Almost four years ago, I heard a tidbit about Jim Harbaugh – that at the time he was the first Michigan QB in years to throw a TD pass in the NFL…and that this little factoid kept Rick Mirer from committing to Michigan. 

Well, with the Harbaugh Era closed, and with Jim’s last starting QB heading to the NFL, I thought it would be a good opportunity to update that piece. We’ll power through the Bo years, sigh with longing for the Moeller and Carr years, and try to stay calm about the Rodriguez and Hoke years. The Harbaugh years will earn a bit more scrutiny due to recency (and many narrative changes over the past few seasons).

I reserve the right to play fast and loose with the term “’Starting’ QB” – tons of fuzziness there: backups who played due to injury, transfers, and decisions like "let's turn Devin Gardner into a wide receiver then ask him to start at QB again after we forgot to have any other reasonable option" and "let's bench Devin Gardner for ‘motivational reasons’."

Bo. Bo Schembechler arrived at Michigan to take over after Bump Elliot’s 1968 team went 8-2, losing badly to Ohio State (National Champions and one of the most stacked OSU teams in history btw). Elliot’s final QB was Dennis Brown, a 3-year starter who set a lot of Michigan career records, including career TD passes with 20. Wait. 20? I’m checking again…yep, still 20. 20 career TD passes in 3 years as a starter. Brown didn’t sniff the NFL, instead spending 20+ years as an assistant coach, and Bump Elliot had a cup of coffee as the Michigan Asst. AD before spending the next 21 years as AD the for Iowa, where 20 TD passes in a career is still record-setting (sorry, couldn’t resist). RIP Bump (1925-2019). 

So Bo had to start fresh with a new QB.

The Bo Years:

So...yeah, Jim Harbaugh can say that he was the one successful NFL QB that Bo produced. Bo’s early QBs were breaking passing records at Michigan…but when the new record is something like “a 57% career completion rate”, maybe that’s not a good thing for their pro prospects...

Bo’s legacy gets more tarnished the more scrutiny it gets (for, uh, multiple reasons). It’s not like his offenses cared much about the passing game, but even if I was to do the Running Back version of this Diary, there wouldn’t have been many Michigan RBs in the NFL from this era either. His successor as Head Coach was a good one though, someone who clearly cared about offense.

[side note: Do you think that Dave Brandon was deliberately treating the Bo-era players like shit as some sort of “I’ll show them” thing? He was very sensitive about his failures as a football player, he’s clearly a petty, vindictive man, and that would be entirely in character for him…]

Oh, and I got pipped on this fun fact, but one of QB/basketballer/decathlete David Hall’s daughters, Kara (UM tennis captain and Zendaya’s stunt double), ended up marrying John Wangler’s son Jack (UM wide receiver 2013-2017). Besides the certainty that their kids will be phenomenal athletes, I’m pretty sure we could eventually wed one of the Hall-Wangler kids to a Glasgow heir and thereby produce the Kwisatz Haderach.

Next up are the all-too-short Moeller Years:

That's solid success, even if two data points technically doesn’t make for a track record. Both Grbac and Collins had long pro careers, and coupled with Harbaugh, who was still mid-career at the time, you can see why the Michigan QB started to be someone you paid attention to. Moeller had an interesting career path too: how many guys go DC -> OC -> HC? RIP Gary.

Fun fact: the 2000 Kansas City Chiefs’ QB room was Elvis Grbac, Todd Collins, and 44-year-old Warren Moon (who once passed for 500+ yards against the Chiefs).

You can argue that Carr rode Moeller's coattails, but that would be a disservice to the dominant teams that Carr put together in the late 90s. 

The Carr Years: Better Than You Remember

Lloyd Carr’s legacy is 1) 1997, and 2) “the game passed him by”, but dude he could pick ‘em at QB. 

At one point during this era, the Michigan QBs playing (some form of) pro football all at once were: Harbaugh, Grbac, Collins, Dreisbach, Griese, Brady.

Here's a mind-bender: when Chad Henne entered the NFL, Scott Dreisbach was just retiring from the AFL. Carr sent EVERYONE to the NFL, even if all they got was a cup of coffee or a sad dose of reality. I included Matt Gutierrez and Ryan Mallett, because why not - I don't think Michigan 'owns' their NFL success or lack thereof, but they were part of the program...even if I was rooting for Mario Manningham to punch Mallett on the sideline during that Wisconsin game where he kept completing passes to the WRs' feet.

Here’s another fun fact (courtesy of u/Gitback): During the 1999 season every AFC West team had a Michigan QB on the roster, 3 of them starters.

• Harbaugh (San Diego)
• Grbac (Kansas City)
• Griese (Denver)
• Dreisbach (Oakland) [IR]

Note: you need to conveniently forget that in 1999 the Seahawks (with starting QB Jon Kitna) were still in the AFC West, and in fact won the division that year, but I’ll allow it.

Ok, grab your ice cream and turn on The Notebook, because things are about to get ROUGH. 

RichRod and Hoke Years: 

Here's a sobering thought about Rich Rodriquez: Justin Feagin notwithstanding…we were (presumably) one injury away from having a senior Antonio Bass as RichRod’s first QB at Michigan. How different does 2008 look with Bass at QB? Instead, we got square-peg-round-hole’d with Threet and Sheridan…who each had one moment-of-brilliance game.

