cade mcnamara

Sponsor note. Trivia time! Leaderboard is here. Congrats to AdamW and BenT for leading the way with 22 each. Round 3 is here. Complete by 5 PM Friday to make the leaderboard.

If you've participated in rounds one or two you're invited to an Autograph event with Jake Butt and Blake Corum on Sunday, September 10 at 12pm ET. This event is a live documentary experience going into the story of Blake’s childhood, his journey to Ann Arbor, his experience as a Michigan Wolverine, and his expectations for the 2023 season. There will also be a Q&A portion for VIP Pass holders. Details of the three levels:

• Stadium Pass: Join the event for a private hangout with Blake and Jake.
• Field Pass: Stadium Pass + you will be invited to stay on after the show with 20 fans for a special post experience with Blake.
• Locker Room Pass: Field Pass + you will get the opportunity to interact with Blake and Jake and ask a question during the hangout.

It's an opportunity to provide some NIL and ask Blake Corum whatever you need to get off your chest. Don't be weird. If you are weird we will disavow you.

For everyone else, get in the game by playing the trivia. This is how we point the money cannon.

"Stanford? Never heard of it." Any questions about whether Michigan's transfer process is insane or not have been definitively answered. Myles Hinton:

“Right now I’m in General Studies because the credits kind of messed up. I was Human Biology at Stanford. And then, for some reason, they didn’t take a lot of the credits,” Hinton said on Monday. “All my bio credits just dropped. I don't know. It's crazy.”

A reporter replied with the question everyone in the room was thinking: Michigan really didn’t accept credits from Stanford?

“I was like, ‘What in the world?’ I took an intro writing class last semester, and I was like, ‘What’s going on? What’s going on? I took this class freshman year.’ It was crazy,” Hinton explained.

Alejandro Zuniga speculates about why that may be the case, bolding this section of the admissions rules:

Additionally, departmental credit cannot be used to satisfy distribution requirements or major/minor requirements without the permission of an academic or major advisor within the school/college.

This means if you transfer into Michigan all of your non-major classes are garbage and have to be retaken, resulting in a senior transferring in from Stanford re-taking an intro to writing class. So the score here:

• If you have a degree from anywhere, even Michigan State, you can pop on over into a grad program no problem.
• If you're a first-year transfer you can make it work because you haven't taken enough college credits to start capping out. So Michigan can bring in Ernest Hausmann without much difficulty.
• Second and especially third-year players are likely to get Terrance Shannon'd if they can't slog through the rest of their degree over the summer.

This goes beyond sports at this point and is another symptom of a sclerotic bureaucracy at Michigan that seems unassailable at this point. AAPS and Michigan are Spidermans Pointing at this point.

[After THE JUMP: …but fast!]

Previously: The Story. 

QUARTERBACK: BEAT GEORGIA

GRADE: 5

Two years ago, Michigan won the Big Ten. Hooray! They returned their starting quarterback. Also hooray! But there was this guy, you know, who'd done this as a freshman:

JJ MCCARTHY

As always, hover over abbreviations for explanations.

Nine dead on throws in the rough equivalent of two games, just one Bad Read Xtreme, a +10 grade, excellent decisions at mesh points. Our charting for JJ McCarthy was not over the moon, but this was a true freshman getting spot duty. He wandered into games and out of them, never developing a rhythm but generally executing better than you'd expect. He flashed a crazy arm, and crazy legs. The people wanted him to win the job. The people did not expect him to win the job, because that never happens. Returning, championship QBs do not get deposed.

Then spring chatter turned into fall chatter and Jim Harbaugh announced that he'd be starting Cade McNamara in the opener and McCarthy in game two. Whether this was a genuine response to a tight competition or a way to ease a Big Ten champion starter out of his job will never be known, but McNamara bottled it and McCarthy turned in a 100% downfield success rating; Harbaugh announced the job was McCarthy's and never looked back.

The payoff was another Big Ten title, albeit one that once again leaned heavily on the ground game. Depending on your point of view, Michigan was either 127th or 5th in "run rate over expected," a metric that measures exactly what it sounds like. They finished 3rd nationally in yards per carry. If you squint you could argue that replacing McNamara was beside the point. And maybe it was, if Michigan's goal was to beat Ohio State and win the conference. It is not. Michigan's added a "Beat Georgia" drill to practice, and McCarthy is the guy who looked like he might be able to hang with the Bulldogs when Michigan got blasted in their CFP appearance two years ago.

