J.J. McCarthy's liberation sets Michigan football free to soar even higher

J.J. McCarthy remembers what it was like last year, impeded by the obstacles placed in front of him. First, he dealt with the uncertainty spawned by a shoulder injury, which slowed his offseason development entering his sophomore year with Michigan football. Then he endured a tense quarterback competition with then-team captain Cade McNamara, which wasn't resolved until after the Wolverines' second game. When it ended with McCarthy named the starter, he was immediately tasked with running a restrictive offense that favored its prolific ground attack.

“There was just a lot of resistance, a lot of stuff to push through,” he recalled.

That is no longer the case. McCarthy now feels liberated, a rising star freed from the shackles of confining game plans.

In his 2023 debut, a 30-3 romp over East Carolina, McCarthy powered the Wolverines. He threw 30 times, produced 26 completions, 280 passing yards and three touchdown strikes. It was a sublime performance that tickled the imaginations of Michigan fans who yearned for the former five-star recruit to be unleashed.

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McCarthy, of course, wanted this, too.

Last October, amid a fit of exuberance following a win over Iowa, he said he was “chomping at the bit to get the 'Air Raid' going.”

In many ways, McCarthy’s ambitions far exceeded those of his coach, Jim Harbaugh. Harbaugh was content with pounding teams into oblivion, leaning on a rugged ground attack that spawned a sudden revival in 2021. The effective formula combined a formidable offensive line with a pair of talented running backs to poison the opposition. It yielded great results, leading to 25 wins in 28 games the past two seasons.

But it lost its potency in the College Football Playoff, where the Wolverines fell to Georgia and TCU in games that highlighted the necessity of having a versatile offense and a quarterback like McCarthy at its controls.

Even Harbaugh arrived at that conclusion this offseason, as he repeatedly mentioned his desire for greater balance and a more robust passing game.

“I want to be 50-50,” he said on Michigan’s in-house radio show earlier this week. “I really do.”

So, there was McCarthy distributing the ball all over the field Saturday, sending it into tight windows, zipping it from one side of the field to the other and dropping it into pockets between defenders. He was surgical as he carved up the Pirates, engineering five straight scoring drives during a bountiful period that spanned the first and third quarters. As acting head coach Jesse Minter said, the scintillating play was a continuation of what took place in practice.

Last month, during preseason camp, Minter approached McCarthy and told him he had never been around a more consistent player and leader.

It was his dependability, he said Saturday, that “leads to performances like that.”

The hard evidence compiled against ECU approached perfection, highlighted by McCarthy’s 86.7% completion percentage and 198.1 passer rating.

But perhaps what stood out most of all was, by the time he exited late in the third quarter, McCarthy had thrown the ball six more times than Michigan ran it. Was that the goal of Kirk Campbell, the team’s quarterbacks coach who made the play calls while Harbaugh and offensive coordinator Sherrone Moore served suspensions stemming from an ongoing NCAA investigation? Or was it the byproduct of an East Carolina defense hell-bent on stopping the run?

To McCarthy, it didn’t really matter.

“It felt like everything was going right,” he said at one point.

“It’s very nice, selfishly as a quarterback, you know what I mean?” he added a few minutes later.

Most everyone did.

This is what Michigan diehards wanted, after all. They wondered why the Wolverines were so reluctant to let McCarthy cook during his intermittent appearances in the nonconference slate last September, when he shared time with McNamara. During that three-game stretch against Colorado State, Hawaii and UConn, the Wolverines didn’t deviate from the ground-based strategy that was their hallmark. Of the 192 offensive plays they executed, 116 were runs. It seemed a missed opportunity to develop the passing game and ascertain just how much McCarthy could improve it.

But a year later, in their opener, the Wolverines were determined to show a different side.

“That we’re a complete team,” star running back Blake Corum said.

Corum bristled at the perception that the Wolverines somehow weren’t one last season, even though there's a convincing argument they weren’t aligned properly to compete beyond their Big Ten footprint.

Even teams far from Ann Arbor understood Michigan’s modus operandi, after all.

It was no mystery.

But now?

“If they know the answer,” McCarthy said, “we’re going to change the question.”

The quarterback smiled, savoring his pithy quote and what it may mean for the future.

As he implied, the possibilities seem endless. When free and unencumbered, as McCarthy seems to be these days, it often tends to be that way.

“A beautiful feeling,” he said.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan football unleashes QB J.J. McCarthy; what's his limit?