zunooreo said:
Positive Bear said:
I'd be shocked if it isn't Zeno or Bohanon. I'm about 60-70% sure Zeno wins the starting job but I could be wrong.
The best QB should start - period.
The tenure entitlement BS is what had the offense struggling with Brewer last season. Now that that's behind us, and he's moved on, it should be greenfield for best available - period.
Coaches ALWAYS say the best players will play. That's of course true to an extent. However, in real life, from what I've seen, there's typically a preference given to seniority in college sports (even controlling for experience/trust) because it's bad for morale of the team as a whole when older guys to get passed up my younger guys. This is even a more pronounced issue now because of the transfer portal.
Of course seniority will only go so far because more than anything else the coaches want to win and have enormous pressure to do so, but (from what I've typically seen) seniority is going to act as a kind of "tiebreaker" for that reason. If it's not close, of course the better younger players will play every time and at every school.
And for QBs in particular, it's very difficult to separate one scholarship D1 from another except in live games. Case in point --- Tom Brady is probably the best QB of all time, but in college he probably didn't look much better in practice than any other scholarship t QB on his team (hence not winning the job until late in his career). QB is so much about decision making under pressure and pocket presence and being cool at crunch time---- things that are very difficult to simulate in practice. The physical tools have to be there but it's these hidden characteristics in their brains and internal makeup that separates the average from the good, the good from the great, and the great from the Brady's and those who have 15 year successful careers. Heck it's even (with all the tools and measuring and analysis in the world) very difficult to project whether a great college QB will translate to the NFL, much less from the practice field to the playing field in college.
In Baylor's situation, separating these three is even more difficult b/c the QBs have such different skill sets. GB's biggest strength is that he's hard to tackle, but you can't tackle any of them in practice so that's not a differentiator. By contrast, if a true freshman linebacker comes in and lights the world on fire, that's much easier to see because the difference between practice and game performance is much less pronounced for that position.
So sure, the coaches will say the best QB will play, and that's certainly true to an extent. But given the realities of QB selection in general and Baylor's analysis in particular, I will still be shocked if anyone but Zeno or GB starts game one. If an underclassmen takes over it will likely be because they show during ACTUAL GAMES that they are superior, because it's so difficult to overcome the seniority factor in practice.
[p.s., the coaches also of course want to maximize the chance that all three competing QBs give maximum effort improving over the summer, not simply as a pretext, but because history shows us there's a high chance we'll say all of them with significant playing time in the fall. That is true for most seasons, but particularly so when there is not an established incumbent).
. You probably would be surprise which QB has the fastest 40 or highest vertical. 
