Gary McNamara was about to message his wife, Nicole, to start searching for the best route from their home in Reno, Nev., to Nick Saban’s cathedral in Tuscaloosa, Ala., when he heard a booming, unmistakable voice down the hall.
“Cade!”
It was Super Bowl weekend of 2018 and his son, Cade McNamara — a 6-foot-1 quarterback recruit with enough self-confidence to power the Las Vegas strip — had just finished visiting Alabama. Saban saw McNamara’s feel and vision as a project worth investing in. Though technically still committed to Notre Dame, Cade seemed to find his fit.
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Then, the voice.
It boomed from a head that had just popped out of a doorway. The McNamaras had traveled to Ann Arbor, Mich., after their trip to Alabama, and they were now standing outside Jim Harbaugh’s office for the first time. Harbaugh was ready to mingle.
Michigan’s head coach is unique. For many, he’s a lot. For some, he’s too much. Others need time to get comfortable.
Cade McNamara needed about 14 seconds.
“Within five minutes they had found a conference room and were watching film,” says Gary, who described the interaction as “a true football exchange.” Within the first half-hour, a recruiting staffer pulled Gary aside to let him know Harbaugh didn’t act like this with other prospects. By the time they got in the car to head home, Cade had decided to change his commitment to Michigan.
“In high school, Cade complained practices weren’t long enough. That’s him,” Gary says, chuckling. “Jim definitely reminds me of Cade. … There’s an extreme respect there that goes beyond what anybody really knows.”
Harbaugh and McNamara, who will lead No. 2 Michigan (12-1) vs. No. 3 Georgia (12-1) on Friday in a College Football Playoff semifinal, naturally share a verbal and nonverbal football language. McNamara’s high school coach, Shawn Dupris, gave him the keys to a complex offense as an underclassman and helped teach him how to win.
“If you’re playing your grandma — whom you love dearly — in checkers, Cade,” Dupris would say, “someone has to win and someone has to lose.
“So, why lose?”
Michigan’s football coach and offensive leader share a feel, a respect and an appreciation of what it means to be a quarterback. Harbaugh, who once broke his hand punching Jim Kelly in the face after Kelly insinuated Harbaugh was soft during a TV broadcast, played the position for the Wolverines from 1983 to 1986. He then spent 13 more years as an NFL quarterback.
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Harbaugh became Michigan’s football coach in 2015. It took him every inch of six seasons to find his blueprint quarterback.
Harbaugh found some of himself in McNamara. He also, perhaps, found his ideal quarterback for his ideal version of Michigan football.
“Hey, Coach,” Dupris recalls McNamara texting once, “I just beat Grandma in checkers.”
The McNamara boys (Cade, Kyle and Jake) had the backyard of every kid’s dream.
The family lived on a golf course, and the yard, outlined by a split-rail fence, was essentially a ballpark. In baseball season, the boys made Gary, a former college baseball center fielder and coach, chalk the yard into a diamond. In the fall, he painted football lines. Dad colored two fence posts yellow to serve as foul poles. He hung Christmas lights along the back fence so they could play at night.
And while this sounds like something out of a Hallmark movie, Gary’s quick to point out the reality. He’s a former competitive athlete, the three boys are close in age, they all have Type-A personalities and they grew up inside college baseball dugouts. There were cute moments.
There were also moments of adolescent explosion.
“I’d be in the golf clubhouse and someone would walk over and say, ‘Hey, so I was going down the fairway earlier and I saw the boys playing ball in the backyard,’” Gary recalls. “And the story would always be about how one of them had dropped a bat and was chasing the other, or one’s dropping an F-bomb.”
Cade McNamara pitches against his brothers. (Courtesy of Gary McNamara)Gary eventually instituted a rule that no games were allowed to take place unless he was in the yard to officiate. Eventually, ejections followed. Hit the showers, put on your pajamas, go to bed and try again tomorrow.
It was the backyard football Thanksgiving episode of “Friends,” but for real. With legitimate athletes. Cade, of course, will start in the Orange Bowl on Friday. Kyle is a rising sophomore wide receiver at Western Kentucky. His coach at the Lipscomb Academy, former NFL quarterback Trent Dilfer, once referred to Kyle as “the toughest player I’ve ever been around.” Jake, a Class of 2022 quarterback prospect, has multiple scholarship offers. Three alphas fighting over one ball.
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The family jokes that the boys will never see a football game more demanding than the Wiffle ball wars in the backyard. They loved to scrap, especially the oldest. Gary’s voice gets a little more serious when he talks about Cade’s role in that. How insanely organized he was back then. How, as a preteen, he demanded Gary not just chalk those lines, but chalk them exactly right. Every detail mattered. Every win seemed to matter. Every loss — even the ones that seemed childish and innocent — seemed to ache.
