HEAT AROUND THE CORNER
"It's always going to be the quarterback and me when things don't go well."
Brian Bohannon tried to warn us earlier in the season. “It’s always going to be the quarterback and me when things don’t go well,” he said last time he was questioned about the struggling Kennesaw State offense.
Remember that Neil McCauley quote from Heat? Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner. The wisdom applies to how vulnerable head coaches feel about their starting quarterbacks, too.
After Kennesaw State’s winless, noncompetitive start to life in FBS, Bohannon made the self-preservation move he foreshadowed a few weeks back: He’s benching redshirt sophomore Davis Bryson ahead of the MTSU game and setting up an open competition for QB1, with four guys allegedly in the mix.
During his first five games as starter, Bryson threw for 2 touchdowns and 6 INTs on his 616 yards, with a 5.6 yards/attempt rate and a completion percentage hovering around 50%. His 51.4 NFL passer rating puts him at the bottom of CUSA, per PFF. More problematic for the ground-based Owls offense: They also failed to get him going in the running game, with only 119 yards to his name on 47 carries, excluding sacks.
If the fourth-quarter pick 6 against Jacksonville State goes down as Bryson’s last throw as the full-time starter, it’s a fitting way to end his time as QB1 and an accurate microcosm of the offense as a whole. Bryson takes full blame from coaches and fans for an ugly result, when he’s far from the only issue.
He doesn’t trust his protection to hold up and doesn’t expect his receivers to get open, so he fires blindly into the primary option. Navelle Dean can’t get a clean release while trying to clear out, ending up so jammed that his original defender almost accidentally picks off the ball intended for Tykeem Wallace on the out route.
Whether you agree with replacing Bryson or not doesn’t make much of a difference. Even in the best case scenario, the move will likely end up as one of those good result/bad process decisions that deserves scrutiny even if Khalib Johnson makes it rain with 300 yards and a few scores on Tuesday night in Murfreesboro.
Coaches choose the wrong quarterback all the time. That’s understandable and not the problem here. It’s still unclear if that’s what happened in Kennesaw this season, but the route to this point highlights concerns about this coaching staff’s ability to ID, recruit, and develop talent at this level. Bohannon and his QB coach Chandler Burks could’ve used a meaningless exhibition season in 2023 to reach this exact conclusion on Bryson, then they also burned five more mostly noncompetitive games this year before making a move.
Here’s Bohannon’s full answer about the current state of the QB room:
To recap how we got here, for those who haven’t been painstakingly following the multi-year mishandling of the QB position in Kennesaw:
Last season, when results literally did not matter, Bryson played 95 total snaps, almost all of which came against non-D1 opposition. Bohannon and Burks passed on the chance to find out if he was the new offense’s long-term answer in favor of full reps for redshirt senior Jonathan Murphy.
Bryson entered 2024 as the starter and it took five full games for them to decide that he’s not the guy. No other QB took meaningful snaps in that time, minus a couple handoffs and garbage time dropbacks for JUCO transfer Khalib Johnson.
“Davis is the quarterback. He gives us the best chance to win,” Bohannon told us less than two weeks ago, prior to the Jacksonville State blowout. Has he changed as a player since then?
The Week 8 depth chart, for what it’s worth, now lists four co-starters at QB. Bohannon didn’t name Bryson alongside the other three who are “taking reps” to determine who will lead the offense. No mention at the time of Earl Woods either, the other transfer brought in during the offseason.
Seems like a fairly important moment in Kennesaw State’s season, right? Did Bohannon really just bench Bryson and say that he has an open, three-man QB race 72 hours before his Week 8 game? That might be worth some added context or critical thought from the media in attendance, however small in numbers. The next two questions were about Qua Ashley and how weird it is to play Tuesday games.
Nobody revisited or followed up about the QB situation on the record.
It’s easy to watch these weekly press conferences and wonder about the long-term plan and competence of the coaching staff as Bohannon winds up for one of his lengthy coachspeak answers. Who can blame him, though, for not diving too deep on the decision when nobody in the room is curious enough to ask a follow up? He says nothing and the questions ask even less of him.
If there is a plan, a way out of this hole, Bohannon hasn’t articulated it in public. He wants the Owls to play a little harder, execute better, and “cut it loose.” As long as the Owls beat insists on covering the program like a high school team, we will continue to have a large knowledge gap in this novice fan base. Everybody’s desperate to have an idea of what’s going on, and the best we’ll get is three basic questions a week without any eyes on the big picture.
If you’re looking for reaction from someone in the room, check out the MDJ story where sports editor John Bednarowski left the door open to Bryson keeping his job and - for some reason - completely revised the names that Bohannon mentioned in the “open” quarterback race.
