OT: 2021 QB (Rivals' #1 overall) commits to Oklahoma
Bogart (GA) Prince Avenue quarterback Brock Vandagriff committed to Oklahoma. He's the #1 player on the new Rivals 100, although he's #19 overall in the 247 Composite. Michigan offered Vandagriff, but AFAIK he never much noticed or cared.
It's crazy how much talent Oklahoma keeps stockpiling at the QB position. Two straight Heisman winners, for this year they have Jalen Hurts (and others like Spencer Rattler), and then they'll have Vandagriff to begin the 2021 season.
Hey, at least we can say we got to see him wearing a Winged Helmet and a 'Wolverines' jersey.
/shrug
His school mascot are the Wolverines with the same colors and winged helmet.
We had to offer on that basis alone.
What jumps out about him on film?
I'm not knocking the kid, because im sure he's really good, but its not immediately obvious to me from the film what makes him elite.
He gets the ball out quickly, but these look like are giving him very simple reads. Looks like a plus athlete for the QB position with ability to throw on the move. Good accuracy, average arm strength.
I'm not any sort of scout, so I'd be curious to know what others are seeing here that screams #1 player in the country.
For reference, J.J. McCarthy is #11 overall on Rivals and #13 in the 247 Composite.
seems like a lot of 5 star QBs for 2021 at 6 with the 7th being 0.9799. do you think that that number will go down or 2021 is really loaded with great QBs?
I'm worried that having multiple 5 star qbs in this class means that McCarthy isn't as special as I need him to be. Makes me feel like he's more of a 4 star and that's depressing.
I see I'm not the only one afflicted with QBPONE.
Dude, I hope there is a missing "/s" in your post.
You are talking the vagaries of recruiting rankings two years out. And even at that, you are depressed over computational rounding errors.
I don't like using the /s. I trust most of the people here to pick up on it while some won't.
That is normally correct - but recruiting rankings bring out some strange shit on this board. People go bonkers when someone drops a star ranking and we get to hear how this is the reason Michigan keeps losing to OSU every year.
Anyway, sorry for letting that one go over my head.
My experience is that on the whole this is a sharp group that is completely full of /s.
My sarcasm gets overlooked all the time on here without that /s.
The /s wasn't necessary.
Have you ever looked at the posts on this board in relation to recruiting rankings?
Folks seriously flip out about these things.
The internet is a haven for certain people to flip out--this place certainly being no exception.
I've seen all of those posts from Maizen and others and still didn't need /s in this instance.
I think 2021 is a very good year for quarterbacks. The 2020 class is not.
247 proprietary has a little more of a gap between them. After seeing Vandegriff's accuracy compared to McCarthy's, I can see why.
https://247sports.com/Season/2021-Football/RecruitRankings/?InstitutionGroup=HighSchool&Position=PRO
As far as I'm concerned, so are we.... in the wings we have future STAR McCaffrey, have McNamara who Alabama had on top of their board, and McCarthy coming too.
And should mention Milton and Johnson, too.
And those Oklahoma QBs.. only one of them will play, and there will be transfers, because the top guys all wanna play.
Pretty sure we'd have gotten him if he was a McVandagriff.
(McCaffrey, McNamara, McCarthy)
We want MOAR hyphens and Mc's! All the hyphens and Mc's are belong to us!!
Maybe one will transfer to Michigan!
Well put. At this point, I don't care what QB's other schools sign. Michigan is as stocked at QB across the different classes as I've ever seen here - and I go back to watching Rick Leach play in the Big House. I'm more interested to see how our OL and RB recruiting will be doing, as all these great QB's need protection and someone good to hand the ball off to.
+1 for Leach memory, how about Harlan Huckelby too?
(subsequent memory edit...Ali Hadji Sheik!)
Oklahoma and Clemson will probably dominate the best QB convo for the next couple years, but Michigan QB room is up there in quality.
Definitely. Trevor Lawrence is the best QB prospect since Luck and he might even be better than Luck was after each’s respective freshman years.
Trevor Lawrence is better than Luck after each's respective freshman years. That's not really even a debate (people seem to forgot just how unfinished of a product Luck was).
That doesn't mean he'll end up as good as Luck when Luck left, but in all likelihood, he will be in that same category of as close to can't-miss QB prospects as you'll get (Luck, Manning, maybe Palmer... it's rare ilk).
You know after how things went for Michigan over the last few years, there is some unhappy posters railing on JH. We forget what he did for Luck.
There's people that forget a whooooole lot when it comes to Jim Harbaugh.
I don't think anyone has forgotten. I think it's more "what have you done for me lately." I was at Cal when Harbaugh was at Stanford and his turn around there was much more impressive than his body of work at Michigan - so far.
