We've made many mistakes. A lot of them. Probably well over $100M worth. Probably many mistakes we don't even know about yet with bitter consequences waiting on us in a few years
Doubt it. The kid played nobodies in high school and ran over that league by being bigger stronger and faster than everyone. Went from the little pond to the ocean and he’s just not that guy
I’m telling you this kid is not it though. Remember he was the number 1 ranked QB nationally. He’s never living up to that anywhere. Guys who play for Belleville high school against no one should never be ranked that high
I said it in another thread but this is it. Belleville has always been a quasi-powerhouse in a non-competitive division of Michigan high school football and their recent(ish) coaching change didn’t help them at all. Without Bryce they’ve regressed to being below their program average because they just don’t have a solid coaching staff or program in general.
Had Bryce been poached by one of the local private schools or even just had the benefit of playing at a place like I dunno… Muskegon, he would have developed much better. You can see the entirety of Bryce’s high school development in the state championship games that are still available on YouTube, you don’t even need to dig deeper than that (but you could, if you wanted to I suppose.)
The honest to god truth is that he was the dying gasp of a failing football program who was just relying on their qb passing for a grown man playing against children. There’s a reason they brought Stallions in; the coach is a massive UofM homer who isn’t a faculty coach, he’s just some former assistant who had to retire from his full time union job in order to take over.
I've always been surprised that Belleville recruits are so highly ranked. Were they always supposed to be good? I grew up in Flint and the good teams were the Detroit schools, Midland, Clarkson, etc.
They’ve been “good” for the last 20 years or so which also happens to coincide with the years where they got knocked for recruiting violations until their head coach was eventually served a 2 year show cause back around 2022.
What makes Belleville relevant long term is that they’re geographically located away from most of the power house teams and don’t schedule them out of their own smaller sub league which is the KLAA. So Belleville gets to walk through teams like novi/northville who watch all their talent regularly get poached to OAA teams such as Brother Rice and Catholic Central, especially the latter who is literally in their backyard. Belleville doesn’t play any Detroit public school , Catholic league, or O-K teams until it’s playoff time either so they regularly avoid Cass Tech, Clarkston, Muskegon, and all the Catholic league teams who have mostly moved to having to schedule out of state teams since they can’t even get “good” schools like Belleville to schedule them.
Basically: they used to have a coach that was actually doing what you need to do to succeed at the Michigan high school level which is developing talent and well… cheating. They don’t have him anymore after the show cause (and repeated suspensions,) and they moved to a “safe” hire who is pretty much a community guy that was an assistant forever and was a line worker in the plants for a long time before that; basically the high school football version of the Sherrone Moore hire with a blue collar background and no infidelity scandals.
They won’t be “good” again until they get a by the book style of coach who’s also willing to bend recruiting rules just like every other successful program. Good is also doing a lot of heavy lifting here because their league is dissolving soon and they’ll be shoehorned into the Oakland league IIRC which will run them directly into actual powerhouse programs they can’t avoid scheduling.
Think Farmington Hills Harrison but instead of hiding down in division three they’ve sequestered themselves into a deadbeat league due to be shut down soon. Without a grown man playing quarterback they’re not going to see a lot of success at the playoff level (if they even make it there in the near future,) because their magic bullet was “generational athlete at quarterback can win games against teams who mostly rely on winning through and stopping the ground game.” Most Michigan high schools (especially the power programs,) aren’t exactly known for their high powered offenses with a pass first mentality. They win by fielding superior athletes on the line and at RB/DB then proceeding to cram it down your throats for four quarters while occasionally letting the QB air one out once the box is stacked.
I’m not going to go back and check the records but most Michigan high school players that end up being standout college players (or god forbid, actually make it to the league,) are linemen, RBs, and DBs with a few linebackers sprinkled in between. Most of the standout Michigan high school WR’s are converted to defensive players once they hit college. OLSM’s Morgan Trent comes to mind as an example here that you might remember since he played for UofM and made it to the NFL with Cincy if my memory isn’t failing me (I’m old, sorry.)
Also, Belleville had highly rated recruits for a while not only because they actually had a football coach but also because that coach had lines directly into Ann Arbor. That’s part of why Stallions was brought into Belleville; with their original coach basically banned from Michigan HS football UofM lost that line into the program and donors/UofM wanted someone there to actually see Bryce with their own eyes. There are reasons why “traditional” powerhouses don’t just ditch their coaches when they retire: CC, OLSM, Brother Rice, Muskegon, clarkston, etc have all kept their retiring coaches on staff either as AD’s or consultants over the years because they need to be there to help the new coach take over that intra-state recruiting connection to UofM (and to a lesser extent MSU.) If you attended a powerhouse Michigan football program and played any sort of sport then chances are you’ve run into a UofM coach or even their current head coach. Belleville (and other schools,) produce higher rated recruits because that’s where Michigan/MSU/OSU scouts actually go look at players. It’s also why players like Cousins slip through the recruiting cracks; no one is sending scouts to Holland Michigan.
His entire tenure at Michigan is marred by the fact that he knew the defensive plays and still primarily handed things off. McCarthy’s value was inflated by the advance scouting of opponents. It’s funny that the only coach that would trade for him is Jimmy’s big brother.
Ehh, he still had to make the plays, you or I couldn't have performed 1% as well as he did even if he had opponents' play books, and that's literally not any part of the allegations, the allegations are that they scouted games illegally, not that they literally stole playbooks.
