Early Tuesday morning, Rutgers Football offensive coordinator Sean Gleeson met with the media for a virtual conference call for the first time since he was hired back in early January. He spoke about a lot of different topics, but one of the top things on everyone’s mind was the ongoing quarterback competition and he gave some interesting answers.
“I think practice is our secret sauce and that’s kind of been the case everywhere that I’ve been,” Gleeson told TKR. “The tempo of which we practice and the aggressiveness. There is going to be no-one collecting rain during our practice, there will be a lot of movement. You guys should notice that when you come visit. Now that we don’t have that, obviously the environment for evaluation has been a lot different. We’ve done everything we can to do bring practice to these guys within the rules. I told the wide receiver group, we’ve studied long and hard the movement that they undergo during a practice and it’s about four miles of running in your typical no huddle practice. Everything we’ve done over the web is great, but that’s four miles of your body confirming everything that you’ve just learned in meetings. That would’ve been 15 chances to do that in spring and we lost out on that. With the quarterbacks are all missing about four miles of movement on their bodies to confirm what our minds are learning. So we have to do our best within the rules to cultivate that to try and get them to do what we want them to do. Then when they get back we have to make sure we don’t waste any time, we haven’t had a chance to practice, but we can’t take a week or two to learn how to practice. That’s going to help in the quarterback evaluation and during the season when these guys start taking live bullets.”
During Gleeson’s time at Princeton, he helped get both a dual-threat and a drop back quarterback to the next level, but the question on everybody’s mind is does he have a preference between the two.
“Like I said before I prefer a good one,” said Gleeson. “The things that have made me a commodity in the coaching world is my ability to be a chameleon. So I definitely didn’t play dual-threat wise, I believe your offense is an indication sometimes of where you’ve played, who you’ve coached with and what you’ve studied. So I bring my experiences as a player and as a quarterback to whatever kid I coach for sure, but I wouldn’t be worth a lick if I couldn’t make it flexible enough for a dual-threat kid to play in. There’s my experience with John Lovett, he would rush for 100 yards, pass for 200 yards in 2018 and we broke the league record for points scored and yards in a season and they’ve been playing football in the Ivy League for a long time. What you have to do is take yourself out of, “football is supposed to be played this particular way”. If your brain can handle impartial advice that maybe isn’t the way you went about your business, then it will make yourself a more rounded coach in that way.
“I don’t really have a preference, but I like guys that can throw like I said before. The field is so big, sometimes when you’re a limited thrower it limits the field a little bit in my opinion. You can’t touch different parts of the field with the ball. In a perfect world, I would love a thrower that can then run, there is a priority in that.”
At the moment, Gleeson doesn’t have a quarterback committed yet in the 2021 class and with the COVID-19 pandemic shutting down in-person evaluations, Gleeson admits that it has been a little more difficult when it comes to quarterback recruiting.
“I think all of us are kind of learning on our feet here with these weird COVID rules,” he said. “I think we did a tremendous job of getting our recruiting off the ground here virtually at Rutgers. The thing that you do miss is physically watching guys throw in shorts and a t-shirt. I think the recruits have responded in a real smart way, a lot of people have done a good job of bringing those throwing sessions to the coaches. Obviously we have game tape and highlight tape to evaluate, where everything is sort of the same. The recruits have been taking ground footage and sending them to the coaches to replace that one-on-one interaction where you get to see them 10 feet away and watch their arm work. I’ve gotten my fair share of that video on that and it’s touched on our evaluation as well. Sometimes on the game tape or highlight tape you can’t really see up close and personal and it’s been a value to me for those kids who have sent that. Whether it’s working out in their home gym or throwing out on the field with their dad, you can definitely see some things. In some ways, I think that the real good recruiters and good evaluators can still spot the things that they need to spot and it’s made the real good ones stand out, so hopefully we have an advantage there.”
Gleeson took it a step further and went into detail about what he is looking for in potential quarterback recruits and the answer shouldn’t really surprise you.
“Competitiveness is number one,” said Gleeson. “I like guys who play multiple sports, I like guys who compete all year long. Guys that have gene about them, that never want to lose in a game of basketball, guys that are just always looking to win. The Jordan documentary has kind of given us evidence of what that looks like. They need to be intelligent. I think that one of the things that I try to preach to the quarterbacks, is that I can coach you in a very capable way. I can get you to do everything that a quarterback needs to do, but in order to really capitalize like these great guys like Brady or Manning, you have to give them the ability to play three-dimensional chess when the game is going on. That’s what we call the difference between capability and capacity.
"If I give you brain the capacity to solve problems, as opposed to one move at a time then I’m going to put you in a better position to be successful. If I can teach your brain to hold onto all that and give you bandwidth and you go on to the NFL and you can handle whatever system the Arizona Cardinals throw at you or the Kansas City Chiefs throw at you or the Cleveland Browns throw at you. I think in that way the guys that we’ve sent to the league in my career, they are all really well prepared. So they have to be intelligent and the way we kind of figure that out is we ask them about their own offense and they have to be accurate. Much has been made about the quarterbacks recently going to the NFL because they don’t fit the typical mold of a Drew Bledsoe, 6-foot-4, 230-pound model, instead they are actually the Russell Wilson’s of the world, Baker Mayfield or whoever, which is slightly different then the recruiting document that you would think we would all receive. They have to be accurate, so I watched a guy like Chad Pennington have a tremendous career in the NFL, his decision making and accuracy was really great. Did he have the best arm strength? No, but I think accuracy across all shapes and sizes is what quarterbacks need to have. So competitiveness, intelligence and accuracy."
Stay tuned for more on Gleeson and other Rutgers Football news right here on The Knight Report!
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