ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Consider the quarterbacks who hold the College Football Playoff hopes of Michigan and Texas in their hands.
Texas has Quinn Ewers, the No. 1 prospect in the Class of 2021 and a potential first-round NFL Draft pick. Behind Ewers is Arch Manning of the First Family of Quarterbacks, the No. 1 prospect in the Class of 2023 and possibly the most famous backup in football.
Then there’s Michigan’s Davis Warren, a former walk-on who had zero recruiting stars and no film to speak of as a high school prospect. Warren appeared in four games as a high school junior in 2019 and eight games as a backup at Michigan before he was picked to start the Wolverines’ season opener against Fresno State.
He’s also a cancer survivor.
Now Warren is in line to start for the reigning national champions against Ewers, Manning and Texas in the biggest nonconference matchup in decades at Michigan Stadium. Looking at these quarterbacks, it’s easy to see that one of them is not like the others. That doesn’t faze Warren, who’s been competing against elite quarterbacks for much of his life.
At Loyola High School in Los Angeles, Warren played with Miller Moss, now the starting quarterback at USC. For the past three years at Michigan, he played behind a top-10 pick in J.J. McCarthy. He’s worked with quarterback experts at 3DQB, a training program in Huntington Beach, Calif., where C.J. Stroud, Bryce Young, Jared Goff and other stars have fine-tuned their mechanics.
“I’m used to being surrounded by top quarterbacks all the time, both in our building and on the outside from being trained with all the top guys,” Warren said. “I’ve been around it. I know I’m capable of playing at this level, 100 percent.”
Other quarterbacks have more fanfare, but nobody has a story like Warren’s.
Davis Warren threw 14 passes as a backup his first three years. (Gregory Shamus / Getty Images)
Warren came home from a workout one morning in spring 2019 and told his father he was feeling sick. He’d recently had his wisdom teeth removed, and his parents thought he might have an infection.
They went to an urgent care facility, where the doctor had Warren take off his shirt, examined his swollen lymph nodes and tested his white blood cell count. Pack a bag, the doctor told them. You need to go to the hospital.
Warren’s father, Jeff, drove him to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, where Warren underwent more testing. Warren’s mother, Terri, was with his younger brother at Odyssey of the Mind, a problem-solving competition. She sat by the phone in her hotel room while Jeff and Davis waited for the test results to come back.
“That was the longest three hours I’ve ever had in my life,” Jeff said.
Sometime after 1 a.m., doctors told Warren he had leukemia. They didn’t know which kind, but Warren was eventually diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, which has a five-year survival rate of 66 percent for adolescents 19 and younger.
Days earlier, Warren had been preparing to leave Los Angeles to play at Peddie School, a prep school in New Jersey. Now he was being told to get ready to start chemotherapy the next Tuesday.
“In a blink of an eye, you’re going from a 6 a.m. workout where you can’t even lift the warmup weight, and before you know it you’re in a children’s hospital and someone tells you you’ve got cancer,” Warren said.
Warren lost 40 pounds, his appetite, his hair and any shot at having a typical recruiting experience. He spent the next five months in and out of the hospital — mostly in — while undergoing four rounds of chemotherapy. He was able to go home for a few days between treatments, but then it was right back to the hospital for another round. He watched every episode of “Game of Thrones,” read a bunch of books, studied film, rode a bike and tossed a football in the hospital courtyard while hooked up to an IV pole.
Warren’s parents would bring food from different restaurants in L.A., trying to make the most of the little appetite he had. Most of the meals went uneaten.
“He was losing a lot of weight and he lost his appetite,” Jeff said. “Every day he just felt horrible.”
The family credits Chris Malleo, Warren’s coach at the Peddie School, for helping him get through the treatments. When Warren called to say he had cancer, Malleo told him he’d have a spot on the team when his treatments were finished. “We’ll see you in the fall,” Malleo said.
During his stay in the hospital, Warren got messages from Trevor Lawrence, Tua Tagovailoa, Kirk Cousins and other famous quarterbacks, the result of Malleo and others working behind the scenes to make sure Warren got the encouragement he needed. Once he had a timeline for his treatments, Warren circled a date on the calendar: Oct. 4, 2019, the day he planned to return to the field.
“All the doctors were like, ‘OK, sure,’” Terri said. “They’d never had an athlete like that who was performing at such a high level come through the treatment he had to go through.”
