Peak Perspective: Quarterback Play in the Mountain West

The quarterback situation in the conference this year will be interesting for a few reasons.

1. As many as eight teams in the Mountain West will be starting someone new
2. The Mountain West had three teams that, when accounting for plays not in garbage time (and not including bowl games), finished in the top 10 for passing frequency - Hawai’i (2nd) , Fresno (5th) and Colorado State (9th). That could increase
3. The Mountain West also has a decent history of good quarterback play. The schools currently in the conference have seven players in the top 50 all time for career passing yards.

I’ll go through each team in alphabetical order and highlight some stats or other facts I thought were interesting. I’ll be be honest, I don’t follow each team incredibly well, so I relied on stats from collegefootballdata.com and Pro Football Focus (PFF) to drive this.

For the teams that are going through a potential quarterback change, I tried to focus more on the coaching staff rather than the actual player. Most of the incoming transfers have little to no playing time, making it harder to gauge how well they’ll do. At the collegiate level so much of what a player does is dictated by the coaches.

*Some stats will be adjusted to remove garbage time (plays that occurred when there was a large scoring discrepancy late in the game) and include only regular season numbers. For stats I was able to do that for I’ll highlight with an asterisk. I do that do make a more fair comparison when possible, since you have a different game plan when up/down by 50 late in the game. With how many players sit out bowl games, and how little coaches actually get to help prepare for those in many cases, I felt like it wasn’t fair to include those when doing comparisons, but I couldn’t do it for all stats.

**I should also put in a disclaimer that I did most of this research in July, before camps started and some starters were named. Even though a few games have been played, it typically takes a few weeks for offenses to get things figured out. You also never know when a starter gets hurt or plays poorly and the backup has to come in. Speaking of that...

Air Force

It’s a little odd to talk about “Air Force” and “quarterback” together since they’re not playing quarterbacks in a traditional way. But there’s still some fun stuff to get into.

Air Force last year was doing pretty good at first. Started 8-0, beat Navy, and by week 10 was the second highest ranked Group of Five school at 25. Then they lost to Army and everything went down hill. Arguably the biggest was losing starting quarterback Zac Larrier to injury for a few games.

Larrier returns for a 5th year, which is great for Air Force. Here are the stats against FBS teams this past year, comparing games Larrier played and those he predominantly missed (included their loss to Hawaii as Larrier only played five snaps):

The advanced stats* from collegefootballdata.com highlight some of the issues:

Don’t worry, I’ll explain these! PPA is a rough estimate of the value of each play, which decreased 60% in games Larrier was out with injury. Success Rate measures the effectiveness of getting consistent yardage: gaining 50% of necessary yards on first down, 70% on second, and 100% on 3rd/4th. Basically what the triple option aims to do. On these plays they noticeably struggled without Larrier, especially on running plays.

The points per opportunity (average number of points gained when crossing the opposing 40 yard line) doesn’t look like much, but considering Air Force averaged nearly 10 fewer points with Larrier, it highlights how struggling to finish drives was a major factor.

None of this is meant to demean or criticize the quarterbacks who filled in for him (Jensen Jones and John Busha, who both could easily beat the crap out of me), but this shows how not being prepared for injury can screw your season. And it highlights how good Larrier was.

Boise State

I think most of us are surprised there starter for the opener wasn’t Malachi Nelson. Going back to 2000, the only five star quarterback I could find that committed to a non-major school was Ben Olsen, who committed to BYU but transferred to UCLA before he could play. Other quarterbacks did move from a major to non-major conference, but there was an underlying reason for the transfer (i.e. injury or off-field issues). It’ll be an interesting experiment to see how well a highly-rated recruit does at a smaller school.

The main option for now is Maddux Madsen, who was in an odd situation last year. He never played an entire game as quarterback, sharing time with Taylen Green, who left for Arkansas. In his one start Madsen got injured before half time. He did alright as essentially a relief player, throwing nine touchdowns to three interceptions, and in his first game off the bench he led Boise to a late lead against UCF. According to PFF he only played 278 snaps, so between a small sample size (that’s basically 4 games) and not being the intended starter, it’s hard to tell how well he’d do for a full season in an offense suited more for him.

Either quarterback has one of the best situations to to join: a dark horse Heisman candidate at running back, four lineman returning with at least seven career starts, and an offensive coordinator that spent about 15 years in the NFL. Plus, they snagged some receiving recruits that are high-risk, high-reward.

