



ANN ARBOR, MI -- "And that's another touchdown for NC State Wolfpack quarterback Wilton Speight, the Michigan transfer!" That's a sentence that became dangerously close to reality not too long ago.

But thankfully for the Michigan faithful, Speight is leading the Wolverines, having come off his best performance in an already solid year -- and one where he set a record for best half by a Michigan quarterback.

But things weren't always that way.

Speight, a former three-star Richmond, Virginia native was the next great quarterback of the region, following in the footsteps of Russell Wilson and Jake McGee, wasn't heavily recruited. But then-Michigan offensive coordinator Al Borges recruited him to fit his and former Wolverines coach Brady Hoke's pro-style system. He was set to be the heir apparent after former five-star Shane Morris had his turn. But after a dismal 2013 season, Borges was fired in favor of Alabama offensive coordinator Doug Nussmeier. The Wolverines got worse, and Speight looked on during his redshirt season, firmly behind Devin Gardner and Shane Morris.

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Then the unimaginable happened: after Brady Hoke was fired, the hottest coach in all of football at any level, Jim Harbaugh, returned to coach his alma mater.

Great news for Michigan fans; bad news for Wilton Speight. At least at the time.

Harbaugh saw a team that was soft, and one that needed competition to get the cream to rise to the top. That meant four hour practices, grueling workouts, lots of very loud and blunt correction by the coaching staff.

Speight was very publicly on one end of that correction, as the HBO series Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel came to Ann Arbor to document Harbaugh's transition to the college game and how the 5-7 Michigan team that he took over was adapting. The quarterback battle was fierce, without an obvious guy to take the lead for Michigan at the time. Shane Morris was expected to be at the top, but true freshman early-enrollee Alex Malzone was getting a lot of praise as well. Speight, seemingly on the outside looking in, had gotten used to the perceived country club atmosphere that Michigan Football had become after Lloyd Carr had left in 2008, and wasn't used to the grind of the Harbaugh era.

That's when he was caught on camera, although with his face blurred out, with Harbaugh barking: "I'm just telling you the right way to do it. If you want to look at me with that look, go [expletive deleted] look it somewhere else."

And he nearly did.

Speight got to fall camp in 2015, and that recommendation seemed like a good idea. By this time, he was completely buried on the depth chart, sitting at fifth in the rotation. Iowa's incumbent starting quarterback Jake Rudock was handed his walking papers in favor of the younger, more mobile C.J. Beathard, and saw an opportunity for him to thrive for one year in Ann Arbor. Morris and Malzone still were ahead of him, and Harbaugh flipped former four-star quarterback Zach Gentry from Texas.

Still trying to overcome the four-hour practices where he was making little-to-no headroom seemed like a little too much for Speight. So he thought long and hard about it. And he decided that his time in Ann Arbor had gone about as far as it could possibly go.

It was time to cut the losses, and move on to somewhere he could have a more feasible chance to play the game he loves. But something happened on his way to Coach Harbaugh's office, Speight says.

“My redshirt year, I was like, okay, I'm a redshirt," Speight recalls. "But when Coach Harbaugh came in, I got buried on the depth chart that spring. And then that redshirt freshman fall camp, I was on the phone with my parents, and was bascially like, 'Okay, I'm out. Let's find a different school.' They were on board. Obviously, they wanted me to stay here, but they were going to support my decision. I had Steve Clarkson helping me out, too, as to where to go. Then one morning I woke up, and I was about to go talk to Coach, and I don't know, it just didn't feel right. So I said I'd give it another week, and then I started playing better. And by the end of camp, I was taking reps with the twos.”

But that was a rough go for Speight. Here he was, on primetime television, being embarrassed in front of the country. It didn't matter that the audience didn't know it was him. It didn't matter that other guys got that very same treatment on a daily basis.

But he bided his time, made the most of it, and now he has his chance.

“Everyone saw the HBO special," he said. "That wasn't exactly a bubbly, 'Hey! Stick around!' That was more, 'Please get out of my face and never come back.' Coach Harbaugh told me over the summer, when we each had our individual meetings, 'Okay, you're going to get a shot.' So I just believed him. But I started to see the writing on the wall a little bit the first week of camp and said, screw it, I'm going to work as hard as I can.”

It was a week, then a month, then a year. Now he's the starting quarterback at the University of Michigan. Oh, how things change.

Through nine games, Speight has a 157.98 passer rating, more than 15 points higher than his 2015 predecessor Jake Rudock.

But things were further along than just a daily malaise. The threat to transfer to NC State, where Speight would be a legacy -- as his grandfather was an All-American basketball player for the Wolfpack -- or somewhere else was very real. His parents were involved. His long time quarterback coach, guru Steve Clarkson had been sending out feelers to schools that might be interested.