Not everybody thought it was a good idea for Warren to play football so soon after undergoing cancer treatments, but he needed the goal to keep him going during the roughest parts of that summer. Once the final round of chemo was complete and doctors declared him cancer-free, Warren’s parents found a way to get him on a plane to New Jersey.
Warren was weak from the cancer treatments, and the Peddie School had another quarterback who’d won the starting job in his absence. True to his word, Malleo found a way to get Warren in the game on his first night with the team. Warren’s parents were holding their breath, hoping he wouldn’t take a big hit.
“The first play he was in, Davis got completely hammered,” Jeff said. “He got right back up and threw two great passes.”
Warren appeared in four games that fall. A few months later, the COVID-19 pandemic struck and the sports world shut down. Warren transferred to Suffield Academy in Connecticut, hoping for one more shot to prove he was a Division I quarterback, but the whole season was canceled.
Warren didn’t have much high school film, and he didn’t have major college football programs throwing scholarship offers at him.
But he did have contacts at a few college programs. He’d caught the eye of Steve Casula, then an analyst at Michigan. He also had connections to Michigan through the 3DQB program and Cam Cameron, a former NFL and college coach.
In the fall of Warren’s senior year, Jim Harbaugh called and offered him a preferred walk-on spot at Michigan. Warren’s family was ecstatic that he’d get to play big-time college football at such a storied program. The idea that he would become Michigan’s starting quarterback someday barely registered.
“I don’t think we were thinking anything but, ‘Wow, it’s so awesome that he has this opportunity,’” Terri said.
For three years, Warren was the player taking notes at every meeting, helping Michigan’s other quarterbacks prepare, running the scout team in practice. He played a few mop-up snaps and went 5-for-14 with an interception. A shoulder injury kept him from seeing more playing time last season, but he got healthy in time to play the part of Michael Penix Jr. in practice leading up to the national championship game against Washington.
From the outside, it was easy to pigeonhole Warren as a career backup, even after he outplayed the other quarterbacks in Michigan’s spring game. When Michigan opened preseason camp, much of the focus was on Alex Orji’s raw potential and the experience of Jack Tuttle, a seventh-year player who started games at Indiana. With Tuttle sidelined again by injuries, Warren’s consistency as a passer nudged him ahead of Orji in the week leading up to Michigan’s first game.
The decision to make Warren the starter was a surprise to the outside world, but it wasn’t a shock to his teammates.
“The things no one else would get to see, what he’s done to get here, is incredible,” said tight end Max Bredeson, Warren’s roommate and another former walk-on. “The hours watching film on his iPad at our house, the hours watching film his freshman year in the dorm. None of us are going to play, and he’s still locked in. You’d think he’s the starting quarterback.”
Michigan beat Fresno State 30-10 in Davis Warren’s first start. (Gregory Shamus / Getty Images)
Now he is. Warren’s first start wasn’t anything spectacular: 15-of-25 passing, 118 yards, a touchdown and an interception in a 30-10 win that was a one-possession game in the fourth quarter. With No. 3 Texas coming to Ann Arbor on Saturday, fans have worried the moment might be too big for a quarterback with very little big-game experience.
Outwardly, Warren projects serenity. He met with reporters Monday after taping a segment for “College GameDay,” a show he watched as a kid. His story, previously known only to Michigan die-hards, is about to go national. Warren finds a sense of purpose in showing people that a cancer diagnosis doesn’t have to mean giving up on a dream.
For a long time after his cancer treatments, Warren wanted nothing to do with hospitals. He couldn’t wait for his hair to grow back and dreaded going in for checkups, which only brought back bad memories.
“I’d be like, ‘Man, I don’t want to be here for this,’” Warren said. “Bad vibes all around. Keep me out of here.”
As Michigan fans learned his story, Warren began hearing from people. A grandfather on LinkedIn whose grandson was going through leukemia treatments. Parents with kids at Mott Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor. Warren realized he was in a unique position to help those people, and it would be a shame not to make the most of it.
“I’ve been through it,” Warren said. “I have the scar on my arm. I know how to press the silence button on the medicine pole that everyone gets. That’s a really special connection.”
People watching Saturday’s game might look at Warren, the 6-foot-2 former walk-on, and wonder how he ended up on the same field with quarterback royalty. It’s easy to see this game as a chance for Warren to prove he has what it takes to be Michigan’s starting quarterback, but in Warren’s mind, the question has already been answered.
“I don’t look at it like that,” he said. “I know I belong here.”
GO DEEPER
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(Top photo: Aaron J. Thornton / Getty Images)
