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There is one thing that has become abundantly clear watching Coug football games this season. It's that Marshall Lobesstael is not a Pac-10 quality quarterback. Now we see plenty of reasons for why this is the case. The staff will tell you that it's because he's still not recovered from his knee injury. That's a perfectly reasonable excuse and it's also the perfect thing for the staff to say because it indicates that once Marshall is fully healed we'll see a magical transformation into a Pac-10 quality quarterback.
Unfortunately, that's just not going to happen. However, there is reason for hope Coug fans.....that hope is in the form of the staff finally indicating that they are seeing the light as well. First, let's take a look at The Lobster's actual performance. It's not pretty.
This season his passer rating is 80.06. That's good for 10th in the Pac-10.....by 20 points. That's actually worse by about 10 points than Ronnie Fouch was for UW last season. Do you remember how awful he was? The passer rating for Marshall is actually better if you look at last year. He was just over 100. That would be good for.....10th in the Pac-10 this season. If you remove his one good game against Portland State last year then you basically have a sample size of more than 200 pass attempts and a quarterback with a passer rating that is on par with the worst Pac-10 QB's of the past 20 years. We simply can't win with The Lobster as our starting quarterback. No question, injury and lack of talent around him have combined to color these numbers. Nevertheless, it's also clear that Marshall hasn't been able to rise to a passable level of competence and now we've got an adequate sample to determine that it's not worth finding out if he can recover. He seems like a great team guy but he should be providing depth not starting snaps for us at this point.
So, what happens from here?
First, burning Jeff Tuel's redshirt was the right thing to do. I am a HUGE believer in redshirting as many people as possible. I think that the extra year is incredible for the vast majority of people that we recruit to Washington State. It becomes less necessary at USC where they pull in freshmen with proper size and speed already. But "hidden gems" are usually going to need some polish before they really are ready to contribute. Nevertheless, we could not afford to burn down another full season by watching the ineptitude at quarterback. The Lopina and Lobesstael option is like watching Paul Mencke and Steve Birnbaum's 10-year old sisters trying to take snaps at quarterback.
Jeff Tuel represents hope for the guys in the program and those of us watching the games. Further, he's clearly got talent that can be grown if he sees repetition. Now, we need to hope that he can stay healthy to get around 140-160 pass attempts in this season. Burning a redshirt is meaningless if he gets injured and can't get the reps needed this season and so we should less concerned with stellar production and more focused on health for Tuel this season. This is like a rookie pitcher on a pitch count or innings count. You don't need Jeff Tuel to get 400 pass attempts this season. You need him to get about 20 attempts a game so he learns to read defenses, work through his progressions, and make pre-snap adjustments.
Second, it looks as if we have a staff that offered and secured the commitment of another excellent prep quarterback for this class. Connor Halliday in Spokane is currently destroying GSL defenses and he recently did the same to a quality California school. His team runs a passing offense and Halliday is currently a highly ranked recruit (#7 QB on the West Coast according to Scout.com) and could be ranked even higher by season's end. It appears that we will have two classes in a row where we have upgraded the talent at quarterback. This makes the burning of Tuel's redshirt more palatable as well. Now if you are able to redshirt Halliday you have excellent spacing between Tuel and Halliday in two years. Tuel would be a Junior and Halliday would be a redshirt Freshmen.
Third, it appears that we are also looking at bringing in a JC quarterback to compete for the starting spot. This weekend we've got Jordan Rogers in for a visit. This is Aaron Rogers (played for Cal and now starting for Green Bay) little brother. He looks as if he's being recruited by several teams with similar quarterback situations (Colorado, Kansas, etc.). He's a full qualifier already so he'd be able to show up in January and participate in Spring ball along with our strength program for eight months before we start Fall practice. Personally, I think this is really good news for us as I'm not anxious to rely exclusively on Tuel and I don't want to see Marshall take any more snaps than necessary.
If you put all of the pieces together you likely have a much better quarterback scenario in these final games and certainly next year. But make no mistake, the more reps we give to Marshall at this point is a lost opportunity for us to get back to competitive at the quarterback position.
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