Simulated Gameday Experience

To understand what’s going on with the Tennessee QB situation, it makes sense to go back a few years.  2010 was going to be a season of reckoning as most of the players we thought were going to be stars were upperclassmen of some form or fashion going into 2008.  (In the case of Eric Berry, that’s a non-issue; we knew he was gone after 2009 anyway.)  Four-year starter Erik Ainge departed after a successful 2007 season, so it fell to talented but largely unproven Jonathan Crompton to shepherd the team through the ’08 season.  And then things fell to shit.

Let’s not rehash the hideous details here, but Crompton didn’t get to start every game of the 2008 season, as backup QB Nick Stephens got …well, he got the kind of playing time you’d expect from a team with an offense that showed up DOA to the first game of the season.  The head coaching staff rolled over pretty severely at the end of the season – really, “severe” is the only word you can use to describe jettisoning Phil Fulmer – and the next roll of the dice came up snake eyes.  Of course, Lady Luck didn’t actually reveal that roll until the end of the 2009 season.

Lane Kiffin came in with Jim Chaney, Monte Kiffin, Ed Orgeron, and a host of promises and awkward moments that have been covered past wit’s end halfway across the ‘net.  What we care about for the purposes of this story is that he stuck with Crompton in the starting role; Crompton was entering his senior season.  Sure, Nick Stephens was an upperclassman, but he had spent enough time as an understudy to Crompton that it wasn’t the end of the world to sit behind him for one more season.  On top of that, Crompton was the more talented of the two.  So Crompton would start in 2009, Stephens would assume the starting QB role in 2010 and the year of the QB reckoning would come in 2011.  Well, that was going to happen if Kiffin wasn’t able to recruit a blue-chip QB or two and hand them the reins as a redshirt freshman.

Say what you will about Kiffin and his crew, but the one thing he’s been able to do – and been very successful at – is recruit.  (Some would say that’s all he does.)  Giving a crew like his a goal like this is about as simple a task as you can imagine.  Ed Orgeron took the hint and started hitting the road, but it didn’t quite work out for Tennessee like they were expecting.  Jesse Scroggins was the first major target along with Tyler Bray (with Jake Heaps tossed in at the side).  Heaps left the picture early to BYU, but Scroggins was in the picture and the main target.  That worked out well for the Kiffins; Scroggins committed to USC in July, and Tennessee came into the 2009 season with no answer to a 2010 backup QB.  In-season recruiting is always such a tricky proposition.  Fortunately, Tyler Bray committed to Tennessee in late September.

Somewhere in this time frame – honestly, I forget the timeline at this point – some fairly aggressive JUCO recruiting was taking place, resulting in Nick Lamaison enrolling in time for the spring semester.  Tennessee’s QB performance during the season progressed as nice as you’d wish; after a rough first few games, Crompton matured into an inexplicable dynamo, confusing most of the football-watching nation in the process.  This was a great sign for 2010 – if Jim Chaney could do this for someone who looked as lost as Crompton did in ’08, surely Nick Stephens would be even better next season.  Crompton ended up drafted.  He ended up drafted!  The kid who couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn or read defenses to save his life in 2008 is going to get a chance with a NFL franchise.  Surely Nick Stephens can pull a 58% completion percentage in ’10 under the same tutelage, right?

Well, these things don’t always work out like you’d expect.  The Kiffin Medusa left to go coach the QB they missed out on in Knoxville (Jim Chaney stuck around) and Derek Dooley came in.  With Dooley came JUCO Matt Simms – and later, Nash Nance.  That’s a total of 5 QBs on scholarship – or at least 5 relevant QBs on scholarship.  Spring practice came and went, and as spring practice went so did Nick Stephens.

Of course, that’s simplifying things a bit.  Stephens struggled during the spring, eventually getting dropped down the depth chart behind the true freshman Bray and Simms.  Once Stephens realized he’d be a backup during his last season, he decided that was the end of his career at Tennessee.  As these things go, that’s probably a fair assessment; I think he had an opportunity to jump back up the depth chart, but realistically Stephens would be in the same situation he was in during the ’08 and ’09 seasons – primary backup.  For a guy that had to have felt that he’d paid his dues, waited for his chance, and learned everything that had been asked of him getting shuffled down to the emergency QB slot was it.

