The battle to replace Jaren Hall as the starting quarterback for the BYU football team appears to be pretty much a foregone conclusion at this point.

Barring injury, it seems certain that senior transfer Kedon Slovis will be taking the snaps for the Cougars when the season starts.

BYU fans who watched Friday’s spring scrimmage at LaVell Edwards Stadium, however, might find themselves jumping to conclusions and questioning whether that would be the right move.

After all, Slovis didn’t lead a TD drive, was just 6-of-13 passing for 50 yards (30 of which came on the first play) and had two rushes for no yards. He also threw a pass on an out route that was intercepted by Cougar junior cornerback Jakob Robinson.

But BYU head coach Kalani Sitake cautioned everyone to not read too much into what happened at the scrimmage.

“Other than the interception, I thought he made good decisions,” Sitake said. “I don’t know if the defense was really giving him much to work with.”

Cougar offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Aaron Roderick also felt comfortable with Slovis’s performance with limited opportunities.

“I thought he did a good job,” Roderick said. “It was mostly check downs but he threw a couple of good completions. The first play of the scrimmage was a really nice completion for a good gain. But it’s hard to run the ball and we didn’t want to show much, but I thought he did a nice job.”

Slovis himself didn’t seem super-pleased with his showing but he said that’s normal and just comes with the circumstances.

“It’s always kind of frustrating,” Slovis said. “I think every spring game I’ve ever had you kind of walk away wanting to do more. But it is what it is. You don’t show too much on TV. We did have a scrimmage on Tuesday and we felt really good after that. It’s good to keep perspective with that stuff.”

Slovis said he is feeling “super-comfortable” being at BYU and working with the team, even though he has only been in town for a few months.

“They make it super easy,” Slovis said. “They doing stuff that I like to do and it has meshed super well. It’s not anything crazy or different out there.”

While Slovis did little to wow the fans at the scrimmage, some of the other quarterbacks had some nice moments.

Here were their numbers:

• Sophomore Cade Fennegan had a couple of rushes for 12 yards.
• Junior Jake Retzlaff was 7-of-10 for 69 yards and a TD with three carries for 11 yards.
• Freshman Ryder Burton went 5-of-8 passing for 69 yards and scored a short-yardage TD run.
• Sophomore Nick Billoups had two carries for 30 yards including a 22-yard touchdown where he ran over and defender.
• Freshman Cole Hagen was 2-of-3 for 20 yards with an 11-yard QB draw TD run.

“I thought the other guys were able to get some work in and get hit a little bit,” Sitake said. “It was good to liven up the other quarterbacks.”

While Roderick didn’t see any of the other QB really separating themselves at the scrimmage, he did say that the depth chart is beginning to become more clear.

“Retzlaff’s really been coming on after missing a lot of practice time,” Roderick said. “There is going to be a good battle for that second spot with Retzlaff and Cade. Right now it’s between those two to be the backup.”

BYU still has a few practices of spring camp remaining and there is still work to be done.

“We want to keep improving our consistency level,” Roderick said. “A lot of the guys who are learning are making first-time mistakes. You want to see them not repeat that mistake next week. The biggest thing is not repeating mistakes and then just continuing to improve in our fundamentals and our technique.”

Sitake said the team is going to be doing some things to get itself ready for the season and “springboard” into offseason conditioning.

For his part, Slovis said he wants to make sure the Cougar offense is running smoothly in every way possible.

“It’s just about fine-tuning the stuff that we still need to work on,” Slovis said. “I think there is 80 or 90% of the offense that we’re pretty fluid with but there’s still probably an extra handful of plays that we haven’t got under wraps. I just want to rip those through certain protections and iron out some of the small details as to the newer stuff.”

Jaren Wilkey, BYU Photo

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