Louis Riddick does not miss. And he didn’t on Wednesday night.
There’s been a ton of internet discourse on just how good former Michigan football quarterback J.J. McCarthy is. NFL personnel seem to believe he’s a potential top 10 pick. Riddick even said on ESPN last week at the NFL scouting combine don’t be surprised if McCarthy goes in the top five of the impending draft.
Then there are the internet fans, who generally reside south of Michigan, north of Kentucky, and sandwiched in from the east and west by Pennsylvania and Indiana. They have a weirdly distorted view of McCarthy’s talents. They’re not alone — we’ve seen fans of other teams chime in with erroneous observations on McCarthy, but we digress.
On Wednesday, Riddick pushed back on the discourse taking place that insists that McCarthy cannot be that good since Michigan was a run-first team mostly when he was a starter. That’s when an OSU fan chimed in to say that McCarthy is particularly abysmal on the road. About that — he’s dead wrong, and Riddick has the stats to back it up.
JJ McCarthy on the road ‘23
@ NEB 75% CMP, 2TD 0INT
@ MIN: 70% CMP, 1TD 0INT
@ MICHST: 77.8%CMP 4TD
@ PA ST: 87.5%CMP 0TD 0INT
@ MD: 52.2% CMP 0 TD 1INT
@ IOWA: 73.3% CMP 0TD
CFP/ALA: 63% CMP 3TD 0INTMaybe YOU should rewatch the road games. https://t.co/1sUahc4i5K
— Louis Riddick (@LRiddickESPN) March 7, 2024
Of those games, McCarthy’s worst were against Penn State (he was 7-for-8 but sustained a leg injury and was then limited) and Maryland the ensuing week when he was still hampered by the leg injury and reportedly didn’t practice all week. But in some of the other games? He threw dimes against Nebraska, Michigan State, Alabama, and Washington. Outside of 2023, while McCarthy’s completion percentage wasn’t stellar against Ohio State, he threw for three touchdowns and ran for another, including two dimes — one downfield to Cornelius Johnson and later in the go-ahead score to Colston Loveland.
But to many football fans in the state of Ohio, facts about McCarthy don’t matter, only vibes.