College Football Notes: QB battles ahoy in Pac-10

By Matt Smith

At the start of the 2007 college football season, the Pac-10 figured to boast a number of good quarterbacks.
USC’s John David Booty was considered a Heisman frontrunner, Oregon’s Dennis Dixon and Cal’s Nate Longshore figured to be two very good returning starters and the same goes for Washington State’s Alex Brink, Arizona’s Willie Tuitama, Arizona State’s Rudy Carpenter and Washington freshman Jake Locker was supposed to round out a very good crop of signal callers.
Now, Booty, Dixon, Brink and Stanford’s T.C. Ostrander have graduated while incumbent starters have left a lot to be desired, opening up some interesting quarterback battles heading into spring practices.
Longshore appears to have lost his job to Kevin Riley, who was the MVP of the Armed Forces Bowl, playing extremely well in his opportunities when replacing Longshore due to injury or ineffectiveness.
Cal head coach Jeff Tedford will say that the competition is open between the two, but Riley has to figure to have the upper hand.
There will also be battles between returning quarterbacks at UCLA between Ben Olson and Pat Cowan and at Oregon State between Sean Canfield and Lyle Maevao.
Quarterback battles will be the story, at least early on in the Pac-10 as only Arizona State, Washington and Arizona are 100 percent certain who will be under center.
The Trojans have to figure out who will be taking the snaps, Mark Sanchez or Mitch Mustain, both of whom were highly touted coming out of high school.
Sanchez was fairly effective when Booty went down last season, completing 60 percent of his passes for 695 yards and seven touchdowns.
Mustain, the Arkansas transfer, threw for nearly 900 yards and threw 10 touchdown passes when he was starting early on for the Razorbacks as a freshman.
Justin Roper and Cody Kempt were forced into action when Dixon and Brady Leaf went down for the Ducks, and now both fairly untested sophomores will be battling for the job.
Stanford, on the other hand, has four quarterbacks returning from last year’s team, including Tavita Pritchard who made a few starts. But the guy who could emerge from the pack is a very highly touted freshman Andrew Luck from Stratford High School in Texas.
Luck was the No. 7 rated quarterback according to ESPN.com and was their No. 61 overall recruit.
Washington State, who was bad last year and had a terrible recruiting class, will try and decide between senior Gary Rogers and Marshall Lobbestael.

What did he do?: The question on anyone’s mind that pays close attention to college football, is what did Ryan Perrilloux do?
He’s a mercurial talent, playing for the best team in college football and he is just about to take the reigns as the starting quarterback at LSU and the next thing you know he’s been suspended indefinitely. As of right now, what he’s done has been kept top secret as Les Miles continues to tell people that it is discipline for the violation of team rules.
This is Perrilloux’s third suspension in nine months, making some wonder if this is it for the would-be sophomore quarterback of the Tigers.
With that said, that leaves LSU with two very inexperienced quarterbacks as the frontrunners to take over.
Junior Andrew Hatch, a transfer from Harvard, was 1-for-2 for nine yards last year and he will be competing with a redshirt freshman in Jarrett Lee, who was a highly regarded recruit coming out of Brenham High School in Texas. Lee was part of a big Texas quarterback class in 2006 that included Ryan Mallett.
If Perrilloux is not allowed to return, Lee will probably emerge as the favorite by the end of fall practice or the beginning of the season. He will then probably wreak havoc on the SEC for four years.

Terrelle Pryor sighting: Or pretty much a lack thereof. There haven’t been any Terrelle Pryor sightings on any major campuses lately.
He has visited Ohio State and Michigan, but since then has not followed up on Penn State and Oregon. According to rivals.com he is high on Ohio State and Michigan and medium on Penn State and according to scout.com he is medium on Michigan, Ohio State, Oregon and Penn State.
All signs indicated he was ready to announce his commitment to Ohio State on Feb. 6, but he was talked into giving Penn State a visit.
Since then, Michigan has stepped up its recruitment of the top prep football player of the country, giving Michigan perhaps the slightest edge.
A visit to Happy Valley could change his mind, and if he does indeed fly to Eugene, he could very well fall in love with the multi-million dollar facilities and the fact that he will have as much Nike gear as he wants, not to mention being able to wear a different style uniform at every game.