After a 0-5 start, Kennesaw State may be looking for a new starting quarterback.
Still, coach Brian Bohannon said the competition to determine a starter is still a work in progress ahead of Tuesday’s kickoff against Middle Tennessee State in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
During his Friday news conference, Bohannon said all of the quarterbacks — current starter Davis Bryson and backups Khalib Johnson, Braden Bohannon and Earl Woods III — were all taking reps and getting a chance.
“May” struck me as an odd word choice here given the only certain moment during the presser is that it wouldn’t be Bryson. That third sentence is not at all what Bohannon said during his time at the podium.
Bednarowski continued, using background explanation about the decision that must have happened after the recorded press conference, as none of this was on tape. Either the media or Bohannon realized the absurdity of the situation once the camera stopped rolling and wanted to revisit the conversation.
Bohannon said he did not lay blame for the team’s struggles on Bryson, and the potential move did not mean Bryson had not done what the coaches expected of him. At this point in the season, Bohannon is hoping a quarterback change might, in some way, spark the offense.
Opening a four-man QB competition ahead of Week 8, even if it’s all a smoke and mirrors motivational tactic, says more about the coaching staff than it does about any of the players involved. Bohannon can talk about needing a spark, but the offensive problems run much deeper than simply needing a hot hand behind center.
Kennesaw State’s only HC in history gambled his Owls legacy on handing over a still-unfinished pistol scheme to two first-time coordinators in Burks and Stewart Cook. The resulting on-field product has shown almost zero redeeming qualities: Dead last in FBS when you look at yards per play (3.96), per carry (2.72) and EPA/play, along with a 30.9% success rate that ranks 133rd. Since we’re talking QBs, the passing-specific numbers are 124 in EPA/play (-0.22), 128 in success rate (33.1%) and 111 in yards/dropback at 5.76.
With serious media coverage, Bohannon would have fielded direct questions about Burks and his co-coordinator Stewart Cook weeks ago. Nobody’s mentioned them in a single presser.
The biggest coaching failure regarding Bryson is the inability to successfully blend triple option concepts, for which Bryson was originally recruited, with the new pistol formations and personnel. That’s the only way this Burks/Cook experiment can ever work, especially if you start Bryson. On the triple looks the Owls showed - both from two-back sets and with WRs in motion - he either wasn’t allowed to pull the ball or wasn’t comfortable making the reads. Not sure which one of those reasons would be worse.
Looking at the national yards per dropback leaderboard, Army and Navy both rank in the top 3. Not because the academies have elite passing talent, but because they can use their run-heavy option schemes to take advantage of crowded boxes on opportunistic passing concepts. It’s hard to scare anyone with RPOs when neither option works, and you’re left doing things like running smoke screens that result in Blake Bohannon trying to make people miss and Tykeem Wallace blocking for him. Sure.
Compare Bryson’s play-action/RPO numbers to what Murphy posted on those same type plays in 2023. Burks calls them less often than Chris Klenakis did last season, and it’s not working as well when he does:
Bryson, ‘24 (5 games) - 2 TDs and 3 INTs on 22 total PA dropbacks (18.5% of the time), 35% completion, 6.2 YPA, 12.3 ADOT.
Murphy, ‘23 (8 games)- 6 TDs and 0 INTs on 83 PA dropbacks (46.9%), 50% completion, 8.9 YPA, 12.5 ADOT
If the Owls can’t succeed on designed runs, mostly took play-action out of the playbook, and won’t commit to the option concepts that made Bryson the correct choice to start the year, you end up without many choices other than relying on a contrived midseason QB competition for a “spark.”
Conceptually, I understand Johnson as a flawed way to shake things up and utilize one of few offensive areas where the Owls rank in the top half of FBS: Explosive pass rate, at 10.7%. The Blinn College transfer, who started his college career at Louisville, does have a stronger arm but a much lower floor with two fumbles, an INT, and three turnover-worthy throws in just five attempts. The staff also clearly doesn’t trust him much if he’s not gotten a real chance to this point, with only 25 snaps to his name.
Unless they’ve been hiding a secret weapon elsewhere on the bench, Woods, Scheerhorn, and Braden Bohannon would all be similar players that mostly just recreate Bryson in the aggregate, to borrow from Moneyball. Your milage may vary on if you believe there is truly a four-man race (I do not), but this change, at this point in the season, only makes sense if it’s accompanied by a shift in strategy, too.
We’ll find out Tuesday night when the Owls offense takes the field against an MTSU defense that’s almost their equal at the bottom of many advanced metrics. Credit to coaching staff on this: For the first time in about a month, I’m intrigued by what will happen when the Owls have the ball. More importantly for Bohannon, he managed a slight distraction from the looming conversation about his job security.