Michigan’s football identity helped make JJ McCarthy a winner in Ann Arbor. It may also be part of the reason his NFL path has gotten rocky.
McCarthy arrived as a starter in 2022 after seeing limited action as a freshman in 2021 behind Cade McNamera, and he never piled up eye-popping passing numbers. What he did do was help Michigan keep winning. He went 3-0 against Ohio State, 2-0 as a starter, captured two Big Ten titles and finished off a historic 15-0 season with a national championship.
That run made him a first-round pick by the Minnesota Vikings after the title game. On paper, it looked like a strong fit. Minnesota had Justin Jefferson, Jordan Addison and TJ Hockenson on offense, plus Kevin O’Connell, who is widely praised as a quarterback whisperer, and a defense led by Brian Flores that was described as hellacious.
Two years later, the picture looks very different. McCarthy has been traded to the New York Giants for a fifth-round pick. He was the Vikings’ third-string quarterback for the first three games this season, a stunning drop after he entered the league with so much momentum.
The question now is how much of that belongs to Michigan.
The Wolverines have long built their offense around a big line and a punishing run game, and that approach was at its most dominant from 2021-2023. Michigan leaned on Hassan Haskins, Blake Corum and Donovan Edwards, and McCarthy’s role was largely to manage the offense, hit big plays when they were there and take care of the ball.
That was by design. Michigan’s coaches made it clear they were trying to win games, not prepare players for the NFL. Their response when asked about McCarthy’s ceiling was that he could do more if needed, but they did not want to ask him to be Superman.
The numbers back up how controlled that role was. Over three seasons, McCarthy attempted 713 passes and never topped 332 in a single year. By comparison, Kyle McCord threw 348 passes for Ohio State in 2023 and 593 after transferring to Syracuse.
McCarthy’s stat line at Michigan was efficient: 46 passing touchdowns, 10 rushing touchdowns, 5,865 passing yards, 576 rushing yards, a 68.1% completion rate, and a 2023 Big Ten QB of the year honor. He never threw more than five interceptions in his two seasons as a starter, and his passer ratings were 155.0 in 2022 and 167.4 in 2023.
Still, the style of play invited doubt. Even when Michigan was winning big, the offense could make McCarthy look more like a distributor than a quarterback who was being asked to carry everything.
That became especially obvious in 2023 at Penn State, when Michigan closed out the game with 32 straight runs. The Wolverines won, but it also sharpened the question of whether a first-round quarterback was being used in a way that would fully prepare him for the next level.
McCarthy’s NFL start has only added fuel to that discussion. He was injured during his rookie season and missed the whole year.
Sam Darnold then had a renaissance season, and the Vikings won 14 games. After that, Darnold was allowed to leave, and McCarthy and Minnesota did not meet expectations.
He was demoted to QB3 before Monday’s trade.
Michigan’s recruiting picture raises the same issue in a different form. Bryce Underwood was a five-star recruit who chose Michigan after first being committed to LSU, and he has since said going to Michigan was a business decision. That suggests Michigan had to pay significantly more than it might have if the program were built differently on offense.
There are other examples, too. Notre Dame’s CJ Carr and Oregon’s Dante Moore were under recruited by Jim Harbaugh and his staff, but the larger question is whether they would have been drawn to Michigan if the offense looked more quarterback-friendly.
Michigan’s track record at the position outside of McCarthy is thin. Before him, the last quarterback from the program to have any real NFL success was Chad Henne, and most of that came as a backup in Kansas City after he flamed out as a starter in Miami.
Tom Brady remains the standard everyone points to, and Michigan has earned credit - including from Brady himself - for developing him. But Brady was also the 199th overall pick, and there was plenty of fortune involved in him making the Patriots’ roster and eventually becoming a starter.
Now Michigan is back at the same crossroads. Can it keep winning with an offense so run-heavy that it scares off top quarterback recruits?
Can it keep finding and developing a player like McCarthy? The program’s championship history shows how hard that is.
Before 2023, Michigan’s last national title came in 1997, when it shared the crown with Nebraska. Before that, it was 1948.
Those are the questions hanging over the post-McCarthy era. If Bryce Underwood develops, a lot of the criticism about Michigan’s quarterback pipeline will quiet down. If he doesn’t, the uphill battle to recruit quarterbacks will only get steeper.
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