The Blueprint: How Michigan Rebuilt Itself to Bring Bryce Underwood Home

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — It’s 10:37 a.m. on an unseasonably warm Saturday in mid-October when a Michigan football player sporting three-quarter pants and an oversized No. 19 T-shirt begins snaring passes with panache, delighting spectators who have trickled into Michigan Stadium long before kickoff against Washington.

He makes a hip-flipping snag across his body. A one-handed snatch on a back-shoulder throw. An aerial seizure in which the ball niftily changes hands mid-flight, like a magician practicing misdirection. A gaudy, shimmering chain roughly an inch thick reverberates off his chest with each fluid movement, the body control indistinguishable from that of a wide receiver. And whenever he opens his mouth to smile, which happens quite often when you’re Bryce Underwood, a hometown hero-turned-teenage millionaire now starting at quarterback for the Wolverines, the sparkling grill affixed to his teeth is momentarily visible.

By this point, he's already completed a weekly pregame walk with Michigan offensive coordinator Chip Lindsey, pausing at predetermined yard lines to talk through what the opposing defense likes to run in certain parts of the field. It’s a popular time for fans in the first few rows to reach toward Bryce with autograph paraphernalia extended, begging for a selfie. Lindsey reminds the true freshman to put his earpiece in, to create a natural barrier between himself and the fervent attention that has engulfed Bryce, a native of nearby Belleville, Michigan, roughly 18 miles east of campus, for nearly half his life.

"I don’t see myself as being famous," Bryce told me in a wide-ranging conversation inside Schembechler Hall. "I see myself as a regular person. But, of course, I can’t do certain things. I can’t