BOWLING GREEN — The quarterback derby at Bowling Green will continue for at least another week, but the Falcons are using training camp to embrace their reality under center.
They have only three scholarship quarterbacks on the roster — the eligibility of one of them is pending — leaving the team preparing for anything and everything.
Bowling Green still is evaluating the competition among Matt McDonald, Darius Wade, and Grant Loy, but this particular battle has a catch. Given the lack of depth at the position, coach Scot Loeffler said “there’s no doubt” that all three quarterbacks will be needed at some point.
“We’re so thin at that position that there’s no question in my mind that we’ll see a bunch of them this year,” he said.
Bowling Green opens the season Aug. 29 with a home game against Morgan State, but who will start at quarterback remains the team’s biggest question.
Wade and McDonald, neither of whom has been made available for interviews, previously played under Loeffler at Boston College.
McDonald is coming off his best week of training camp, though his status for 2019 is unknown. The redshirt sophomore applied with the NCAA for immediate eligibility after transferring this offseason, and BG awaits the ruling on the waiver.
Wade, a sixth-year graduate transfer most recently at Delaware, has been on campus for less than a month, while Loy, a redshirt junior, is the most experienced at BG but the least experienced in Loeffler’s offense.
But the belief is that any of the three could be needed in a specific game week.
“That’s the conversation I had with Coach Loeffler, and he said that we’re going to need all of us,” Loy said. “I’ll be on the field one way or another. I’ve been working hard, and I just want to help our team win. I just want to win games.”
Despite the nature of a position where only one player sees the field at a time, Loy said the quarterback room found an easy rapport.
“You think of a quarterback battle and you might think of it being so competitive where you don’t talk to each other and you might not be friends, but that’s not the case,” he said.
Loy said he and McDonald connected right away, and the addition of Wade has helped all three improve in Loeffler’s pro-style offense.
“That’s the thing, in this offense, you’ve got to be on top of your stuff,” Loy said. “You’re not going to be successful unless you have your peers, your other quarterbacks helping you, especially guys who have been in this offense for two years.”
Loeffler said the next week of training camp will be important in deciding who ultimately starts against Morgan State.
“They’ve all got things that they need to improve on, and I’m going to really hammer that out,” he said. “We’ll see where this goes at the end of the week. Probably, it’ll be a game-week decision of where we’ll go.”
No matter how the depth chart looks in late August, however, each of the three has been given the same order: Be ready.
“We all just mesh really well and support each other,” Loy said. “It’s a really good thing we have going, and when the season comes, I think we’re going to need all three of us.”
First Published August 17, 2019, 8:58 p.m.
