QB competition open
Offensive coordinator Jake Spavital said Tuesday that the team will go through another quarterback competition leading up to Saturday’s game, albeit a shorter one than occurred in the offseason.
“We opened [the competition] back up and we’ve had some good experiences throughout the last week in live scrimmage situations,” Spavital said. “It’s still wide open. We’re going to split the reps today and possibly on Wednesday, and then Thursday we’ll probably have a declared starter, and they’ll take all the reps for that Thursday practice.”
Spavital said the situation is similar to what it was during fall camp.
“Kyle [Allen] came into my office and asked me if this is for real and I said, ‘Yeah it is,’” Spavital said. “He was like, ‘Good, because I’m going to try to go get it.’ I’m pleased with how he’s handled the whole situation from fall camp through those eight games leading up to this point. He shows up every day, he gets extra work in and you can tell that he’s really trying to exert himself to go out there and try to win this job.”
Licking the wounds
After eight straight weekends of football, the Texas A&M football team had a bye last week and was able to focus on improvement and recuperation as it prepares to rebound from a three-game losing streak.
“Looking back and evaluating where we are and where we were, I probably underestimated the eight-game stretch and how we handled it,” said head coach Kevin Sumlin. “We didn’t handle it the right way. We had a substantial amount of guys who are banged up and I would say mentally tired. That’s something we tried to address last week. I think the bye week came at a great time for us. Usually, you lose — particularly the way we lost — a bye week is the worst time for that to happen. I think in this situation it was much needed and it gave us an opportunity to look within, to heal up.”
Defensive coordinator Mark Snyder said the focus of the bye week was simple: get better.
“This past week was a matter of getting better,” Snyder said. “Each person had to get better in a certain way and we felt like coming out of the week that we were able to get that accomplished.”
Actions louder than words
When asked whether more vocal leaders had emerged on the team during the bye week, Sumlin said he isn’t looking for more talk among the players. Rather, he wants results.
“Last week, I don’t know that that’s something that we were looking for,” Sumlin said. “I think last week we were looking for improvement across the board — times like this, it’s not time to talk. I’ll just put it that way. It’s not time to have team meetings, it’s not time to have guys yell and scream or do all that. What it’s time for is action. That was really the message last week.”