UConn Offensive Coordinator George DeLeone: A Light, Then Serious Notes About QB Situation

What’s goin’ on?

Working on a piece for tomorrow featuring offensive coordinator George DeLeone and how this recruiting class can help on offense next season but I don’t think I can fit this in so we’ll drop it here.

I asked DeLeone if he and the staff could trudge through yet another  quarterback competition like last season because this season there are five guys in the mix:  starter  Johnny McEntee, Scott McCummings and Michael Nebrich. Chandler Whitmer, an experienced JUCO with credentials and true freshman Casey Cochran, the reigning two-time Connecticut Gatorade Player of the Year.

A light moment with the coach then onto it.

Can you afford to run the competition the way you did last year?

“I think you just answered your own question,” DeLeone said. “You got five quarterbacks how can that get done in one day? You don’t have to be a Pulitzer Prize winning sports writer to know you had the answer to that one before you asked it.”

Guess he’s right though, huh?

Still, when would they like to have the competition wrapped up? It doesn’t sound like going through the preseason without a guy named is going to be the course taken this year but who knows?

“Being serious about it I don’t know when we can have it locked up but I know this,” DeLeone said. “Whatever quarterbacks we have in the spring are going to get every opportunity to become the starter. That’s how we’re going to start. Now whatever happens through that competition will happen. I think it will sort itself out.  This is too important to our program. We have to go through the process and see where it takes us. I don’t think you can shortcut it. And then with the number of kids we’re dealing with I don’t think you can say it’s going to happen in this time frame. I think we got to see. Now if one guy jumps ahead of the pack that’s great. That’s great. But our goal, to be fair to our program, is to go through a process where everybody is going to be evaluated and let the chips fall where they may. If that happens sooner than later that’s great but we’re not going to rush the process.

How about the playing field? How level will it be? After all, McEntee, McCummings and Nebrich have been through the system a already.

“You know, we have a body of work, really on three of the guys and the new guys we don’t know so we’re going to have to get a good look at everybody but we haven’t gotten to the point where we’re going to establish a pecking order of who gets reps. We haven’t said anything to the quarterbacks in that regard. We’re not ready to do that. We have an off-season program that’s about to start where we got an agility program, strength program and we’ve got some other evaluative tools. It’s going to be a delicate thing and we want to make sure we handle it right not so much right relative to the media but handle it right to be fair to the players involved. That will be our main goal.”

Did you think you went about the competition fairly last time out with McEntee, McCummings and Nebrich?

“I think we were overly fair. I think we were overly fair. I think Coach P, the great man that he is, I think he was fair to a fault. There’s no one there, any of the quarterbacks, that can say I didn’t get a chance or I didn’t get enough reps. They had enough reps to choke a horse….

“Hey, the bottom line is, we’re going to be fair here and do what’s right.”

DC