How Michigan found itself in perplexing QB situation on heels of national title

A few years into Jim Harbaugh's tenure at Michigan, a handful of coaches and members of the recruiting department gathered in a room to study film of high school quarterbacks. The group included Harbaugh, assistant head coach and passing game coordinator Pep Hamilton, director of player personnel Sean Magee and player personnel analyst Connor Anderson, among others. They watched cutups of 10 or 15 quarterbacks before Harbaugh asked for the tape to be turned off and each person to find their own corner of the room. From there, Harbaugh instructed everyone to rank their top three or four quarterbacks on individual white boards. 

"And everybody kinda went around the room and talked about who they liked the most and why they liked them," Anderson told FOX Sports. "And [Harbaugh] was always open to hear from different people. If you saw it a different way than he did, he was respectful of it. He wasn't demeaning in any way. He wasn't like, ‘Man, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.' He was open. And obviously, at the end of the day, we were going to do what he wanted to do, but that didn't keep him from asking people's opinions at all. He was awesome to work with."

The story offers a window into Harbaugh's process for recruiting quarterbacks, a methodology described by ex-Michigan assistants and recruiting staffers as both collaborative and incredibly broad in scope. Harbaugh and Hamilton, who worked together in Ann Arbor from 2017-18, a stretch of roster building that helped lay the foundation for the program's post-pandemic surge to the College Football Playoff, were said to be exhaustive in their research of underclassmen high school quarterbacks. The former became enamored with a youthful dual-threat prospect from