keep the quarterback room together.”
Tweets of the day
Michigan quote of the day
“Harbaugh knows it’ll be hard to keep both quarterbacks completely happy. But he can try, at least for a while, to make sure neither is unhappy, or disgruntled. Asked if it was possible both could play in games all the way through the season, he said, “It’s absolutely a possibility.”
“With college football’s transfer portal, players are less willing to wait for an opportunity. Harbaugh isn’t oblivious to it, and he practically issued a challenge to his quarterbacks.”
– Bob Wojnowski of The Detroit News on Michigan football’s quarterback situation
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