Thanks to our new sponsor Inteleca for helping bring back Q's Take my weekly look at things around GT and college sports from my vantage.
Brent Key threw a breadcrumb intentionally or unintentionally on Saturday when he dropped his line about two quarterbacks after sticking with the three scholarship quarterbacks line for most of the spring. Everyone expects and everything I've heard from sources about it being a two-horse race between Zach Pyron or Haynes King with Zach Gibson being the odd man out for now.
So let's focus on that. You have a small sample size from Zach Pyron a true freshman last year where he played with a lot of guts and made some great plays and had a few freshman blunders. King spent the last three years at Texas A&M not playing any significant snaps until last year when he started five of six games played including opening the season as the Aggies starting QB before benched last season. He actually won the job there in 2021 as well but an injury in week two against Colorado ended his R-Fr. year after just 79 plays that season.
King was brought in by this staff to compete for the job. Pyron was signed by an offensive coordinator who was fired in December of 2021 and the Jackets are now two more OCs removed from that guy with Buster Faulkner running the show. Pyron has less experience but he has improved in every aspect of his game since a season-ending collarbone injury ended his campaign in the Miami game.
Neither guy lit it up in their opportunities at the helm. This is King's third bite at the apple. He was 104/187 for 1,220 yards and 7 TDs and 6 INTs last year, but in FBS games that dropped to 84/156 for 856 with 3 TDs and 4 INTs. 5.48 yards per pass attempt last year.
Pyron had a much smaller sample size with three games and two starts last year. He was 49/82 all against ACC teams throwing for 565 yards with 3 TDs and 3 INTs (the third was on the play after he broke his collarbone and I kind of want to give him a pass on that, but King could have one of those that I'm unaware of so I left it in). 6.9 yards per pass attempt for his lone season.
None of that means much though. Chris Weinke, Buster Faulkner and Key will have to make the call on how they want to handle it and this will be the first big test of their tenure right out of the gate. This isn't Jeff Sims going against James Graham back in 2020 where it was painfully obvious that Graham was ill-suited for the system Dave Patenaude ran. Both of King and Pyron should be capable of winning games in the ACC and even Gibson has shown he is capable of it if you give him a game plan that makes sense with his skillset.
That doesn't make any of this easier to decode. My gut feeling going into camp was that Pyron would win the job and he had the edge in leadership despite his age and that under Key would give him the keys to the offense out of the gate. The other side of my brain wonders if the guy that Buster and Weinke both recruited at other places, King who also is more experienced might gain an edge if all things are equal.
I really have no idea how it is going to play out and the reality of it for me is I've seen HOF-level coaches screw this up badly like Mark Richt at Georgia (he once picked Joe T III as his starter over a freshman Matt Stafford. Joe T III made Tevin Washington look like Lamar Jackson and that was a legit 4 QB race) so it is far from an exact science. What those coaches do is pivot and adjust based on the performance on the field. The one position on the field where you really can't go live anymore is the quarterback and so it may take seeing live reps to really know which guy is ready for prime time and which one isn't.
For GT's sake, I hope the coaches get it right on the first take, but historically the data is all over the place and even the last two OCs Chip Long and Patenaude screwed up QB picks whether they were their choice or not at the prior stops (Temple and ND) before coming to GT so you just never know.
This is not a challenge I envy for the staff and even in the last five or six seasons at GT we've seen some interesting QB battles shake out in ways that were unexpected like TaQuon Marshall's big jump in 2017 from third-string in the spring to starter in the fall. Jeff Sims was sort of a talented throw-in for that 2020 class after he and FSU parted ways and he jumped the guy Patenaude told me was the next great GT QB, Tucker Gleason now at Toldeo.
Chances are they will need both King and Pyron to win games this fall IMO just based on history and the way CFB is these days with QBs. Hopefully they are both ready and both play lights out, but either way I think this will get sorted out in the Benz, BDS and probably Oxford, MS before we know for sure.
