If there was one thing that got mentioned about a million times over the last three seasons in College Park, it was the value of having depth at quarterback in the program.
And give James Franklin, Maryland's estwhile offensive coordinator, some credit. Maryland brought in two quarterbacks in 2009 and two more in 2010, the only two classes Franklin had a hand in recruiting from start to finish during his second stint with the Terrapins.
New Maryland coach Randy Edsall inherited a program that was well-stocked at quarterback, including ACC rookie of the year Danny O'Brien and veteran Jamarr Robinson. In what really isn't a huge surprise, Edsall's first recruiting class doesn't include a quarterback.
And he didn't seem particularly concerned about it, either.
"My thing is there's so many numbers that you have. you have 85 scholarships, and when I came here there was five quarterbacks on scholarship," Edsall said. "I didn't think at that time that I should go and take another quarterback and have six because there's only one quarterback that plays at a time and you have five guys sitting. If you have six guys, only one's playing and five are sitting, I'm not real smart, but I'm smart enough to know that that doesn't work out real well. I just didn't feel like it was necessary this year to go and take a quarterback."
The interesting thing here isn't necessarily Edsall's philosophy in the micro, but rather trying to figure out what his thought process in the macro is. Edsall later mentioned he hoped to have 16 or 17 offensive linemen on scholarship in the long term.
There wasn't a good chance to follow up with a precise line of questioning on what the ideal number is for every unit. But when it comes to quarterbacks, it's clear that number isn't any larger than five. This year, that group will include O'Brien, Robinson (a senior), C.J. Brown, Devin Burns and Tyler Smith.
"Next year, we will take a quarterback," Edsall said. "But this year, with our numbers --- and again, that's one thing I want to get back to there. Every coach has a different philosophy in terms of how he would break down the number of scholarships per position to add up to the 85. Well, I have that and I want to get to that number. We're not there were we're at. There will be some things that we'll be doing that we tried to start doing this year and then even next year where we can get the numbers allocated in the way I would like to see them allocated."
Whatever happened to Clay Belton?
Posted by: Colm | 02/02/2011 at 07:42 PM
Colm ---
He was gone well before the 2010 season.
Posted by: D1scourse | 02/02/2011 at 08:20 PM