By the end of the 2015 season, Jake Rudock was playing well enough to garner serious NFL consideration. However, Jim Harbaugh and the Michigan Wolverines waited as long as humanly possible to name Rudock as the starting quarterback before the 2015 campaign, and this year, the head coach is speaking in more glowing terms about his quarterback battle.
On Monday, Harbaugh had this to say, via Nick Baumgardner of MLive.com:
"I'm trying to think back to (other) camps, and I've said it to myself, this group of quarterbacks is playing really well. Better than most, better than most camps I've seen at the start. Sometimes (early in camps the quarterbacks will) struggle with their accuracy or communicating or fumbled snaps on the ground. We haven't been seeing that. We've seen solid play that's improving, too.
"It's getting better every day."
The always entertaining head coach wasn't done, though, as he dropped the hammer in saying the 2016 options are "playing better" than the 2015 group, headlined by Rudock:
"I hate to compare, but we're playing better at that position than we were eight, nine days into camp last year."
Wilton Speight and John O'Korn have emerged at the top of the race, but long-time program quarterback Shane Morris is in the mix and there is additional talent in the freshman class. Still, it is somewhat jarring to consider that this group is outpacing Rudock, especially because of the clear delineation between the Iowa transfer and everyone else by the time the season opened in 2015.
It remains to be seen whether Speight, O'Korn or someone else will take the first snap, but Harbaugh appears pleased with the progress of his quarterbacks.
