Central Michigan University Athletics
CMU QB Takes Nothing For Granted
9/21/2017 12:00:00 AM | Football
By Andy Sneddon
MOUNT PLEASANT, Mich. -- As Vince Lombardi said, it's not whether you get knocked down, it's whether you get back up.
Shane Morris is back up.
Morris, Central Michigan's quarterback, is not your average 23-year-old college football player. He came to CMU as a graduate transfer from Michigan, where he spent four years on a physical and emotional roller coaster under the white-hot spotlight in one of college football's highest-profile programs.
He had some highs and some lows, and as a quarterback, particularly one at a place like Michigan, they were magnified.
Morris is the triggerman in Central Michigan's new up-tempo spread offense, and he has led the Chippewas to a 2-1 start. He leads the Mid-American Conference in total offense, averaging a combined 345 yards per game passing and rushing, and he shares the league lead with eight touchdown passes.
He is putting up the kind of numbers and having the kind of success that was expected of him when he came out of De La Salle High School in suburban-Detroit's Warren, signing with Michigan in 2013 as the nation's fifth-best quarterback and its 81st-best player, according to Rivals.com.
But things never materialized at U-M the way Morris, and everybody else, envisioned. He appeared in 15 games, two of them starts, throwing for 434 yards as a Wolverine.
Because he never redshirted at U-M, and because he had earned a bachelor's degree from the school, he had one year of college football eligibility remaining after the 2016 season. With the graduation last season of Cooper Rush, Morris saw a fair opportunity to give it one last shot.
And with that, he became a Chippewa.
"Michigan was a great experience for me on the field and off," Morris said. "Obviously, I wish things would have gone a little bit different for me on the field, but I graduated from there, and that was my goal when I signed there. I wanted to graduate from the University of Michigan, and I did that.
"I'm lucky. Coach (John) Bonamego gave me the opportunity, and I'm thankful for that, and these guys have trusted me to be their quarterback."
Like any student-athlete coming out of high school and landing a scholarship with a Division I program - particularly one as heralded as Morris was - the sky, it seemed, was the limit. Perform well at U-M in the Big Ten, wouldn't an NFL career be the next logical step?
That hope may still be there for Morris. After all, Rush, Morris' predecessor at CMU, is today a rookie backup quarterback with the Dallas Cowboys.
It almost certainly has helped Morris that he as been reunited with his high school coach, Paul Verska, who works on Bonamego's staff in quality control.
Verska, a captain of legendary coach Bill Kelly's 1966 Chippewa squad, is in his fifth decade of coaching, the vast majority of which was spent in the high school level around the state of Michigan.
Morris, Verska said, possessed as strong an arm as any quarterback he ever saw on the high school level, and the only prep signal-caller that he personally ever saw that was as adept at delivering strikes was Drew Henson, a state of Michigan high school football/baseball legend from Brighton who went on to play quarterback at Michigan and then spent nearly a decade in the NFL.
"I coached against Henson when I was in Ann Arbor Huron, and both of them have that, when they throw the ball it sort of whistles when it comes by you," Verska said. "They both have cannons for arms. (Morris is) probably all-around the best thrower that I've ever had."
Verska said he has seen, in the short time that Morris has been in Mount Pleasant, a maturity in the quarterback that wasn't there when they were both at De La Salle just five short years ago. It's only natural, of course, that a young man at 23 is going to be different than he was at 18. When that young man is the quarterback, well …
"When you're young, you think all you've got to do is go back and throw it," Verska said. "He's matured and grown that way as far as his knowledge of the game of football, and he's got all the talent in the world.
"When you come in (to college) as highly rated as he was and then to go through all the things that he did at Michigan, if it doesn't kill you it's going to make you stronger, and I think mentally he's stronger and he's more capable of handling those situations."
Morris looks back at his days at U-M without regret, and through the lens of hard-won wisdom.
"College football's a very humbling experience, and it was for me," he said. "I got knocked down really quick. But it was really good for me, and it made me work a lot harder and understand how high you can be one day and you can be torn down the next day.
"I'm very lucky to have gotten an opportunity and I'm very thankful for that. I'm not going to take that lightly. You can't take anything for granted."