The yard isn’t where Cade McNamara learned how to compete. He was probably born with that, too. The yard, and those plastic ball-and-bat fights, was simply his first vehicle. It’s where his family first saw the look many Michigan fans now surely know. The one that doesn’t blink.
It’s the look Gary saw watching ABC’s telecast of Michigan at Nebraska on Oct. 9 on his phone while at a Western Kentucky game. Seconds after Cade threw a costly third-quarter interception that seemed to turn Memorial Stadium into the loudest gathering of breathing souls on the planet, the camera turned and caught McNamara square in the face.
Dad had seen the expression before. So had Mom. Gary turned to Jake, who had seen it, too.
“Cade’s totally fine right now,” they said to each other. They were, of course, correct.
Minutes later, Michigan finished a 10-play touchdown drive that included a critical McNamara third-down conversion in U-M territory. The drive gave the Wolverines the lead back, shut up one of the more raucous road crowds of the year and put Michigan back at ease.
For the McNamaras, it was the most familiar of scenes. For Michigan fans, it was a night to remember. For Jim Harbaugh, it was evidence of the only thing he’s really ever been looking for in a quarterback at Michigan: someone who can manage the position the way he did. Someone who can function at his best when everything else is going to hell. Someone who is as comfortable in chaos as Harbaugh always has been.
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Someone who can pass the most important test a quarterback can face.
“After they throw an interception, do they have the ability (to come back) and drive the offense for points?” an ecstatic Harbaugh asked that night in Lincoln, beaming after the 32-29 win. “Right there, in a nutshell, you can tell so much about any quarterback.”
Cade McNamara and Jim Harbaugh celebrate after beating Nebraska in October. (Dylan Widger / USA Today)From 2015 through the 2020 opener, Harbaugh started six quarterbacks at Michigan. Each had a different story. Some got closer to success than others. But no one was the exact right fit. Fans clamored for the next guy year after year. From Jake Rudock to Wilton Speight to John O’Korn. Then, to Brandon Peters and, eventually, Shea Patterson, Dylan McCaffrey and Joe Milton.
But McNamara? He’s always been different. Fans were happy to see him when he replaced a struggling Milton against Rutgers in 2020, rallying the Wolverines from a 17-0 deficit to a 48-42 triple-overtime win. But Michigan went 2-4 in a COVID-19-shortened season, and as soon as the calendar hit 2021, fan chatter turned to five-star freshman QB J.J. McCarthy.
McNamara, though, won the starting job. He’s not real big. He’s not real fast. Every missed throw drew criticism from exhausted fans who were long out of patience with their program. But Harbaugh, Michigan’s staff and Michigan’s roster never wavered from the McNamara decision.
Because in so many of the same ways Harbaugh has long been different as a competitor, so is McNamara.
“This will be the greatest comeback in Nevada history.”
Whether those were the exact words of sophomore quarterback Cade McNamara to his Damonte Ranch High School teammates depends on who you ask. But no one doubts the sentiment.
It was halftime of the biggest game in school history, and the situation was bleak. The Mustangs trailed Nevada 4A powerhouse Reed — winner of 26 straight games — 31-7 in the region title game and appeared on their way to basketball season. McNamara was in his first year as a full-time starter after sharing duties with an older player as a true freshman (sound familiar?). McNamara’s first year on varsity was up and down and Damonte had two quarterbacks who could play, but Dupris couldn’t shake something he felt about McNamara: Nothing shook the youngster.
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McNamara, as a high school freshman, navigated the pocket without sweat. Ask 10 quarterback coaches for their respective theories on pocket presence and you might get two dozen answers. But what’s rarely debated is the idea that the best quarterbacks come by it naturally. McNamara, Dupris figures, had it the day he was born.
Dupris had been watching McNamara dodge bigger players to make throws into open space since middle school. So entering McNamara’s sophomore year, Dupris started to experiment. He loaded up the young quarterback’s plate with offensive concepts. Overloaded it, in fact.
“As much as possible,” says Dupris, a former college quarterback himself, chuckling. “Which, to be honest with you, was everything.”
The more McNamara digested, the more Dupris tried. Damonte would script the first 10 plays so Dupris and McNamara could get a feel for what defensive looks the opponent was showing. From there, the coach and quarterback adjusted together.
Dupris taught McNamara how to read a field — every inch of it and not just the stuff that feels like it might be important. Everything. It was advanced training for an advanced player. McNamara, who has also long worked with quarterback coach Jordan Palmer, was already blessed with a natural throwing motion (thanks again, Gary) and his obsession with winning had found a much larger vehicle than the one in his childhood yard.
