West Virginia head coach Rich Rodriguez isn’t looking to force the issue when it comes to making any sort of decisions in the ongoing quarterback competition.
He even joked that the Mountaineers likely won’t even announce any sort of decision at the position until one minute prior to the kickoff of the first game.
“Why would we, right? The battle might be going down until then,” he said.
West Virginia might know before then, but Rodriguez is hoping that through the course of the remaining spring, summer, and into fall camp that the coaching staff can identify more than one option that they feel is good enough to win with. And in fact, the goal is to exit fall camp with three such players.
“I feel pretty confident that with the talent that we have right now, we can have three guys that we can win with. But there’s still a lot of work to do to determine the starter,” he said.
Rodriguez was clear that somebody could separate themselves by the end of the spring, but that also has just as likely a chance not to occur. But what is clear is that he doesn’t have any sort of philosophy that dictates that one has to be picked because of the fact that the Mountaineers want to use them in the run game.
That makes finding multiple options critical in order for the coaching staff to feel confident if there would be any injuries, to find who they can trust to run the scheme.
“I just want them all to get good. I want all of them to get good,” he said.
Throughout the spring, Rodriguez plans to roll with a constant rotation and that also will likely spill over into the summer as he tries to identify those players he is confident that he can win games with on the field.
“I don’t worry about who’s rolling in with the ones or twos or whatever,” he said.
The Mountaineers have several left-handed options competing for the job including Nicco Marchiol and Jayden Henderson. Rodriguez said that there’s no difference given how they run their offense as they plan to be able to roll out to both sides and bootleg as well.
“Going in a gun has changed a little bit what's front side or backside, because you're seeing it,” he said.
Still, it’s fair to say that unless one of the options truly separates themselves in the coming weeks, there isn’t going to be any quick resolution to which one will be the first one taking snaps this fall.
“But we've got six guys practicing, and we're trying to give everybody a fair amount of reps, and that's hard to do,” Rodriguez said.
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