School: Michigan
Position: QB
Year: Junior
The Good: JJ McCarthy, beyond being a National Championship QB, is super quick and twitchy yet with an extremely smooth delivery of the football – a good combo! His sense of timing is generally excellent and his processing might be off the charts for only recently having turned 21 years old. Along those lines, McCarthy mostly operated as a facilitator at Michigan – and he is very good at making the play call work – but he can snap into playmaker mode too. He’s hyper athletic, instinctual, and can really scoot; he’s a chain mover who’s effective on rollouts. McCarthy might not have the top arm in this class, but he’s plenty capable of airing it out. He has enough arm to hit holes down the field and can throw deep on a line. McCarthy has a good amount of creativity in his bag too, and it was great to see him take more control of Michigan’s offense in 2023.
The Bad: Despite having a zippy and solid enough arm for the NFL, McCarthy’s arm talent isn’t anything special for a first-round prospect. Some stuff is probably fixable with time – and McCarthy definitely should expect to start his NFL career on the bench – like often setting too wide of a base and misfiring because of it. But most of McCarthy’s drawbacks as a thrower are likely who he is as a player, sans incredible coaching or him bulking up a ton. He just doesn’t have the most natural feel as a passer; his ball placement is generally inconsistent and he needs to develop more touch too. McCarthy doesn’t exactly possess flick-of-the-wrist raw arm strength either, which is part of the reason that he’s a suspect deep ball thrower. While I’ve covered that McCarthy is truly an elite athlete for the position, his jumpiness can backfire at times. He can definitely push it as a scrambling, backyard football type. And for all of Michigan’s accolades with McCarthy under center, he really wasn’t very good in the biggest games. McCarthy threw two pick-sixes in the 2022 CFP semifinal where TCU defenders sat and read his eyes, and then his tape was rough in the 2023 CFP semifinal vs. Alabama; they really were able to accentuate his flaws.
The Bottom Line: JJ McCarthy is a tantalizing prospect; that much isn’t a media creation. With another year of seasoning, he’d likely become the favorite to be the next first overall pick. He’s an ideal QB fit for a West Coast based offense, so the Shanahan Tree teams might be all over him as the next project to groom. McCarthy often does mirror Brock Purdy at his best which, say what you will about Purdy, is a level that gets votes for NFL MVP in the right offense. The flip side is that McCarthy also often mirrors Zach Wilson; there are A LOT of similarities between what Wilson was a prospect and what McCarthy is as a prospect now. I liked Wilson quite a bit more at the time; he had a way better arm, but still…look how that’s turned out. Like Wilson at BYU, it’s fair to wonder how McCarthy might fare without an elite offensive line, let alone Roman Wilson, Cornelius Johnson, Colston Loveland, AJ Barner, Blake Corum, and Donovan Edwards too. All of that factored together, my comp for McCarthy is neither Purdy nor Wilson; McCarthy is more athletic than them and has had more pro-style exposure too, but the more lowly glimpses from both of them that you see in McCarthy are also too glaring to ignore.
Grade: Mid First Round
Pro Comp: Kyler Murray
Games Watched:
- Hawaii 2022
- Maryland 2022
- Iowa 2022
- Penn State 2022
- Michigan State 2022
- Illinois 2022
- Ohio State 2022
- TCU 2022 (CFP Semi)
- Rutgers 2023
- Minnesota 2023
- Nebraska 2023
- Indiana 2023
- Penn State 2023
- Ohio State 2023
- Alabama 2023 (CFP Semi)
- Washington 2023 (CFP Final)
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