My hot take is that Tate Forcier was Johnny Manziel before there was Johnny Manziel. Without the on-field success. But given that he was the only one on the roster who could even vaguely quarterback at the time, he did really well. And don’t forget that he was the QB that RichRod went to whenever a lot of passing was going to be required. Probably was never going to be a pro. Also, he had to deal with the Michigan fanbase going, "wait a second, weren't you named Jason last year?"

I will never forgive Hoke, Borges, and Nussmeier for what they did to Denard Robinson and Devin Gardner. If we're being honest, Denard probably wasn't going to be a pro QB either, but damned if Hoke and Borges didn't snuff that little flame of hope even so. Trying to make Denard an under-center pocket passer was a crime against the Football Gods, and the Football Gods duly punished us for it. Oh yeah, and that tendency Brady Hoke had for refusing to acknowledge injuries? By the end of his career, the most exciting player in football couldn’t throw a pass.

Gardner…man. If there's anyone who fought against a coaching staff determined to break their spirit, it's Devin Gardner. Aside from basically having to coach himself for 3 years, he also had to learn the WR position during that time (remember he was the #1 receiver for a good chunk of 2012). I wish he would have gone to a more patient NFL team: you’re not beating out Tom Brady, and some other team could have used him…after putting all his ribs back into place. 

Shane Morris, as much as Gardner, is an indictment on the Hoke Era, because 1) Hoke staked the team's entire future on the assumption that he'd work out, 2) he got starts over Gardner for non-injury reasons, 3) as far as I can tell nobody bothered to coach him - he threw only a risky fastball when he got here and threw only a risky fastball when he played, and, of course 4) the Shane Morris Fiasco (TM). He spent his year under Harbaugh in a weird/ineffective WR package. 

Anyway, here’s Wonderwall.

The Harbaugh Era

I’d like to start off this section with a user comment made 4 years ago:

Took the long route, but shoutout to this dude, who predicted a pro career for Joe Milton after one game in 2020 and will likely be proven right. If Joe applies himself. Which took until his second year at Tennessee – his fifth year of being a college football player – for him to start doing. I’m rooting for Joe, if for no other reason than wanting another “sometimes you gotta unleash the dragon” QB in the pros.

So…this wasn’t like the Carr transition, where Moeller clearly started something special and left the cupboard STOCKED. Harbaugh had to basically start fresh after an abysmal predecessor, and though he gets credit for developing Rudock, he also gets the blame for whatever it was that John O'Korn did while he was here. Speight too was on an upward trajectory before injury, and we also need to remember that Brandon Peters had his head taken off a couple times. QBs can be broken.

Shea Patterson earned himself some ribbing with his commitment to golf and his Infinite Regression in 2019, but I have an alternative theory: Shea Patterson hates golf, he was just hiding out at the golf course so that then-OC Josh Gattis couldn’t find him and ‘coach’ him. I could make an entire post just about Patterson, but I do feel for the guy. He had talent. My memory of him is that he could be an absolute sniper…if he understood what he was looking at and if his pre-snap decisions were correct. Those things happened less and less over his last season, and so my memory of him is also a lot of instances of “bailed out of a clean pocket and ran himself into a sack while DPJ was 10 yards past the nearest defender”…

And I will never understand what happened between 2019 and 2020. Whatever Joe Milton did to ‘earn’ the starting role in 2020 over Dylan McCaffrey, we can only speculate. What we do know is that out of 2 handpicked Harbaugh QBs, we got a grand total of 5 starts, 4 of them disasters, before losing both. Cade ”Moxie” McNamara was pressed into service early, and honestly it all kinda worked out in the end: if Milton had stayed, I would bet anything that he would have started for Michigan in 2021…

My $1 says that Cade “a Chip On Your Shoulder is a Double-Edged Sword” McNamara doesn’t play in the NFL; athletic limitations aside, neither Michigan nor (especially) Iowa are great places to pad one’s stats, and he’s had a few rough injuries over the past couple of years. Next season he returns to Iowa, where, for the 3rd season in a row, he will try to prove himself worthy of the starting job at Michigan. 

Conclusion

Interesting that a coaching change and a QB change coincided with each other so much over the past 55+ years. Bo, Moeller, Carr, RichRod, Harbaugh, and now Sherrone Moore all started their Michigan head coaching careers needing to choose a new starting QB – none of them even had the option to retain the prior starting QB. Hoke, of course, was gifted Denard Robinson and though he did his level best to fumble that gift, 2011 was the best offense Hoke ever fielded. That’s not a coincidence. Experienced quarterbacks matter.

Michigan’s run of pro QBs came to a grinding halt after Henne, and the offense struggled for a good long while. That’s not a coincidence either. I’m hopeful that Sherrone Moore can restart the QB success story again…because we’re not always going to have a generationally good running game courtesy of Blake Corum. QB is still the most important position on the field.

At this point, I don’t know if Harbaugh’s former reputation as an offense-first coach holds up under scrutiny, and, looking at this list, I don’t know about his former reputation as a ‘QB whisperer’ either. “Josh Johnson, Andrew Luck, and probably JJ McCarthy” does not a guru make.

We're also in an era of unprecedented mobility in college football: top QBs who lose playing time competitions are almost sure to transfer. The pressure is there for QBs to shine on Day 1 or not at all, meaning development time is compressed and the question of which school "owns" a QB's NFL success, or lack thereof, will become even more murky than it already is.

And now it's been a couple years since a Michigan QB has thrown an NFL touchdown pass. Brady carried a LOT of water for us in the League, but his career is over, and JJ’s is just starting. 

Go Blue