For those who obsess easily, football is a natural pairing. There is so much to learn. So much to master. So much with which to struggle. So much to conquer. Dupris and McNamara studied tape together. McNamara learned about route combinations and how different coverages react to each of them. He learned how to make pre-snap adjustments and gain a full understanding of the run game, how it works and how to properly build a play-action series off it.
Eventually, it paid off. McNamara’s four-year career ended with a state-record 12,804 passing yards and 146 touchdowns. By the time McNamara was a senior, Dupris estimates roughly 90 percent of his throws came off decisions made before the snap. He knew how to throw receivers open. He processed reads like a college passer. And that is why coaches who truly understand quarterbacks eventually fell in love with him.
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McNamara was barely 6 feet 1 and 200 pounds. His 40 time didn’t set records. He couldn’t throw a ball 80 yards. His brain and his drive, however, were different. Which is why Saban quietly moved him to the top of his QB recruiting board two years after signing Mac Jones. It’s why Notre Dame wanted him. It’s why Harbaugh wanted him.
But back to that locker room against Reed, down 31-7. Dupris told the team to trust its training. He’d seen the group rally behind McNamara before; he knew it was possible. McNamara figured it was a certainty. Not because he believed in miracles.
But because he’s Cade McNamara. And in his mind, no one walking this earth can play quarterback like he can.
“It’s just his attitude. If you put him in a situation right now against an NFL quarterback, he will firmly believe and say, ‘This football team is better with me as a starter than that guy as a starter,’” Gary says. “I’ve had conversations with NFL quarterbacks who have worked out with Cade over the years and they all laugh and say: ‘The beauty of Cade is, he thinks he’s better than all of us.’”
The only one who doesn’t laugh at that, of course, is Cade. He wasn’t laughing in that playoff game against Reed, either. Damonte Ranch scored 42 points after halftime, Reed’s historic winning streak was snapped and former Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly offered McNamara that summer after watching just the second half of the game.
McNamara’s career has been on the rise ever since.
McNamara last month quarterbacked Michigan to its first win over Ohio State since 2011. (Junfu Han / USA Today)Gary’s story about Cade going through throwing sessions with NFL quarterbacks and truly believing he’s better is notable within McNamara’s present context.
Like his head coach, McNamara’s only focus right now is preparing for Georgia. What happens with McNamara and McCarthy next season, though, has already been a talking point among Michigan fans in 2021.
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McCarthy has played in 10 games this season. The 6-foot-3, 197-pound freshman is a physical prototype for the modern game. His arm strength and deep-shot accuracy are electric. His speed is a weapon and, like his older teammate, he’s madly in love with the game. There have been moments this year when McCarthy has looked like a true phenom. And moments when he’s looked like a freshman.
One reason McCarthy gets occasional action — and could in the playoff — is because Michigan likes what he gives the team in the run game. There are also times when the staff likes McCarthy in a shot attempt situation vs. certain defenses. McNamara hasn’t made every deep throw this year. But he’s made more than enough.
McNamara’s public thoughts on the situation have been simple: If McCarthy’s play helps Michigan win, he’s all for it. Privately, he’s told those close to him that he simply views the situation as “when I go back in there, it just means the field will be a little bit shorter.” McNamara knows McCarthy is talented, but he also knows he’s a teammate. So while McNamara knows McCarthy wants his (the key word here) job, he also knows it’s part of his job — as the leader of the QB room and, in turn, the team — to help the youngster learn and grow.
Same time, McNamara has yet to ever back down from a fight. No one, including McCarthy, expects that to change now.
Or Jim Harbaugh.
Peyton Manning recently recalled an encounter with Harbaugh in 2012 when the coach was still with the San Francisco 49ers. Manning was a free agent considering the 49ers. Harbaugh was a head coach interested in Manning — but also still, at heart, an alpha quarterback who was about to meet with another one.
Harbaugh insisted on playing catch with Manning that day, something he always does with prospective QBs for his program. He wanted to see Manning’s zip for himself. But Manning left the meeting with a suspicion that Harbaugh, then 48, wanted to show Manning that the old man’s arm was still good enough. Whether it was doesn’t matter. Harbaugh surely thought so. In his heart of hearts, he might still.
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Crazy? Oh yeah. But also the truest sign of a relentless competitor who trusts himself more than anyone will ever know or understand. Kind of like a high school kid who walks away from a throwing session with a bunch of pro quarterbacks and, without blinking, tells his dad he was the best one there.
You can doubt Cade McNamara. You can question his arm, his speed or his strength. He’s not going to hear you.
Because he’s busy beating your grandma at checkers.
(Top photos: Gregory Shamus and Justin Casterline / Getty Images)
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