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He added, “I think it’s been really cool.”
There’s a saying in football at every level: When you have two quarterbacks, you don’t have a quarterback. To a degree untrue of any other position, at some point a successful team will need to choose only one player to fill that role, and that eventually will leave every other quarterback on the team without the chance to gain the experience necessary to improve.
“You cannot overrecruit the running back position,” the CBS analyst Gary Danielson said. “They’re all perfectly happy to get a third of the carries.”
“But at quarterback,” he added, “it’s different.”
Danielson, a former college and N.F.L. quarterback, recalled how splitting snaps between a sophomore and a senior on the 1999 Michigan Wolverines birthed tensions in the locker room (not to mention a massive chip on the shoulder of the senior, Tom Brady).
“It affects the rest of the team way more than it affects the guys,” Danielson said. “When things don’t go well, they’re just like the people calling the talk show: ‘Put the other guy in!’ ”
So far, the Tide, the Bulldogs and the Tigers — a combined 6-0 entering this weekend — are managing. It helps that in all three cases, one of the quarterbacks is more of a so-called pro-style player — mainly handing off or passing, like most N.F.L. quarterbacks — while his rival is a dual-threat option, as likely to run with the ball as to throw it. Consequently, each player’s skill set can yield what is effectively a different offense.
At Alabama, for example, Tagovailoa is more clearly pro-style than Hurts; at Georgia, the sophomore starter Jake Fromm offers a pro-style look, and the freshman Justin Fields, who spends more time on the bench, is the dual-threat option. At Clemson, it is the reverse: the starter Kelly Bryant, a senior, is the runner, while the freshman Trevor Lawrence comes from a more traditional mold.