Tiki Barber doesn’t believe JJ McCarthy

As the draft approaches, most scenes focus on how good a guy will be. Few will risk a decade remembering that they were wrong to doubt a player who turned out to be great.

Tiki Barber is willing to roll the dice when it comes to former Michigan quarterback JJ McCarthy.

“JJ McCarthy thing, I’m tired of hearing this,” Barber said Friday on his WFAN radio show, via Matt Ehalt of New York Post Office. “Stop with the JJ McCarthy thing. His film doesn’t say he’s a first-round quarterback. His film doesn’t say, ‘I need to get rid of all my assets and draft this guy,’ because a lot of what he does not translate. The scheme he ran at Michigan – and maybe this is an indictment on the scheme and not necessarily on him – but didn’t highlight the things you need to do, second, third level reads, various combined routes that you need to correct. He didn’t do any of those things. They were race-based and he thrived on that because he was good at it – that’s what Jim Harbaugh wanted him to do.”

Barber thinks McCarthy’s hype comes down to Harbaugh, now the Chargers’ head coach, expecting each of the four picks ahead of L.A. at No. 5 to be quarterbacks. This will give the Chargers, as Harbaugh said, essentially the first overall pick in the draft.

“The JJ McCarthy thing, to me, is a smokescreen,” Barber said. “He’s getting inflated because Jim Harbaugh won’t stop talking about him. Now all of a sudden he’s a top four quarterback? I do not believe that.”

With the Giants potentially taking the No. 6 quarterback spot, Barber wants his former NFL team to stay away.

“It’s not going to happen,” Barber said. “I’m just saying. It’s not happening. I don’t want it. It’s not happening.

The truth is, it’s impossible to know for sure which players will thrive and which won’t at the NFL level. It’s notable that the league office, which wants the best of the best prospects in the draft, invited McCarthy to attend. (He refused.)

The league invited just four quarterbacks to Detroit — McCarthy, Caleb Williams, Jayden Daniels and Drake Maye.

McCarthy will likely go in the first round. Whether it is up or down is a mystery and will be driven by several factors. At this moment, teams don’t have a crystal ball. Barber definitely not.

If he is right, he will have made a lucky guess. If he’s wrong, he may never hear the end.