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DETROIT, Mich. — There will be a new sheriff in town, no matter how you look at it, come this fall in Ann Arbor.
While incumbent quarterback Cade McNamara started the final game of 2020, that’s his sole turn at taking the reins from the first snap, so if he’s to win the job this year — and he enters fall camp as the team’s starter — it’ll be somewhat uncharted territory.
But he’s being pushed by former five-star, early-enrollee J.J. McCarthy, and is soon to be pushed by Texas Tech transfer Alan Bowman.
McNamara said on Saturday that he doesn’t shy away from competition, in fact, he embraces it. While that competition will begin in earnest as fall camp starts on Aug. 6, he’s enjoyed seeing his future internal foes get better this offseason throughout summer conditioning.
“J.J.’s doing good as well as our entire quarterback room,” McNamara said. “We’ve been doing a lot of work together with the wide receivers, tight ends and running backs. Overall, I think we’re performing well. We had a good spring — so did Dan (Villari) and now in addition with Alan (Bowman). We have a lot more depth at the quarterback position now. Competition is always great.”
What Michigan needs, and has long needed, is a quarterback of old to walk through the doors of Schembechler Hall. Not a throwback pro-style signal-caller as much as a bona fide leader, someone who can galvanize the offense.
While Jake Rudock, Wilton Speight and Shea Patterson all had leadership qualities, the offense appears to really rally behind McNamara in ways that we haven’t seen in Ann Arbor in some time. Once he entered the Wisconsin game in the second half, though the Wolverines were being blown out, the offense moved down the field with seeming ease. Against Rutgers, it was McNamara that showed off how much of a gamer he is, helping lead the team to a triple-overtime win. He gained notoriety when his postgame speech somehow hit the internet in the hours after the game.
Jim Harbaugh proclaimed McNamara the starter entering fall camp — a position he can either affirm or lose, depending on how he handles said competition. But being a quarterback of any team is more than just reading a defense and making the throws. It’s about having the other 10 players believe in you while you try to get your best out of them, simultaneously.
Being a leader is easier said than done, but McNamara is up for the challenge.
“To be honest, I enjoy that part of being a quarterback,” McNamara said. “Being a quarterback, you’re given a leadership role, no matter what your leadership type is prior. That’s something that I’ve embraced and that’s something that I’ve continued to work on, being to influence my teammates and help our team win — that’s something I’ve taken seriously.”
As noted, McNamara enters fall camp as the starter, just as he was throughout spring ball. He feels like the spring went about as well as it could have and he’s excited to see how far he can push himself as well as the offense.
But now, there’s a target on his back, with the other quarterbacks coming for him. However, he has the requisite experience he needs, having actually seen the field in 2020, to help him do what he knows he needs to do.
“I think my overall comfortability, just my comfort with being the starter I think is — just getting used to running with the ones, running against the one (defense) and really performing well,” McNamara said. “I think overall I had the spring I wanted. I performed really well. I’m very pleased with how my spring went and I’m looking to building on that.”
They always say, ‘You can’t teach experience,’ and now McNamara has some. He’s using all of that to his advantage this summer, knowing Josh Gattis’ offense as well as what teams might bring at him defensively, to help improve anything and everything before the season opener on Sept. 4 comes along.
“Just being in those situations helps me really apply what I’m working on in practice to visualizing it in a game,” McNamara said. “Now I’ve been on the field, I’ve been in a game, I’ve seen the speed and noticing what we can work on in practice and what will work on game day is kind of the perspective that I’ve been able to gain.”
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