Sunday, April 13, 2008
1 vote for a QB race to last till August
Aaron McFarling
Recent columns
CHARLOTTESVILLE -- Virginia should leave it open. Really.
Fling that door to the starting quarterback job wide, wide open and let Scott Deke step through it, if only to mingle with the other guys inside between now and Aug. 30.
Coach Al Groh has said all along that it is open, and he reiterated that stance after Saturday's Spring (don't call it a Game) Festival at Scott Stadium.
Here's hoping he's serious. Because Deke looked the best of all of them on this day, and it wasn't even close.
"But it's just the Spring Game!" you say.
Festival.
"Right," you say. "It's just the Spring Festival! Merely one performance! Don't read too much into it."
Valid points, all. This was 68 minutes of scrimmage-style football with no punts, no field goals and no clock. They didn't even keep score this year. As usual, there were mix-and-match lines in front of the quarterbacks. Numerous starters on both sides of the ball sat out because of injury.
That said, Deke still looked the best. That still matters. Because let's face it: If this offseason has been any indication, there will be no perfect world for UVa in 2008. There's going to be plenty of adversity, plenty of challenges. Performance under less-than-ideal circumstances should count, more so this year than any.
Questions abound, starting with an obvious one: Who would start the Festival at QB after Jameel Sewell's academic troubles left the team without a bona fide starter? The Cavaliers answered that by -- no kidding -- playing "guess a number between 1 and 50." Whoever got closest among the top three quarterbacks -- Peter Lalich, Deke and Marc Verica -- would be anointed the starter in the scrimmage.
"Scott Deke picked it on the first one," Lalich said. "He got it. He picked the actual number on the first one."
The number was 27.
"Got lucky," Deke said. "Just came into my head."
It was Deke's day. The senior from Pacific Palisades, Calif., led the team out to the 35-yard line and immediately began completing passes. When he was finished, he'd connected on 17 of 23 throws for 160 yards and two touchdowns. More importantly, he looked like he knew what he was doing and where he wanted to throw the ball.
Despite never throwing a pass in his four seasons at UVa, he was accurate. He was poised. He even made a nice move with his feet to elude pressure and get the ball off for a 42-yard strike to Matt Snyder, who made a spectacular catch.
"Definitely with age, I think comfort comes," said Deke, a 6-foot-3, 215-pound right-hander whose father, Daryl, played golf at VMI. "It wasn't my first rodeo by any means. Every day I still get really excited. I don't get nervous, per se. I just get anxious to do well.
"We just wanted to go out as quarterbacks and show the Virginia fans what the offense was capable of."
Verica completed 17 of 25 passes for 110 yards and a TD, a solid day for the sophomore.
The sophomore Lalich, meanwhile, struggled. The former high school All-American -- and the player with the most game experience -- did not look comfortable Saturday. He completed just 6 of his 18 passes for 72 yards.
He was intercepted three times, although two of them weren't really his fault. The first was a nice sideline pass that got wrestled out of the receiver's hands by the defender. The third was tipped and picked.
The second? Well, that was a legitimate mistake, a dump-off pass to nobody in particular, the kind of play UVa can't have this fall.
"Those things don't matter to the team right now, this spring," Lalich said, when asked about the first INT. "We've got a long way to go."
Asked how he felt about Groh saying all three QBs were even, Lalich said, "I don't have anything to say about that."
And his personal performance in the Festival?
"I don't have anything to say about that, either," he said.
Lalich can take solace in Groh's post-Festival assessment, which is the only one that really matters. The coach stood behind the quarterbacks throughout the scrimmage and watched how they progressed through their reads, and he said he was pleased with all three.
"They made good decisions," Groh said. "They ran their team well. ... Each one of them made some throws up the field that have to be made. I thought they were all pretty much in the same circumstance.
"If you look at numbers, you can't get the picture on that in the Spring Game [pretty sure he meant to say 'Festival,' but he gets a pass]. You don't know what line they were in. You don't know what receivers they had in there. So if you're trying to form any conclusions based on that, you're fooling yourself."
Fair enough. No need to form any conclusions in April other than one: Deke deserves a good, long look this August.
