ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Spring ball has come to a close for Michigan football and there is one glaring positional battle that hasn’t emerged with a winner.
A team is usually only as good as its quarterback play, and though the Wolverines do things a little differently with more of a pro-style approach, we’ve seen in past years how quickly a season can fall off the map if the signal-caller isn’t up to par.
Though Michigan doesn’t have anyone of former QB J.J. McCarthy’s star caliber, it has some options, and many of those options were on display on Saturday in the annual spring game. Alex Orji started out shaky but ended up going 13-for-18 for 103 yards. His longest pass was for 12 yards but he also rushed five times for 19 yards (if you exclude sacks — which were counted when a defender got a hand on him) with a touchdown. Davis Warren was also impressive going 6-for-9 for 136 yards and two touchdowns — both being long passes to Kendrick Bell and Fred Moore, respectively.
But new head coach Sherrone Moore isn’t ready to say anyone asserted themselves to the point where one may be ahead of another. For now, we’ll have to wait until August, when the Wolverines take the field for fall camp to get a better idea of who may start in Week 1 against Fresno State.
“Everybody’s getting better,” Moore said. “So I think that’ll go into the summer to fall. So we’ll see when we get to fall camp.”
One name that could end up being the winner is Jack Tuttle, who was granted a seventh year by the NCAA and returns for his second year in Ann Arbor.
Though not heralded in terms of expectations, last year’s backup QB for the Wolverines was actually a decorated recruit. 247Sports had Tuttle as the No. 110 player in the country, regardless of position, in the 2018 recruiting class. He was behind the likes of Trevor Lawrence and JT Daniels but ahead of players like former Michigan QB Joe Milton, Sam Hartman, Will Levis, Zach Wilson, Brock Purdy, Cam Rising, and Michael Penix Jr. Tuttle started his career at Utah before transferring to Indiana in 2019 — where he played behind the aforementioned Penix.
Coming off of an injury this spring, Sherrone Moore says that Tuttle certainly has a shot to be the guy in 2024, but it will be up to how he does in fall camp. However, as Moore notes, one of the big reasons why Tuttle hasn’t gotten his opportunity to shine is because he’s played behind elite talent in two quarterbacks who will likely be drafted in the first round of the upcoming NFL draft.
“Yeah, he’ll be in it. I mean, we talked about this as a team, as a staff,” Moore said. “And then the dudes that he backed up are Michael Penix and J.J. McCarthy. So he’s got talent. And we’ll see what happens when he gets to fall camp.”
Of course, there’s also the option of seeking out a quarterback in the transfer portal, but at this juncture, it’s unlikely that someone Michigan considers to be a starting-caliber QB will look for a change of scenery this late into the process.