Boise’s offense last year year was very all-or-nothing:

The only teams that had more big plays at each interval were passing like crazy. Basically Boise’s passing game strategy last year was (a) throw to Ashton Jeanty or George Holani or (b) chuck it deep. It wasn’t efficient as Boise finished 60th in passer rating.

Colorado State

So, Colorado State liked to throw the ball in 2023. They had the 11th most attempts and threw at the 9th highest frequency*. Brayden Fowler-Nicolosi, who started as a freshman, had more pass attempts last year in 12 starts than Bart Star had in his first 36 professional games. Man things have changed.

But throwing the ball non-stop doesn’t always work out. Colorado State finished 60th in completion rate, 42nd in touchdowns, 72nd in passer rating, with Fowler-Nicolosi finishing 82nd in QBR. So that’s the bad news. I’ll point to two things as good news for him (maybe)

1. He really cut back on turning the ball over as the season went on. Here’s his stats from his first four games against FBS opponents versus the rest of the season:

It’s not great overall improvement, but cutting his turnover rate in half is solid, and the change in touchdown rate is too small to really say he regressed (literally one more touchdown would have put it at 4.4%). He had some good moments as a freshman: he managed to go toe-to-toe with Shadeur Sanders in his second career road start and overcame a 20 point deficit in the fourth quarter to beat Boise State.

2. Jay Norvell has good history with quarterbacks. When he was the co-offensive coordinator at Oklahoma he helped coach Landry Jones, who’s Oklahoma’s career leader in passing yards and touchdowns. At Nevada he helped Carson Strong win MW player of the year in 2020 and 2021.

3. (Bonus) Tory Horton came back. He finished 11th nationally in yards per game and was projected to go as high as the second round in the NFL draft this year, but decided to come back. Makes it easy to look good when others around you are good

Fresno State

Fresno might have the best proven situation going into 2024. Last year in the Mountain West, they finished second best in interception rate, touchdowns, passing yards, and first in completion rate. Mikey Keene was named First Team All conference by Athlon Sports. He led the conference in completion percentage last year at 67.1%, which was also 18th best nationally. The only Mountain West quarterbacks with a higher rating than him last year have left.

While they lost three of their top receivers, Fresno was pretty good at spreading the ball out and not relying too much on one receiver. No player was responsible for more than 10% of all receptions or 25% of all receiving yards. Returning players Jalen Moss, Mac Dalena, and running back Malik Sherrod combined for 146 receptions, 1,475 yards, and 10 touchdowns last year.

The downside is Mikey Keen struggled down the stretch:

His yards per game and touchdown rate nearly dropped in half. It’s not like the schedule got any harder: Of those final five games, only San Jose had a pass defense that was at least above average. To try and isolate where the issue was, I looked at some advance stats* and found that Fresno really struggled on passing downs late in the season (2nd and 7 or longer, 3/4th and 4 or longer):

With a ton of experience on the offensive line (might be starting five seniors) and both running backs returning, the best strategy might be to not get too greedy on early downs.

The wild card in all this is Jeff Tedford stepping down as head coach. Pat McCann was the offensive coordinator last year and the passing game coordinator the year before that. It looks like the plan is to keep him there with Tim Skipper being named Interim Head Coach. , I doubt we’ll see much change with the offensive scheme, especially with how late in the year this change happened.

Hawaii

Hawaii was the exact opposite of Air Force Last year, who ran the ball at the highest rate in the nation*. The only team who passed the ball more frequently* than Hawaii was Colorado.

Like Colorado State, they passed the ball a lot but wasn’t exactly efficient. They were outside the top 20 for completion rate, touchdowns, yards per game, and rating despite finishing the year 5th in total attempts. In Hawaii’s defense, they are in a bit of a rebuilding phase. They’ve only had four winning seasons since June Jones left in 2008 and Timmy Chang is only in his second year as head coach.

Returning quarterback Brayden Schager showed some solid improvement between the 2022 and 2023 seasons:

And here were his national ranks:

It’s still not great, especially the high number of interceptions. Sometimes teams have nowhere to go but up but remain stagnant. Schager at least was able to improve his numbers, and did that despite losing three of their top five receivers from 2022 (the other two who returned combined for two touchdowns in 2022).

While they did take a lot of sacks (39; tied for 116th), part of that was due to having a ridiculous number of pass attempts. They averaged 13 attempts per sack, which ranked 80th. So still not good. The biggest reason they might want to work on that is, according to collegefootballdata.com, Schager had the highest usage rate in the nation (percent of all offensive plays where a player throws/runs the ball). For reference, Colorado State’s Fowler-Nicolosi was second in the Mountain west at 57%. Schager was 70.3%. That may be part of the plan, but I always get worried about teams relying on one player so much. If he gets hurt that might screw Hawaii’s season (see “Air Force” for an example).