That's my thoughts on the QB thing, folks have been asking so here you go.
Brent Key threw a breadcrumb intentionally or unintentionally on Saturday when he dropped his line about two quarterbacks after sticking with the three scholarship quarterbacks line for most of the spring. Everyone expects and everything I've heard from sources about it being a two-horse race between Zach Pyron or Haynes King with Zach Gibson being the odd man out for now.
So let's focus on that. You have a small sample size from Zach Pyron a true freshman last year where he played with a lot of guts and made some great plays and had a few freshman blunders. King spent the last three years at Texas A&M not playing any significant snaps until last year when he started five of six games played including opening the season as the Aggies starting QB before benched last season. He actually won the job there in 2021 as well but an injury in week two against Colorado ended his R-Fr. year after just 79 plays that season.
King was brought in by this staff to compete for the job. Pyron was signed by an offensive coordinator who was fired in December of 2021 and the Jackets are now two more OCs removed from that guy with Buster Faulkner running the show. Pyron has less experience but he has improved in every aspect of his game since a season-ending collarbone injury ended his campaign in the Miami game.
Neither guy lit it up in their opportunities at the helm. This is King's third bite at the apple. He was 104/187 for 1,220 yards and 7 TDs and 6 INTs last year, but in FBS games that dropped to 84/156 for 856 with 3 TDs and 4 INTs. 5.48 yards per pass attempt last year.
Pyron had a much smaller sample size with three games and two starts last year. He was 49/82 all against ACC teams throwing for 565 yards with 3 TDs and 3 INTs (the third was on the play after he broke his collarbone and I kind of want to give him a pass on that, but King could have one of those that I'm unaware of so I left it in). 6.9 yards per pass attempt for his lone season.
None of that means much though. Chris Weinke, Buster Faulkner and Key will have to make the call on how they want to handle it and this will be the first big test of their tenure right out of the gate. This isn't Jeff Sims going against James Graham back in 2020 where it was painfully obvious that Graham was ill-suited for the system Dave Patenaude ran. Both of King and Pyron should be capable of winning games in the ACC and even Gibson has shown he is capable of it if you give him a game plan that makes sense with his skillset.
That doesn't make any of this easier to decode. My gut feeling going into camp was that Pyron would win the job and he had the edge in leadership despite his age and that under Key would give him the keys to the offense out of the gate. The other side of my brain wonders if the guy that Buster and Weinke both recruited at other places, King who also is more experienced might gain an edge if all things are equal.
I really have no idea how it is going to play out and the reality of it for me is I've seen HOF-level coaches screw this up badly like Mark Richt at Georgia (he once picked Joe T III as his starter over a freshman Matt Stafford. Joe T III made Tevin Washington look like Lamar Jackson and that was a legit 4 QB race) so it is far from an exact science. What those coaches do is pivot and adjust based on the performance on the field. The one position on the field where you really can't go live anymore is the quarterback and so it may take seeing live reps to really know which guy is ready for prime time and which one isn't.
For GT's sake, I hope the coaches get it right on the first take, but historically the data is all over the place and even the last two OCs Chip Long and Patenaude screwed up QB picks whether they were their choice or not at the prior stops (Temple and ND) before coming to GT so you just never know.
This is not a challenge I envy for the staff and even in the last five or six seasons at GT we've seen some interesting QB battles shake out in ways that were unexpected like TaQuon Marshall's big jump in 2017 from third-string in the spring to starter in the fall. Jeff Sims was sort of a talented throw-in for that 2020 class after he and FSU parted ways and he jumped the guy Patenaude told me was the next great GT QB, Tucker Gleason now at Toldeo.
Chances are they will need both King and Pyron to win games this fall IMO just based on history and the way CFB is these days with QBs. Hopefully they are both ready and both play lights out, but either way I think this will get sorted out in the Benz, BDS and probably Oxford, MS before we know for sure.
That's my thoughts on the QB thing, folks have been asking so here you go.