After the chaos of the last two seasons, it’s set in stone that the starter for Tennessee will open the season taking a total of zero snaps in orange.  Of the four prospects, Lamaison is the least exciting.  Lamaison was a useful cog back in 2009 when there was no immediate answer to the backup QB issue, but for now the position battle has passed him by.  At this point, he’ll likely inherit Stephens’ spot as third on the depth chart.  Nash Nance wins the battle for best name among the QB prospects (really, I’ve been seeing his name for months and I want to flip one of the N’s for a V – Vash Nance or Nash Vance feel like they make more sense); unfortunately, he’s also the clubhouse leader for Most Likely to Redshirt.  Nance isn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination, but he’s fortunate enough to be a true freshman he gets a year to learn the system.

That leaves two legitimate contenders for the starting role – Matt Simms and Tyler Bray.  Let’s talk about the guy who gives me hives first – after spending the better part of the last eight years mocking Chris Simms’ performance in the 2001 Big 12 Championship Game, I’m not sure how I feel about being in a position to cheer someone with that last name.  Simms may be a perfectly capable QB, and on some level I like the idea of playing a guy who’s at least seen college athletes, but on the other hand I know I’d like him way more if his name was Matt Smith.  In terms of raw recruiting chops Simms profiles similar to Nance (which posits well for Nance come 2011), but clearly there’s a superior ability to accept instruction, read defenses, and perform as compared to Nance.

On the other hand, Bray is clearly the most talented of the group.  Sure, he may have the mobility of a Weeble – which will be a problem this year – but Bray is the choice for the future.  He has height but resembles a beanpole; in a perfect world Bray is the kind of guy you redshirt behind a capable senior and force-feed the guy until he gains 25 pounds.  (Even with that 25 pounds he’d still weigh less than Lamaison, FWIW.)  This is just about as far from a perfect world as you can get, and the unfortunate question for Dooley is if Bray has enough strength to handle the grind of a college schedule.

The one issue we haven’t talked about yet is protection; not only is the QB situation a mess, the offensive line might actually be in worse shape.  Most of the guys with functional starts (or any starts) are gone, and depth is going to be a major concern.  On the plus side, most of the line is likely set save center, but …well, set doesn’t necessarily mean good or experienced.  Dallas Thomas and Ju’Wuan James should slot in as tackles with JerQuari Schofield and Jarrod Shaw as guards.  Of those four, Shaw is the only upperclassman – heck, he’s the only guy who’s not a freshman.  Fortunately, the center competition involves a sophomore and a junior, so the line isn’t entirely freshmen.  Whether the line meshes is a huge key to the season; the fortunate news among the line is that they were all in for spring practice.  James Stone may jump in as depth, but …well, of the seven guys listed in this paragraph, only three of them have had the fortune to come back to Tennessee for a second season.  Putting a quarterback – any quarterback – behind this offensive line and asking them to win games is going to be a tall proposition.  It’s a fool’s errand to hope that offensive line health will hold throughout the season, but it’s the case here.

Whichever QB makes it to the opening game of the season may very well not make it out of the opening game.  Quite frankly, the odds that a crucial QB skill list for 2010 Tennessee includes “take a hit” are pretty high.  As a result, while Bray is certainly the most talented of the crew – and absent game experience, it may as well come down to talent or a coin flip – there’s a risk with putting a guy out there who can be snapped like a wheat stalk.  Maybe putting one of the JUCOs out there is the right path (and I’ll ignore the true long-term strategy, which is to redshirt Bray, let Nance get the crap knocked out of him, and then get rid of him at the end of the season; don’t run your actual football teams like I run my NCAA ’10 teams, kids (unless you’re Nick Saban).  It’s less mean when you’re doing it to memory than when you’re doing it to people) for now, and once the offensive line gets a chance to gel and improve you let Bray take the reins.  This also gives him time to see and break down film from college games.