Nevada

Aight, so far I’ve tried highlighting some good things. I’m not going to sugar coat it, Nevada did not have a good passing game in 2023. They were dead last in passing touchdowns (6) and touchdown percentage (1.7%).

Instead of trying to guess what the quarterbacks are going to do ( I’ll instead go over their new offensive coordinator, Matt Lubick.

Matt Lubick might be a sneaky good hire, here’s where he has been the past decade:

As far as I can tell he took the 2019 year off, and according to Wikipedia he’s been an analyst at Kansas the past two years, probably taking a break after the disaster that was the Scott Frost Era at Nebraska.

Here’s some basic stats of those years he coached:

You can probably ignore the Nebraska stats: 2020 because of COVID and 2021 because, again, Scott Frost. At Oregon Lubick was part of some great offenses, working with Marcus Mariota (who won the Heisman, BTW) and Justin Herbert for a year (who’s starting for the Chargers). At Washington the offenses were still efficient, but I wonder if the lower touchdowns came down to a potential difference in styles. Lubick comes from the Oregon spread-option-offense style that Chip Kelly integrated in the late 2000s, where Washington’s coach at the time (Chris Petersen) preferred traditional, drop-back-and-pass quarterbacks.

At Oregon and Nebraska, Lubick had the quarterbacks run more, so it might be safe to assume he’ll do the same at Nevada. At Nevada, it’s kind of hard to tell if Brendon Lewis, AJ Bianco, or Chubba Purdy fit what exactly Lubick wants, but Lewis was named the starer. He did alright as a runner last year (495 yards on 120 attempts and four touchdowns), has good size at 225 lbs, and if Lubick does implement the spread offense throughout the year that’ll give Lewis some easy throws to mitigate any weaknesses he might have as a passer.

New Mexico

Like Nevada, New Mexico got a new head coach and offensive coordinator. But, they are also replacing their quarterback for sure. Because of that, like Nevada, I’m going to focus more on the coaches for this preview. But it’s going to be short (sorry New Mexico fans, it’s what happens when a lot changes)

Jason Beck is the new coordinator, who’s been coaching at the FBS level since 2013:

The seven quarterback Beck coached over the years consistently got 3,000 yards and 20 touchdowns a season. That’s not much, but the only New Mexico quarterback to ever do that was Jeremy Leach in 1989. The quarterbacks were pretty different styles, from running quarterbacks like Taysom Hill and Bryce Perkins to traditional quarterbacks like Tanner Mangum and Kurt Benkert.

The two most recent quarterbacks were arguably the most productive: Brennan Armstrong and Garrett Shrader. The past three years with Beck as their position coach they had 87 passing and rushing touchdowns. Armstrong in 2021 finished with 4,449 yards (4th most in the FBS ) and 31 touchdowns (12th most). Should also be worth noting that Hill, Benkert, and Perkins all spent time in the NFL after graduating.

Last year was Beck’s first as a play caller and it wasn’t good , as Syracuse finished 92nd in scoring, 99th in total yards per game, 116th in passing yards per game, but 48th in rushing yards per game. The other potential concern is that while Bronco Mendenhall has had a history of good offenses, outside of 2011-2012, Robert Anae has always been his offensive coordinator. In that one window without Anae BYU’s offense wasn’t too good (finishing 42nd and 65th in scoring in those years). Anae has a sweet gig at North Carolina State, so Mendenhall went with Beck to coach the offense (but Anae’s son is coaching the offensive line). I don’t think I know of any head coach having the same coordinator for 15 years, but I found that interesting.

The starter is Devon Dampier. It looks like his only start was against Boise last year, so not much to go off of. Bill Connelly likes him though, for what it’s worth.

San Diego

Since 2019, the best way to describe San Diego State’s offense is “Consistently slightly above Average”.

Very different from the days of Donnel Pumphrey and Rashaad Penny. So it’s going to be a complete change with Sean Lewis, who is notorious for his passing offenses.

Last year he was at Colorado as the offensive coordinator. If you weren’t paying attention to Colorado last year, you missed out on some entertaining stuff. I’m not saying they were good or bad, just entertaining. Quarterback Shedeur Sanders finished eighth in completion rate, 4th in interception rate (among those with at least 245 attempts), 10th in yards per game, and 25th in passer rating. Also, despite only playing 11 games, he was 13th in passing touchdowns. But it wasn’t all good.

