The least surprising departure of this offseason is finally quasi-official. Former starting quarterback Brandon Peters, who graduated from Michigan yesterday, has entered the trasnfer portal with two years of eligibility remaining, and Purdue the most likely destination.

Michigan QB Brandon Peters has entered the NCAA transfer portal.

— Cole Cubelic (@colecubelic) May 4, 2019

Peters was the guy this site fell in love with after Ace and David took in a high school game of his in Indiana. Concerns about his lack of arm strength morphed into excitement over his ability to float a perfectly catchable ball with impeccable accuracy. Peters redshirted in 2016 and entered 2017 trailing Hoke/Borges leftover Wilton Speight and Houston transfer John O'Korn for the starting gig. But Speight was injured in the Big Ten opener that season, and after a pair of disastrous road starts against Indiana and Penn State, a nice easy home date with Rutgers seemed the natural launching point for Harbaugh's first true quarterback recruit at Michigan. Peters clearly had the training wheels on, but looked reasonably functional. A perfect wheel to running back/classmate/fellow Hoosier Chris Evans caused QB coach Pep Hamilton—and in fact the entire Michigan fanbase—to exclaim "The Brandon Peters era has begun."

The Peters Era would last only a few weeks. A week before The Game, Wisconsin's front seven turned Michigan's Drevno-constructed OL into swiss cheese; by the time Peters was knocked out of the rest of the regular season with a concussion, the freshman quarterback had already lost all semblance of composure. Michigan nearly beat Ohio State the following week but couldn't overcome O'Korn's terrible performance. Peters returned to start the bowl game against South Carolina, but looked extremely skittish and unconfident. Meanwhile, dismissible rumors leaked from the program that Peters didn't have the take-charge, devil-may-care attitude of a high-level quarterback. These were not helped by the Peters portion of Amazon's yearlong look inside the Michigan program, in which the presumptive starter came across as a generally passive, normal college kid.

Michigan pursued former 2016 five-star Shea Patterson to start in 2018. By the following spring, it was redshirt freshman Dylan McCaffrey, not Peters, challenging Shea for the starting job, and early enrollee Joe Milton got as much hype as the returning starter. It seemed a fait accompli by that point that Peters would seek a transfer. Already three years into his education, his choices were to lose the year of eligibility by transferring somewhere immediately, or stick around a few more semesters, get his degree, and have the freedom to transfer and play immediately wherever he liked.

It's impossible to tell if it was Pep Hamilton's overly long-developing route trees, Drevno's overly complicated offensive line calls, Brandon's own makeup, or what combination of the above, led to Peters not coming close to his potential at Michigan. There are probably 30 ways his career could have worked out differently.

Like Shane Morris and Alex Malzone before him, Peters demonstrates why the grad transfer rule is good thing for Michigan and its players. Peters leaves with a Michigan degree and more value than he had as a freshman. He offers immediate eligibility, three years of Harbaugh coaching, starting experience against Big Ten and SEC opponents, two years left to play to any school with a good graduate program that needs a starter. While Peters has the option to shop, a rising Purdue program near home and in dire need of an established QB is probably harder to pass up than the chance to coach Louisville was for Jeff Brohm.