Then again, there’s something to be said for allowing a true freshman to learn on the job.  Opportunities like this at major schools don’t come along every day, and if Bray is the kind of talent that Tennessee thinks he is there’s a very real line of thought that lends itself to letting the kid take his lumps.  Erik Ainge ended up doing pretty well for himself after getting thrust into the fire as a true freshman (including getting himself a SEC East crown his senior year) and besides, it’s not like Bray would end up with a full-blown 100% of the snaps in that scenario.  He’d be protected when it makes sense to protect him – in blowouts, off injuries, and the like.  If Simms and Bray are as close as they appear to be right now, then there’s no incentive to play for this season.

As painful as those words are for me to write, this year wasn’t going to be good and we knew that going into it.  Heck, we knew that going into the Kiffin regime, too; the way the line played out last year was 2009 was learning the system, 2010 was rebuilding, and 2011 was contention.  With Dooley running things, now Tennessee has compressed learning the system and rebuilding into the same year.  Next year will likely be rebuilding too – it’s tough to build a foundation when you tear a house down, start to rebuild it and then notice you’re building on a sinkhole halfway into construction.  It’s a minor miracle that recruiting has done as well as it has; Dooley deserves credit for pulling together one heck of a class given the offseason chaos.  This kind of problem would be glorious were it not for the backdrop it was laid against and the massive pile of questions at half the other positions on the field.

Simms is the safe choice – pedigree, knowledge, experience.  Two years is a lot of time to learn the game, and more than that I’d bet Simms has a better grasp on how to learn the game.  Bray may be a film rat for all I know, but Simms has had more time to know how he absorbs information.  Heck, I didn’t figure that out at all my first three years in college – knowing what to do is easier than knowing how to see what to do.  I’m pretty sure Bray knows what to do, but does he know how to see?   Again, I’m not sure if Simms has had exposure to advanced schematics (thanks again, Charlie Weis) at the JUCO level, but I feel pretty safe in saying that Simms has probably seen more of the stuff he’ll see in SEC play than Bray has.  More importantly, he’s seen more of it.  Has he seen copies of Saban’s defensive schemes, or has he seen the Mustang package?  (Please tell me he’s seen the Mustang package.)  Probably not, but he might get it sooner.

As much as I’m loathe to admit it, that kind of pattern recognition matters a lot to coaches.  Simms simply has to have this knowledge base because he doesn’t have the physical gifts that Bray does.  There’s no other way for him to be this close in the QB competition otherwise – and yes, that pedigree does mean he’s learned how to do things like break down defenses and watch film, or at least I’d guess he has (whether he learned it from Phil or Chris is another question entirely; let’s hope he learned it from Phil).

There’s always the idea of a QB rotation, which seems like the worst idea of the bunch.  Neither option here is great for this season, so when absent a good option, taking two mediocre ones and chucking them together smells less like a good idea and more like football Frankenstein.  If they had disparate talents I’d understand somewhat (although as we’ve learned recently, running QBs now play in the slot and young “dual-threat” QBs can be effectively reworded as “guys who can run but don’t have either the accuracy or the power to play QB at the college level, but they can get a snap from under center”) as that was part of the intent behind the well-meaning Brent Schaffer / Erik Ainge platoon in 2004.  However, all the guys in camp are classic pocket passers, and while one of the guys may be able to bust out a 4.8 40-yard dash on occasion, that won’t let them escape from the DE who runs a 4.59.  The mad scientist in me looks at the dearth of QB talent and the mess of RB talent (Tauren Poole, David Oku, Toney Williams) and wonders if we can’t just stick two RBs in the backfield, teach one of them how to take a shotgun snap, and run zone reads 15 times a game.  It’d keep the QB crew safe if nothing else.

Somewhere in this mess of words there’s an answer for who to start and how to make it work.  I’m not sure I know what the answer is, though – at this point there have been so many doors shut that it’s tough to tell which doors didn’t get locked.  Simms or Bray will be the starter for the first game of the season, but after that it’s anyone’s guess.  Heck, it’s anyone’s guess if they’ll succeed.  The only thing I feel pretty confident about right now is that I won’t have to write this piece again next year, and for that I’m thankful.

Tags: print this out and save it for later, Tennessee Vols