However, one voice helped cut through that negativity, and urged Speight to keep working and give it another go. And it's someone that Speight still has a strong connection with.

“My dad had reached out to other schools and stuff," Speight said. "Those schools were on board. I woke up in the dorms during camp, Drake Harris was my roommate. I told a bunch of my teammates that I was out. But then I woke up the next morning and Drake was like, 'Are you sure? Are you sure?' I guess maybe Drake me into it a little bit, to give it another week.”

So he did, and it paid off -- in time. There was still negativity to overcome.

He knew there was a lot of hard work involved if he was going to move forward and try to become a starter for the Wolverines. But when he got to be the number two quarterback on the team behind Rudock, he was getting the same coaching that the number one players get. He wasn't relegated to the scout team or just holding a clipboard. He was in the thick of it.

But there was another obstacle in the way: John O'Korn, who had transferred from Houston.

O'Korn was expected to take over with ease from Rudock, and was mentioned by insiders as being the best quarterback on the roster, even when Rudock was thriving. Speight was the number two guy all season in 2015, but he heard that message. He read those articles.

But whenever he heard that he had no chance to supplant O'Korn as the force majeure, it just fueled him that much more.

Speight read the press clippings, and said that when he particularly saw MLive's Nick Baumgartner's articles proclaiming O'Korn as the next man up, it forced him to stay focused and make sure that didn't happen.

“Yeah, to be honest, I'm not going to sit here and say that I didn't," Speight said. "Your stuff. Because your stuff was always getting retweeted.

“[The press' negativity] helped me work harder, I'll tell you that. You were all – and I mean a lot of people – but [Baumgartner] especially, were on the John O'Korn train. Which is fine! John and I have become even closer through the competition. The maturity he's shown as well as Shane, not winning the battle in their eyes, it's special. It speaks volumes for how much of a man both of those guys are.”

Speight has learned that it's best not to read his press clippings anymore, something that Coach Harbaugh suggested. It doesn't matter if the write-up is good or bad -- the most important thing to him is to focus on what can make him better and his team.

***

But how did the coaching staff react to the news of his near transfer? Surely this wasn't the first time they had heard about this. And it wasn't just Speight who was interested in leaving the program now that things had just gotten really, really real under Harbaugh.

Some guys did leave, even. But the guys who stayed: they're better for it, and focused on becoming champions for the first time in the Wolverines career.

“There's a lot of guys that did leave," Speight recalled. "And there's a lot of guys that thought about it. That first spring ball with Coach – the four hour practices, the constant cussing out – you didn't feel worthy. 'Should I really be here at Michigan?' To fight through that stuff, and to have gone through all that this team has gone through. From my redshirt year, and with Coach Harbaugh's first year – I think that's a huge reason why we're so close.”

When Speight finally addressed his near departure with the coaching staff, some were surprised, he said, but others had a pretty good sense of what was going on.

Speight said that he couldn't remember the specifics of his conversation with Harbaugh, but he did remember his reaction: more relief than surprise.

“Happy I didn't leave," Speight recalled of Harbaugh's reaction. "I know he said that. Maybe a little bit. Coach Fisch, I interacted with him at all times. Like every day. So he knew, he had a sense. But Coach was maybe a little bit surprised. He knew I wasn't in good standing with the coaching staff in their eyes. So it wasn't anything too shocking.”

So now Speight is unequivocally the guy. He's lead Michigan to it's first 9-0 start since 2006, a year when the Wolverines headed on the road to Columbus as an undefeated number two team in the country with an 11-0 record. Heading into Iowa on Saturday, Speight says he relayed to the team that they didn't come this far with nine wins on the season to leave Iowa City 9-1.

But his next message to the team was to keep working. Remain focused. That the only impediment to success is yourself.

And he should know. He's come a long way from being a guy projected to never see the field at Michigan Stadium from setting Wolverines records. But here he is: arguably the best quarterback in the conference through nine weeks, a guy his head coach insists should be in the Heisman Trophy conversation, and someone who's getting better and better and better, week-by-week-by-week.

This was his message to the team: keep working, because the job isn't done.

“That's another thing I talked with the team about last night. One thing was that we didn't come this far just to come this far. Another one was, my uncle texted me on Monday, and was like, 'How do you stay at the level that you are?' I tell myself all the time that it wasn't long ago that he was cussing me out on HBO and I was the fifth-string quarterback. It took a lot of work to get here, but I could go back to where I was like that. You just have to stay humble and focused, and hungry to get better every day.”

And if anyone has done just that, it's Speight. The two-time Big Ten offensive player of the week has only gotten here through persevering more, working harder.

And through all the struggles and strife, it's paid off for him -- as he's truly leading by example -- a consummate leader who's on his way to being one of the very best.

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