BYU Football: At what point is the QB battle concerning?
By Adam Gibby
BYU Football has still not announced their starting quarterback three weeks before the season begins.
BYU Football begins in 21 days and we still don’t know who the starting quarterback is. While there is definitely a lot of positives about having three capable guys who can play, we are starting to enter the “Worry” zone.
When Fall Camp began ten days ago, many assumed that Jaren Hall would be the starter and that the decision would be announced after a few days. However, since Fall Camp started it has actually been Jacob Conover and Baylor Romney who have been excelling, making the QB battle an actual….well battle.
The issue is that BYU Football has seven or eight more practice days to get ready for season before their focus starts to shift to preparing for the Arizona game. While preparing for an opponent certain aspects of the offense won’t be practiced. For example, Arizona has better outside linebackers than interior linebackers so the offense will focus more on the inside running game than the outside running game.
Without having a quarterback getting a majority of reps right now, as the week to week game plan changes, the quarterback may struggle to keep up with the rest of the offense who are getting first team reps right now.
A Tough Balance
On one side the coaches need to get the decision right. In today’s game, naming a starter and backup is no longer just a decision that can be as simple as who starts a game and then replaces him if things go wrong. In today’s game, it almost feels like whoever is named third string will very possibly end up transferring from BYU. In fact, even the backup could find himself in the transfer portal if he feels that there are better opportunities elsewhere.
Because of that alone this can’t just be a “Well all three are tied so let’s go with (player) and if things aren’t going great in the first quarter we’ll give someone else a chance as well.”
At the same time the most important objective of any team is to win. If it truly is a three way tie, at some point putting off naming a starter is only going to hurt the team more than making 100% absolute sure they right guy is chosen.
While it isn’t quite time to hit the panic button, if we get to this point next week and still don’t have a starter, then the Cougars are looking at one week with a starter getting all the reps and then one week of preparing for Arizona.
Of course the silver lining in all of this is that the coaches are struggling to name a starter based off of talent, not searching for it.