Lewis had his play calling duties taken away after a loss to UCLA, where he was criticized for having a basic and predictable offense. I’ve heard the same thing about Baylor’s offense in 2012, Boise’s offense in 2010, and Florida’s offense with Tim Tebow, but with the tagline “it doesn’t matter if it’s predictable, you still can’t stop them”. More often than not that’s a vague criticism someone says about a poor offense when they can’t single out the exact issue. If you’re interested, here’s an article about how predictable NFL coaches are. Obviously that’s a trigger for me, so I’ll get back on topic.

It’s not clear if Colorado did better without Lewis calling plays. They only had two full games with Sanders after the change before he got hurt, scoring 19 points in one and 31 in the other. The real reason for the change may have been the fact that Sanders was sacked 52 times. That is a characteristic of Lewis’s offenses; they take lots of sacks:

So that’s the bad. The good is Sanders isn’t the only good quarterback Lewis has coached. He coached Eric Dungey at Syracuse, the school’s all-time leader in yards and third in touchdowns. Syracuse finished 11th and 18th in passing yards per game in 2016 and 2017, respectively. More impressively was how well Kent State did with Lewis as head coach. For the record, Kent State is not a good football program. They’ve had four bowl appearances ever and Lewis coached two of those. Since 1949, Kent State has had three seasons with 20+ passing touchdowns. Lewis was the coach for two of those and probably would have had a third in 2020; they had 14 passing touchdowns in four games.

Kent State is not a school that is overly invested in their football team, so his stats aren’t impressive on the surface. But most people feel he did well given the circumstances.

San Jose

Another team going through a change at quarterback and head coach. I was a little worried this would be a boring one since San Jose’s new coach, Ken Niumatalolo, has run the triple option his entire career. But then I found they hired Craig Stutzman, He played for Junes Jones back at Hawaii and runs a variant of the run n’ shoot offense, which he has used or implemented at Hawaii (2016-2019), Washington State (2020-2021) and Texas State (2023). At all of those schools he coached quarterbacks and was either the passing game coordinator or co-offensive coordinator.

That doesn’t mean they’re “pass happy”, like some of the other offenses in the conference. Texas State was 69th in passing plays rate* and 39th in total attempts. They were pretty efficient in moving the ball:

• 16th in completion rate
• 26th in yards per attempt
• 27th in rating

On passing plays, they ranked:

• 14th in success rate*
• 27th in PPA*

The down side was the bigger ones, touchdown rate (57th) and interception rate (98th). A big reason for that was their average starting field position* was ranked 92th, and low explosiveness* (91st), or how many plays lead to scoring plays. The counter point is that they finished 23rd in Points per opportunity*. On top of that, they were actually more of a running team than passing: outside of garbage time they were about 50/50 between running and passing, and relied more on running to score (33 rushing touchdowns to 24 passing on the year). The stats do back up the name of the offense, “Spread n’ shred”.

Really they used the pass to set up scoring plays, which is the opposite of what college offenses are starting to do. It’ll take some pressure off of whoever plays quarterback. Right now it doesn’t look like there’s a clear favorite to replace Chevan Cordeiro. San Jose’s options going into the year were:

• Emmett Brown from Washington State
• Xavier Ward from Sam Houston State
• Macloud Crowton from Moorpark College

Crowton was the only one with notable playing time beyond high school, playing 10 games for junior college team Moorepark College. For what it’s worth he was with the University of Utah for Spring ball this year before transferring to San Jose. But I guess that’s not enough as Brown is starting.

UNLV

As much fun as it was going over a few schools with new quarterbacks and coaches, it’s much easier to review schools that have some degree of continuity, even if it’s only among coaches.

Last year was Brennan Marion’s first at UNLV. The offense averaged 30 points a game for the first time since 2016 and had their highest offensive SP+ranking since 1996 (finished 8th last year). However, most of that was due to their running game. They finished 104th in passing plays rate* and only had 17 passing touchdowns (two more than in 2022, where they played two fewer games). The difference though was the passing game was an actual factor:

It’s only the fifth time since 2015 they averaged 200+ passing yards a game. It also helped having Ricky White, who finished 7th nationally in yards per game with 105.93.

Unfortunately, UNLV is losing a lot of offensive talent. Gone are two of their top three backs, a big part of the Go-Go Offense Marion developed. On top of that, quarterback Jayden Maiava left to join an interesting quarterback battle at USC (more on that here in case you feel like going down a rabbit hole). The type of quarterbacks that played for Marion at UNLV and William & Mary in 2019 are running quarterbacks (averaged 7.8 quarterback rushing attempts per game across 2019 and 2023), so that will likely be a deciding factor in determining the replacement.

