This time last year, UVA Football coach Tony Elliott didn’t know what he had at QB – with Tony Muskett, an FCS transfer, the only guy on the roster who had taken snaps at QB at the college level, and Muskett’s backup, Anthony Colandrea, set to begin summer camp as a true freshman.
You wouldn’t have asked for things to have worked out the way they did, necessarily – that Muskett, the Week 1 starter, would only get six starts as he dealt with injuries.
But it probably did work out for Elliott, because now he goes into the 2024 season with two established, productive guys.
I’m assuming at this point that Muskett (1,031 yards, 6 TDs, 5 INTs, 63.3% completion rate, 128.8 QB rating in 2023) will be Elliott’s QB1 in the season opener with Richmond.
Neither Muskett nor Colandrea (1,958 yards, 12 TDs, 9 INTs, 62.6% completion rate, 139.6 QB rating) separated themselves in the spring, so my thinking on who will get the job is based on the idea that Elliott had decided on Muskett as his starter going into Week 1 last season based on Muskett’s experience, and that Elliott will opt for the experience factor again.
That said, I expect Elliott, offensive coordinator Des Kitchings and QBs coach Taylor Lamb to hold off on finalizing the depth chart until the last week or two of training camp, just to make sure that they make the right call.
The argument can certainly be made that Colandrea, a sophomore, is the QB of the future, with Muskett, a fifth-year grad senior, in his final year of eligibility, but Elliott is coming off back-to-back three-win seasons, and sorta, kinda, needs to win now, not next year.
There is a new third-string guy in the mix at QB, Gavin Frakes, a 6’4”, 220-pound big-arm guy who started five games as a freshman at New Mexico State in 2022.
Frakes, like Colandrea, has three years of eligibility remaining, and while I don’t expect him to push either Muskett or Colandrea for the QB1 spot this fall, I don’t presume that Elliott brought him in, or that Frakes packed up and moved across the country, to have the kid hold a clipboard for the next three years.
At the least, there has to be an expectation that Frakes can develop into a guy who will challenge Colandrea for the starting QB job next spring.
In the meantime, for 2024, Frakes is a nice insurance policy, considering the injury issues that we saw last season with Muskett.
When Muskett went down last year – he missed Weeks 2-4 after going down to a shoulder injury in the season-opening loss to Tennessee, then injured his right ankle in the first quarter in Week 10 against Georgia Tech, and missed the last three games – the backup to Colandrea was third-string walk-on Grady Brosterhous, who was used last year almost entirely in short-yardage situations.
Not having a reliable third-stringer at QB dumbs down the playbook when the backup is pressed into a starting role, so having Frakes in the mix should keep things rolling if one of the top two guys goes down.
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Chris Graham