I'm not unhappy that he's the coach, and he's doing a good job, but I doubt anyone would have predicted that his best season at Michigan would be 10-3 with a loss to OSU at this point in his tenure. The embarrasing bowl losses aren't amazing either.
Hopefully next year is the year that he breaks his Michigan ceiling, because the team has been so close so often. It's a matter of "when", not "if".
I think it's explainable what happened the last 2 seasons: two coaching hires that Jim Harbaugh had an error in judgment over. Both are gone now.
Onward and upward climbing begins again. :-)
A couple bad hires, Peters not working out, shit OL recruiting by Drevno, and being in a division with an all time great coach heading a team that cares about nothing besides winning.
It’s all pretty explainable and I’m sure Harbaugh knows how to get his team over the hump.
his most surprising one was pep hamilton, evidenced the sitewide lack of support... maybe 1 in 100 here was in favor of the hire, and when it hits critical mass like that, its often right.
bringing drevno wasn't so much of an error, but just unfortunate... coming from the west coat, harbaugh probably shouldn't have expected to know how clickish the midwestern high school coach scene is, and drevno couldn't land anyone... they didnt jive with the west coast guy, similar to dissing RR. maybe someone here can make the argument that he should have known that drevno wouldn't recruit well in this area, but i cannot.
Greg Frey
Pep was a bad idea from the start, no questions about that. I think what really put the brakes on things was keeping Pep and Drevno one year after it was clear that neither were the right guy for the job.
From the outside it looked very much like Harbaugh wanted both out the year before they left but allowed them to stay since they couldn't secure a soft landing. It was definitely a nice guy thing to do, but it hurt the trajectory of the program.
It’s still a question whether Jim Harbaugh made Andrew Luck or Andrew Luck made Jim Harbaugh. Harbaugh is going into his fifth year here, and we still won’t see anyone that he himself recruited and developed starting at QB, at ANY level of play, let alone at the level of Luck or Lawrence.
That's revisionist history. Harbaugh has looked like a QB savant at every stop prior to Michigan. It's not just Andrew Luck.
If people want to debate something about Harbaugh, I think "has the college game passed him by" is a much more resonable position to take. The hiring of Gattis suggests that Harbaugh might be ready to step back a little and let the younger guys handle more of the offense.
This is the theory I agree with. And if I got Harbaugh's personality right then I don't think he will sit still with the offence. I think he is going to learn few tricks from Gattis, and be ready to make the next young and upcoming OC hire and use his tricks.
I hope Gattis stays 2 years at Michigan. But if he gets the results we have been hoping for, he is going to be gone next year. 100%
This seems like an unfair/ off-base complaint.
Year 1 & 2, pretty unreasonable to expect a Harbaugh recruit to be starting.
Year 3, Peters was Harbaugh's only QB recruit with any seasoning. Pretty rare for a red-shirt freshman QB to unseat a starter.
Year 4, a former 5 star with college starting experience got dropped on his lap. You certainly, wouldn't expect Harbaugh to turn him away just so his recruit can start.
Year 5, see year 4 but 5 star now has experience.
Harbaugh made Wilton Speight look like an above average Big 10 QB.
/ end
Two redshirt freshmen QBs have won Heisman trophies recently. And both Clemson and Alabama had TRUE freshmen beat out starters who had taken them to the NC playoff. So Year 3 bombs.
Patterson was solid last year, but nothing special, certainly not a difference maker. And he showed no sign of having another level to his game. But no Harbaugh recruit has any chance of beating him out.
Bottom line remains that it will be at least year 6 before any Harbaugh recruit has any hope of being a starter (assuming that Harbaugh doesn't bring in yet another transfer because he has no confidence in his own players and coaching). And even then, we don't know if McCaffrey will be anything better than average.
So Harbaugh didn’t recruit Patterson here? He isn’t developing him? That point is something worried sparties say when they are trying to convince themselves Harbaugh isn’t a good coach
No, he didn't out-compete everyone else in the country for him. And no, he didn't do that much better for us than he did for his previous school, he just had better talent around him. And the only reason Harbaugh brought him in was that he had no confidence in the guys he already had.
So how do you explain away Colin Kaepernick and Jake Ruddock?
There is no Ruddock. For the millionth time, it's Rudock.
The same way you explain away O'Korn, Peters, Malzone and Gentry.
Come on man, what was Kaepernick before and after Harbaugh? I live the SF Bay area. I watched every 9er game when Harbaugh was here. I saw what Kaepernick did in those 2 years. It was all the Harbaugh effect. That third year Kaepernick went rogue and messed the team up.
I'm glad I am not the only one who saw Jesse Palmer as a virtual lock when he came out. All that wasted talent...