There are three senior quarterbacks on the roster, two of which are transfers and the favorites to start. Matthew Sluka has had 1,200+ rushing yards the past two seasons at Holy Cross, and Hajj-Malik Williams has 10 rushing touchdowns in the same window at Cameron. Cameron Friel might also be in the mix, but with -141 career rushing yards he likely didn’t fit what Marion wanted. Sluka got the start in week one.

Utah State

Utah State was actually the first team I looked at. They’ve started six quarterbacks since Blake Anderson was hired, so between that and being an alumni I was curious about what they were going to do this year, and that’s what gave me the idea to look at every other team.

But then Anderson got fired on July 2nd. Since he was their offensive coordinator, quarterback coach, and play caller, I think it’s safe to say they’re going to have it rough. But like every other team there are still some numbers to look at.

Kyle Cefalo was the co-offensive coordinator last year, passing game coordinator the two years before that, and coaching receivers since he came to Logan in 2021. Nate Dreiling was named the interim head coach, after joining Utah State this past spring as defensive coordinator. Because of his defensive background, I’m assuming Cefalo will be in complete control of the offense. They may bring in another coach or promote a graduate assistant in the meantime to assist with either quarterbacks or receivers, but at the time I’m writing this they have not.

Anyway, in the three year’s Cefalo was part of Utah State’s offense they’ve done pretty good, despite the revolving door at quarterback. Since 2021, Utah state has led the Mountain West in total passing touchdowns (94) and second in total passing yards (10,090, second to Fresno). On the relative metrics, they’ve been second in yards per game, second in touchdown rate and third in rating (I should not that Air Force beat them in both metrics, but those rates are skewed due to how rarely they throw the ball).

The areas they’ve struggled with are interceptions and sacks. Utah State has thrown the most interceptions in the conference since 2021 with 55, 11 more than second place Hawaii. Their 106 sacks allowed is also second most, and PFF gave them a pass blocking grade last year of 48; last in the conference and 126th nationally.

The good news is four offensive line starters return, so at least they don’t HAVE to replace much there. Plus, Jalen Royals and Micah Davis return, who combined for 1,708 yards and 21 touchdowns last year. At first the starter was Spencer Petras, who transferred from Iowa, and Bryson Barnes from Utah was named number two. Neither put up big numbers at their prior schools, but both were in very conservative offenses, so whatever numbers they put up before shouldn’t be over analyzed.

Barnes filled in pretty well in week one when Petras was injured, so it may not be the last time he plays. I want to see more, mainly because he was a pig farmer and that’s a good background for entertaining memes.

Wyoming

Of all the teams in the conference potentially changing quarterbacks, Wyoming was the only one not to get one through the transfer portal. Andrew Peasley seems done with college football after six seasons, which is a shame since he was the first Wyoming quarterback to throw 20+ touchdowns since Josh Allen in 2016.

The two main options were Jayden Clemons and Evan Svoboda. Clemons was the back up in 2022 and had one start, then Svobodada passed him on the depth chart last year. He had a whopping 38 attempts and no touchdowns, but ran for two. In their bowl win against Toledo he came in to put the team in position to get the game winning field goal. And at 6’5 245 lbs, he might be the biggest quarterback in the Mountain West (that’s the same size as Cam Newton, FYI).

Wyoming’s all time leader in coaching wins, Craig Bohl, retired and was replaced by long time defensive coordinator Jay Sawvel. I think he didn’t like Bohl’s conservative offenses because a month after becoming head coach he hired Jay Johnson to be the offensive coordinator and quarterback coach. Johnson was an offensive coach at five Power Five schools since 2016, including five years as an offensive coordinator. His offense at Colorado was pretty average in 2019, but he did better at Michigan State from 2020-2023. In 2021 he was a finalist for the Broyles Award, given to the nation’s top assistant coach.

That year Michigan State quarterback Payton Thorne had 3,240 yards (3rd most in school history), and school record 27 touchdowns. They regressed a bit in 2022 (19 touchdowns to 11 interceptions), and head coach Mel Tucker being fired last September almost made it a lost season. Wyoming is banking on getting the 2021 version.

Conclusion

Like I briefly went over in the beginning, the Mountain West every now and then has good quarterback play. Last year was not one of those. Air Force and San Jose were the only schools to finish top 50 nationally in passer rating, but Air Force’s stats are skewed due to their low number of pass attempts. However, every school this year at least as some type of plan. Either a team is bringing in a new coach/quarterback or running it back with a quarterback that at has least some degree of success.