Could footwork fixes be a salve for Bryce Underwood after underwhelming 2025?
Underwood might've been reverting to bad, old habits last year, something the he and his new coaches are working to iron out.
Ann Arbor — It wasn’t hard to figure out Jason Beck sought a measure of diplomacy in his language.
And as Beck, Michigan’s new offensive coordinator under head coach Kyle Whittingham, spoke to reporters last Thursday, the subject of Bryce Underwood and the second-year quarterback’s footwork development came up.
“He's made nice strides, we'll continue to emphasize it and play to his strengths and put him in the best situations to be successful,” Beck said.
Diplomatic words aside, much has been made of Underwood over the last, well, five years, really. From being elevated as the No. 1 overall recruit in the nation, flipping from LSU to Michigan and all that occurred around that — including a massive reported NIL payday — to a largely underwhelming freshman season, the spotlight has been inescapable. And with it has come every opinion, perspective, analysis and hot take under the sun.
It’s true that Underwood’s overall season was unimpressive relative to his recruiting status and some of the talk around him, his own words included. But it’s also evident that there’s not so much scar tissue from mistakes and setbacks last season that Kyle Whittingham and a new staff, including a dedicated quarterbacks coach in Koy Detmer Jr., can’t guide Underwood to an improved 2026, perhaps built on some improved footwork.
His right tackle, Andrew Sprague, certainly was less subtle than his offensive coordinator.
“It seemed like last year there were times where he was really scrambling right away,” Sprague said of Underwood. “He's doing great, stepping up in the pockets, staying in there, setting his feet. He's been launching it, so he looks great.”
Starting all 13 games for Michigan as a true freshman, Underwood completed 60.3 percent of his passes for 2428 yards and 11 touchdowns with nine interceptions. In a vacuum, for a freshman, that’s OK, albeit not great.
But given his stature as the top recruit in his class and the fact some other true freshmen quarterbacks were outshining him — Maryland’s Malik Washington and Cal’s Jaron Keawe-Sagapolutele spring to mind — meant comparison was not kind to the quarterback in various corners of the media, internet chatter or even the Michigan fanbase.
In particular, Underwood struggled with interceptions, sprayed throws and some throws that were just too hard for receivers to handle in short areas, the former two often a result of the quarterback falling back to old high school habits that he could get away with in the KLAA but not in the Big Ten.
While Beck didn’t offer specifics about what the staff wants out of Underwood in this regard, clean footwork does a lot for a quarterback, on top of more accurate and consistent throwing. Footwork is often the base for how a quarterback guides their eyes through a progression and it naturally aids with pocket movement. It can also be tied into the timing of routes breaking or coming open.
There’s no shortage of things good footwork helps for a quarterback, or bad habits harm.
Fixing and changing Underwood’s footwork was not something the new coaching staff arrived in Ann Arbor with plans to do. As they observed through the spring, Beck said, they started to notice some things with Underwood’s footwork and base in the pocket.
“It's interesting because, and I kinda mentioned this, when we got here it was not 'Hey, here's the footwork and this is what we do,'” Beck said. “It was install and go through spring, and now as we've gone through spring, OK, here are some things I've seen, consistently, that we want to work on.”
As Beck noted, there’s an air around camp that Underwood is improved. After a spring where the on-field results might’ve been up-and-down, Beck said, Underwood has been a more consistent presence through this fall camp.
Sprague of course spoke to his belief in Underwood and his improvements.
“He knows our team kind of depends on how he plays and he works so hard,” Sprague said. “Like, every single day, he watches so much film, and everybody knows Bryce is gonna be ready. Nobody, nobody on our team is worried about Bryce.”
Beck also made sure to add that adjustments or changes to footwork aren’t an overnight process, either.
The offensive coordinator explained why something so fundamental and second-nature isn’t something a quarterback can be thinking about as they drop back with the football.
“That stuff is like the last thing you're thinking of,” Beck said. “You're just, 'Hey here's the play, here's my read and here's the coverage.' You're not thinking about that. And so whenever you start playing and bullets become live and real and all that, there's always an element of, you're going to revert to, I don't know what the word is, but the subconscious. Just whatever you're doing without thinking.”
And while Underwood has already made strides in building better habits with his feet, leading to more accurate and consistent throws and pocket movement, they’re not easy to build. It’s muscle memory repped over time. And, old habits die hard.
It’ll just be consistent work on the good habits until they’re the muscle memory for Underwood to fall back on.
“He has just been on an upward trajectory all fall camp,” Whittingham said Friday. “And has really started to come into his own. Don’t want to get too ahead of things because we still got two weeks before we play and a we have a lot of work to do between now and then. But he his progress has been very positive — his progress has been very positive this fall camp.”
