Michigan's Backup Quarterback Has Never Thrown A College Pass

Brayden Fowler-Nicolosi has thrown 969 passes in college football games. Tommy Carr has thrown none.

Carr is the backup.

Kyle Whittingham said so out loud in Chicago on Thursday, at the first Big Ten Media Days of his Michigan tenure, with none of the padding a coach normally wraps around a depth chart in July. "Tommy Carr is the number two right now, without a doubt, going into fall camp," per Alejandro Zuniga of 247Sports. Whittingham added that Carr had outplayed Chase Herbstreit through the spring.

Without a doubt. About a true freshman, five days before the first practice.

Some background on the freshman, and the recruiting industry could not agree on what it had. On the 247Sports Composite, which blends the services, Carr came in 964th overall in the 2026 class, 49th among quarterbacks and 18th in his own state. Three stars. On 247Sports' own board, which kept moving him up through his senior year, he finished a four-star, 316th overall and 22nd among quarterbacks. Miami of Ohio had his commitment before Michigan flipped it, he is listed at 6-4 and 195 pounds, and he went 18-5 as a starter at Saline High School, twenty minutes down the road from Michigan Stadium.

(Two rankings, one company, 648 places apart. Take the kinder of them and he is still the 22nd-best quarterback in his own class, which is not usually the résumé that beats a 6,938-yard passer to a job.)

(His grandfather is Lloyd Carr, who went 12-0 here in 1997. His older brother starts at quarterback for Notre Dame. His father backed up at Michigan. Hold that thought, because it is the obvious objection to everything below and it deserves an answer rather than a dodge.)

Now the man he is in front of. Fowler-Nicolosi spent four seasons at Colorado State and completed 583 of those 969 throws for 6,938 yards, 38 touchdowns and 29 interceptions. In 2023 alone he threw for 3,460. His 2025 stopped at 82 attempts and 488 yards, because he left the program partway through the season, and he turned up at Michigan as a summer enrollee.

So a graduate transfer with a four-year head start on college football is behind a kid from up the road, and Whittingham, asked about him, said this: "We've got to find out what he's all about." Clayton Sayfie of On3, filing live from the same session, had the coach saying Fowler-Nicolosi needs reps in camp.

Anyway. The genuinely interesting thing Whittingham did on Thursday was not name a backup.

He backed his starter with a criticism#

Bryce Underwood's job was never in question, and Whittingham did not spend his afternoon pretending otherwise. What he volunteered instead was that he had arrived to find Underwood "not nearly as fundamentally sound as he needed to be." Then he declined to leave the sentence sitting there alone: "Not to make excuses, but he didn't really have much of an opportunity last year to become more sound in that regard."

Reporters in the room took the second sentence as pointing at the absence of a dedicated quarterbacks coach in 2025, and Zuniga wrote it up that way with a hedge on it, because Whittingham did not name the thing he was talking around.

Get precise about that, though, because Michigan had a quarterbacks coach last year on paper. Chip Lindsey was hired in December 2024 and announced with both titles, offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach, and he carried both through the season before leaving for Missouri. The complaint is not that nobody had the job. It is that nobody had only that job. Whittingham's answer was to split it in two: Jason Beck runs the offense, Koy Detmer Jr. coaches the quarterbacks and nothing else, and the pair of them have worked together at Syracuse, New Mexico and Utah.

So a head coach in his first summer said the previous staff did not teach the position closely enough, and then restructured the staff so it could not happen again. He did that into a microphone, at his conference's flagship event, about a quarterback he is keeping.

The numbers hold the complaint up. Underwood led Michigan in passing in all thirteen games it played last season, completing 202 of 335 throws, 60.3 percent, for 2,428 yards, with 11 touchdown passes against 9 interceptions and 20 sacks taken. Michigan went 9-4, losing the Citrus Bowl to Texas, and in its three regular-season losses it scored 13 points at Oklahoma, 13 at USC and 9 against Ohio State. Eleven touchdown passes on 335 attempts is a season-long condition rather than a bad afternoon, and it is the sort of thing a position coach exists to fix.

