No starting QB change coming yet for Rutgers
When Rutgers trots out on offense this upcoming Saturday night against Michigan, behind center you’ll still find Noah Vedral.
Monday, head Scarlet Knights football coach Greg Schiano said that Vedral will remain the starting quarterback despite throwing for three killer second half interceptions this past weekend in Illinois’ comeback win at SHI Stadium in Piscataway.
“Noah is our starting quarterback,” Schiano said as his team prepares to take on the Wolverines at home (7:30 p.m., ET, BTN).
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“We're clearly in a developmental stage of offense, defense, and special teams. With everything that's gone on this year without a training camp without spring ball, we can't get the cart before the horse. But if you look at even in this developmental stage, offensively we're performing better than any time in the history of Big Ten football for Rutgers. My job as a coach is I got to step back and look and say okay, where are we? Each week I have to do that because I've always believed this, but I've learned it more in the back half of my career, to know where you're going, you better know where you've been and where you are right now. We got better on the offensive line this week. Was it what we're looking for? Absolutely not. Not even close. But if we can continue to make that incremental improvement. The thing that excites me is, even while we're making incremental improvement, again, we're operating at a higher level than we ever have in the Big Ten, that's substantial to me. So I have to look at that and I have to take that into account as I make decisions personnel wise.
“I talk to our staff about what we think we need to do schematically and those all come into play. But to answer your question Noah will be the starter.”
Rutgers led by 10 after the first quarter, six at halftime, and by 10 again in the third before Illinois scored on its last six possessions to win 23-20 with a few seconds remaining.
Vedral started out on a tear, completing six of his first seven attempts for 69 yards including a fourth down touchdown to Bo Melton for 29 yards. He threw for 164 yards in the first two quarters.
But, Vedral was shaky after the break, as he tallied just 95 more yards in the air with a touchdown and three picks. The Fighting Illini scored 18 points off of those turnovers. He finished 21-of-34 for 259 yards.
All three of Vedral’s interceptions were either bad decisions, bad throws, or both. Rutgers was driving and using its ground game late in the game until Vedral, off of play-action, went to throw to Shameen Jones, but the pass was behind the receiver and Jones tipped it up and was intercepted.
The Scarlet Knights were aggressive, but the risk didn’t pay off.
“I always talk like that to him. As I said Saturday after the game, I really believe it's managing risk and managing opportunity,” Schiano said. “And it's not always easy to see which is which. And that's how quarterbacks progress. You have to let the bad ones die. That's the single biggest thing and even though Noah's an older guy, he doesn't have a ton of experience under his belt. Hopefully with experience he'll better recognize the ones that we got to led die because there's gonna be plenty of opportunities in a game. Football games usually come down to anywhere between six to 10 plays. Now if we can predict the six to 10 plays they're going to be I could tell them, hey, these are the ones you really got to go hard on and really pay extra attention, but I can't. So that's how you got to play every one of them hard. You got to focus and you got to prepare for every one of them. The challenge I think is getting Noah to better see that and understand that and anticipate that. On the same token he made several plays that were really big time plays. Again, we're managing the opportunity. We have to do just a little bit of job managing the risk.”
After seeing three quarterbacks play against Ohio State a week ago including Johnny Langan and Artur Sitkowski, after Vedral was struggling in the second half, many questioned whether a change of signal callers was coming either in-game. It didn’t and it’s not coming next week either.
“Well first off I talked to the guys that coach the quarterbacks every day. I coach the whole team. Sean Gleeson coaches Noah and all the quarterbacks every single day. The offensive staff studies our offensive practice film every day so that's where I gather most of my information. But at the end of the day that's the decision of the head coach with a lot of input from a lot of people,” Schiano said on how he measure personnel decisions. “But that's really at every position. Obviously the quarterback gets the most attention, but that's every position in all three phases.
“Quarterback is the most important. I think you got to make sure you understand what you're evaluating. When a guy gets hit when he's throwing the ball is that partly his fault? Maybe if he held it too long. So let's get a time off the video. Okay, we released it in 2.3 seconds. He shouldn't get hit in 2.3 seconds. We released it in 3.8 seconds. Well, you better have that clock in your head and get rid of the ball. We really spend a lot of time on Sunday evaluating the previous game. And truth be told, it's Saturday night, it's Sunday morning, it's Sunday afternoon. It haunts you when you lose a game like that. It haunts you when you win. ...We try to take all the information gathered, talk to the experts, and then come up with a conclusion. But this one didn't take didn't take much time. I know that it's not what we wanted -- the result, but that's our decision.”
Follow Chris Nalwasky on Twitter @ChrisWasky.
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