Flipping to JJ is for this year, when his ceiling blows McNamara's out of the water. He's got to take a step forward. This is about how much of a step:

…the former top-25 recruit made the gamble pay off, winning his first 12 starts and finishing 16th in Total QBR.

Sixteenth is good, but is it national-title good? Over the past four seasons, the title-winning quarterback has averaged a 91.4 Total QBR, completing 72% of his passes at 14.2 yards per completion. McCarthy in 2022: 79.1 Total QBR, 65% completion rate, 13.1 yards per completion. He came up big in the last three games of the season (57% completion rate, but at 17.8 yards per completion). Was that a sign of things to come?

Well, Dude, we just don't know.

[After THE JUMP: salami]

Yesterday we concluded our The Enemy, Ranked series, covering the nine B1G teams who find themselves on Michigan's schedule this 2023 season. But how about the four teams not on the schedule, all out of the B1G West? As I mentioned throughout the series, some of these teams are among the stronger B1G foes and feature talent in the trenches and in the secondary/at QB missing from The Enemy series. Today we will break down each of those four teams, their strengths, weaknesses, and project out their season. 

Wisconsin

No team in the B1G underwent a larger change this offseason than Wisconsin, and I'm including Northwestern in that. The Badgers opted to abandon the DNA of what made Wisconsin Football successful for nearly three decades, not just moving away from the Barry Alvarez coaching tree by hiring Luke Fickell, but letting Fickell scrap the bully ball offense in favor of an Air Raid attack(!) led by former North Carolina OC Phil Longo. On defense, Jim Leonhard's 3-4 system that churned out star OLBs is out in favor of Mike Tressel's 3-3-5, a seismic shock to the program on par with the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Everything about Badger football is about to change and it makes Wisconsin one of America's most fascinating teams in 2023. 

Offense

It's not just that the scheme has changed... the roster looks significantly different as well. Yes, Braelon Allen is still around, a star RB who is probably the second best back in the conference behind Blake Corum. The run game he engineers in tandem with Chez Mellusi is a great balancing weapon to have next to the completely re-made passing attack headed up by transfer QB Tanner Mordecai from SMU. Over two seasons with the Mustangs after transferring from Oklahoma, where he was coached by Lincoln Riley as a backup behind Jalen Hurts, Mordecai completed 66.4% of his passes for 8.0 Y/A, 72 TD to 22 INT. The upgrade Mordecai represents over Graham Mertz is astronomical and gives Wisconsin the best QB in the B1G West. 

Rebooting the receiving corps was an area of emphasis for Luke Fickell, even though the top three pass-catchers off last season's ho-hum Wisconsin WR room return, with Chimere Dike being the top target. Fickell added four transfer WRs(!) in addition to those three established returners, two transfers from Cincy, a promising RS Fr 4* from USC, and Bryson Green, who racked up 723 receiving yards over two seasons with OKST. I'm not sure if there will be a Dude in this receiving corps, but between seven lottery tickets, at least three should be solid targets for Mordecai to throw to. 

The biggest question with the offense is the offensive line. OL Coach Bob Bostad is out (hired by Indiana), with Longo bringing Jack Bicknell Jr. with him from UNC. Bicknell's first order of business will be finding a line of five starters and then teaching them a brand new blocking system that is diametrically different from what Wisconsin has run forever. The Badger OL also declined considerably in the last years of the Chryst era, finishing only 70th in average line yards last year. The good news is 3.5 starters return and Fickell brings two former All-AAC OL with him from Cincy (Joe Huber and Jake Renfro), so experience is here, but getting five guys to gel as a unit and get a hang of a new scheme is the big question. If they can get even a decent OL, between Mordecai leading the passing game and the prowess of Allen on the ground, the Wisconsin offense could be terrific. But there are also a lot of moving parts, possible transition costs and it's not a sure thing that it all works in year 1. 

[AFTER THE JUMP: Wisconsin defense and the rest of the teams]