I'm all for crapping on Michigan but the criticism should be based in reality. Michigan has had several good quarterbacks in the past 20 years, like are you actually saying Denard Robinson wasn't an awesome quarterback? Devin Gardner wasn't a good college quarterback. Tate Forcier wasn't a decent college quarterback. Like, saying they haven't developed a quarterback in 20 years is flat out wrong.
It’s a lot easier to make the plays when you know if you are throwing into zone or man coverage, it its a blitz or not. It’s not that hard of a concept to understand. Anybody with any experience is going to look better when he knows the defense. That’s not subjective.
I think you're overstating how much more he knew on a play to play basis than others, and even if he did that's a huge leap from that to saying he "wasn't developed at all". There's a whole book full of genuinely great college quarterbacks that didn't pan out in the NFL, and the fact that JJ McCarthy probably will end up being one of them doesn't mean Michigan didn't develop him. Pains me to say it but that's like saying UF didn't develop Tim Tebow, or (less painfully) that FSU didn't develop Jameis Winston or EJ Manuel or Jordan Travis. The fact they didn't pan out in the NFL doesn't mean they weren't developed in college.
Also again, it is such a wildly stupid statement to say "Michigan hasn't developed a quarterback in 20 years"... Stupid enough to the point that if you're going to defend it, I'm going to ask you actually defend such an insane statement QB by QB. Denard Robinson. Devin Gardner. Tate Forcier. Wilton Speight... etc. etc. If even one quarterback in the past 20 years developed and became better at Michigan, that idiotic statement is literally false.
If you're going to talk trash, stick to things that make sense.
I’m not the one that made the comment that you are rallying against. I’m just saying, JJ was not a good example of a quarterback that was developed because he wasn’t and it’s clearly showing in the NFL.
I see this take a lot and I don't think it's wrong. However I've wondered: what about JJ McCarthy? Obviously he wasn't developed to the point of a starting NFL QB but I think it'd be incorrect to claim he was playing at the same level in 2023 as he was as a freshman in '21. Going further back I think Devin Gardner developed somewhat too, he just had to deal with Hoke's reckless lack of regard for his players' safety or physical well-being.
I am not trying to claim that we're good or even competent at QB development because we obviously aren't. But I also don't think it's an unknown concept that has been on a decades long continual absence.
His disaster of an NFL career has definitely affected how he’s viewed as a college football QB. Say what you will about him but he won a national championship and made a lot of big throws to get them there.
That being said if JJ McCarthy is the best QB you can say you’ve developed over the last 20 years, I’m not sure I’d consider you a school that can develop QBs
Yeah I'm not sure we can develop QBs now either. I just think the claim that no QB has been developed at Michigan in the past ~20 years stretchs our awful-to-subpar passing performance to a ridiculous assumption that people treat like fact.
To be fair they're not the only one saying this, I've seen a lot of people make that claim here. I've been curious at to what exactly people mean when they say that. Are they actually thinking of all the Michigan QBs since Lloyd Carr left, including guys like JJ and Devin Gardner or are they just thinking of the bad ones (which sadly is the large majority of them)? So I finally decided to ask someone.
Heck thinking about it further now I think there's an argument for Denard Robinson's development at Michigan. He may not have developed his passing game, but his run game and even his football IQ improved. While he didn't have a great NFL career, he was the only member of that Michigan team to be invited to the combine and did get drafted as a RB. As for his rep as a QB who didn't/couldn't pass he did throw for 338 yards in a come from behind victory over ND, it was the first ever night game at Michigan Stadium and one of my favorite games I've ever watched, made some great memories that night.
Also as a senior Robinson set an FBS career record as the only player to throw for 200 yards and rush for 200 yards in a regular season game 3 times (2 in 2011, 1 in 2012). He set an NCAA record as the first to 1500 yards passing and 1500 yards rushing in a season (2,570/1,702).
Michigan's top 3 single season total offense records are from this time frame. Robinson holds spots 1 and 3, Gardner holds spot 2. Michigan's top 10 list for single game total yards by a QB is all held by QBs from the past 16 years, Robinson has 7 spots, Gardner has 2 and Jake Rudock has 1 spot (#2 on the list).
Denard's funniest record is longest run from scrimmage in Notre Dame Stadium.
JJ threw for 2,991 yards in 2023 with a 72.3% completion rate and a 167.4 rating. That's not exceptional but it's not something a QB who isn't "asked to throw" reaches. Now compare that with his 2021 season where he had 516 yards, 57.6% completion and 152.3 rating. He improved on those stats every year while he played at Michigan.
No better Michigan Football scholar than an OSU fan.
Genuinely, if we paid you a million bucks to accurately identify the actual problem, what would you even say?
I would guess it's cultural. Michigan still sees itself as too "academic" to go all in on the program the way it needs to in order to compete. This is not to say that they actually are more academic, kind you. Just talking about institutional ego.
I still don’t understand what that is supposed to mean or how you assess that. The coach establishes the culture. It’s not something that just lives within the university.
I’ll give you an alternate explanation. Ohio state, Georgia, etc. are better because they are in more talent rich states. They consistently bring in more talented players- numerous five stars join their programs each years whereas we are lucky to get one, two, or even three in an exceptional class. This talent discrepancy can be made up in part with excellent scouting and coaching (I.e Mason graham was a four star), but it’s not easy to do.
536
u/TheOriginalElTigre LSU Tigers • Louisiana Tech Bulldogs 14d ago
We've made many mistakes. A lot of them. Probably well over $100M worth. Probably many mistakes we don't even know about yet with bitter consequences waiting on us in a few years
But at least he won't be one of them