It had to be a Thursday. Of all the days of the week cosmically aligned with the NFL’s magical ability to spin rotting straw into gold, it’s fitting that the Chad Henne era in Jacksonville begins on a Thursday night.
10 Chad Henne facts that will blow your damn mind
There’s way more to the man who might replace Blake Bortles as the Jaguars starting QB than you ever realized.
Photo by Sam Greenwood/Getty Images
How much do you really know about Henne? Probably not much! A career as a backup QB for two of Florida’s most hapless NFL franchises has a way of putting a person in the shadows.
He was BRIEFLY going to be Miami’s version Tom Brady
Struggling to find their way back from the glory days of the Jay Fielder era, Miami pinned its hope on a second-round pick in the 2008 draft, a young Michigan man named Chad Henne.
When Chad Pennington was lost for the season shoulder injury early in 2009, Henne took over. With Henne at the helm, the Dolphins splashed back from an 0-3 start to a 7-9 finish.
People were starstruck. But it’s a low bar for Dolphins quarterbacks.
The Dolphins passed on Matt Ryan for Chad Henne
It’s hard to know what was going on in Miami’s draft room back in those days, but this happened.
“Part of the reason?” What was the rest of it? No wait, I don’t think I want to know.
He’s in the record book!
Henne started 13 games for the Jags in 2013, throwing for 3,241 yards, becoming the first Jaguars quarterback to throw for over 3,000 yards in a season since David Garrard did it in 2009. (It came on a dump off pass to Maurice Jones-Drew. He was intercepted on the next play).
The year before, Henne came off the bench in a Week 11 game against the Texans and threw four touchdowns and over 300 yards, joining Steve Young as the only quarterback NOT to start a game and throw four touchdowns without a pick.
Powerful friends
Henne hype got an early boost thanks to Florida senator Marco Rubio, who is also a Dolphins fan, a hydration meme, and an amateur football scout.
Rubio’s other famous foray into scouting was making Trump’s tiny hands a thing. Stick to politics, “little Marco!”
Origin story
Henne’s football journey was forged in controversy. A Pennsylvania lad and a five-star recruit (I do not understand recruiting), he was heavily recruited by two schools, Penn State and Michigan. He chose Michigan.
”Michigan is very high up in tradition and their quarterbacks succeed in the NFL,” he said as a high schooler. “It is a big honor for me just to get notification from them.”
Even if you aren’t a regular college football fan, you’ll remember that Henne was the quarterback for the No. 5 ranked Wolverines that lost to Appalachian State in that wild 2007 CFB season.
A good enough backup
Henne’s star faded from those dizzying days as hyped recruit to a brief stint as the Dolphins’ Tom Brady. Earlier in the offseason, back when Blake Bortles was still considered a starting QB, Henne got some praise as a perfectly mediocre backup. He was 10th on SI’s rankings for the backup QBs.
Andy Benoit, the future of bad football takes at SI, even classified him as one of the quarterbacks he believes to be better than Colin Kaepernick. OK!
There’s also this:
He’s done this before
The NFL puts a premium on experience, and Henne has done this before. He first joined the Jaguars in 2012, the same year the team was pinning its hopes on another terrible first-round pick, Blaine Gabbert.
Gabbert got benched early in the 2013 season. That’s when Henne took over and produced the previously mentioned 3,000-yard season with the Jags.
Buy a piece of history
Buying memorabilia to commemorate an important moment that’s about to maybe happen is your right as an American. Don’t let the Chad Henne era, this iteration of it anyway, pass you buy without something special that your children will be able to sell at a garage sale when they have to take care of all your crap after you die.
At the upper end of the market, you can get a trading card thing that features some other really exciting names on it!
WHAT? Brian Brohm AND Joe Flacco AND Chad Henne! Matt Ryan’s presence on that card feels like a mistake, but now that you know the Dolphins passed Ryan because they thought so highly of Henne in 2008, well, that right there isn’t just memorabilia, it’s a damn piece of history.
Let’s not forget the mustache
Here’s the most important thing to know about Chad Henne. He once had a mustache, and when the camera caught him smirking, he looked a lot like a hybrid Magnum-era Tom Selleck and Burt Reynolds.
Bring back that ‘stache, and the Jags just might win seven games this year.
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