He also carried 88 times for 392 yards and six touchdowns, which is the part of his season that needed nobody's help.

April was the currency#

Alex Drain of MGoBlog had written a week earlier that he expected Fowler-Nicolosi to open camp as the backup. The day after media days he filed the correction against himself, and offered a mechanism:

"Carr is being granted incumbency status and his presence in spring (Fowler-Nicolosi was not here in spring) likely helped that."

That is Drain's read rather than a reason the staff has stated, and it is the most plausible one available. Fowler-Nicolosi enrolled over the summer. Carr enrolled early, went through spring practice, and in the spring game completed 21 of 30, ran ten times for 59 yards and drove the winning touchdown. Asked by John Kornacki who the most pleasant surprise of the spring had been, Whittingham said, "It'd probably be him."

Which makes the two announcements one announcement. A staff that just split the quarterbacks job off from the coordinator job, on the grounds that the position was not being taught closely enough, is a staff that puts a price on teaching time. Through the spring of 2026 the only quarterback behind Underwood buying any of it from these coaches was a three-star freshman who grew up twenty minutes away. Fowler-Nicolosi spent that spring somewhere other than Ann Arbor.

Now the objection, which is fair. A kid named Carr getting the benefit of the doubt at Michigan is the oldest story in this athletic department, and anybody who wants to read the depth chart that way has the family tree to do it with. Two things sit against it. Whittingham ran Utah for twenty-one seasons and went 177-88 doing it, at a program with no particular reverence for Ann Arbor bloodlines, and he arrived here in December with his own staff. And the man being passed is not a scholarship walk-on. He is a 6,938-yard passer, which is a large object to move out of the way as a favor to anybody's grandfather.

Four weeks in which to be wrong#

It is a July depth chart, and the sport is littered with the wreckage of those. Fall camp opens August 5. Whittingham's own sentence about Fowler-Nicolosi, that the staff has to find out what he is all about, is not what a coach says about a man he has finished evaluating; it is what he says about one he has not started. Herbstreit and Brady Smigiel are in the room. Four weeks of live reps in pads is a long time to hold a job you won in shorts.

There is also the small matter of Michigan's own roster page, which on Saturday morning listed four quarterbacks: Carr, Underwood, Herbstreit and Smigiel. The graduate transfer his head coach discussed by name on national television two days earlier is not on it.

(Which is evidence that somebody in that athletic department is having a July, and evidence of nothing whatsoever about a football player. Roster pages in the summer are a genre of fiction.)

Fowler-Nicolosi's 969 college passes are still 969 more than Carr has thrown.

That was true in April, too.

Sources#

Alejandro Zuniga, 247Sports, "Kyle Whittingham shares Michigan QB depth chart at start of fall camp," July 2026, for the depth chart quotes and the Underwood remarks. Clayton Sayfie, On3, live file from 2026 Big Ten Media Days, July 30, 2026. Alex Drain, MGoBlog, "Fall Football Bits Is Ready For Fall Camp," July 31, 2026, for the spring-attendance read. John Kornacki, Kornacki Wolverine Report, for Whittingham's spring assessment of Carr and the spring-game line. Carr's measurables and high school record from 247Sports commitment coverage; the family relationships are carried by that coverage and by Sports Illustrated's Michigan site. His two rankings are both from 247Sports and were read August 1, 2026: the Composite figures (964th, 49th among quarterbacks, 18th in Michigan, three stars) and the site's own final 2026 board (316th, 22nd among quarterbacks, four stars). Chip Lindsey's 2025 titles from Michigan's own December 2024 announcement as carried by 247Sports; Whittingham's 2026 offensive staff from the 247Sports Michigan staff tracker. Whittingham's Utah tenure and record, and his December 26, 2025 hiring, from Michigan and Utah athletics releases as carried in the hiring coverage. Underwood's 2025 statistics, Fowler-Nicolosi's career statistics and Michigan's 2025 results and 2026 schedule from ESPN's team and player pages, read August 1, 2026. Michigan's 2026 quarterback roster read at mgoblue.com, August 1, 2026.