Inside HOKIE SPORTS | Vol. 12 No. 4 | March 2020

inside.hokiesports.com 23 READY TO TAKE next step Eight starters return, including quarterback Hendon Hooker and the entire offensive line, and coordinator Brad Cornelsen is focusing on finding consistency and developing depth by Jimmy Robertson IHS extra Continued on page 24 ball away at times. To his credit, he was ready, and he took advantage of the opportunity. And then, the other part of it was our team played better. We played better around him. We got turnovers on defense and set up some short fields. We got a couple of leads, and that always makes it easier for a guy to play well on offense, especially at quarterback. So certainly a combination of us as a team playing better, and Hendon gave us a spark, made plays and took care of the ball. It was the perfect storm that started to develop at the same time. Q: Were you surprised at his performances? BC: I don’t think so. He had not proven those things yet. He had had some opportunities to play in games. What we had seen was development, but he had yet to show us his full potential on the field at the time, and that’s always the tough thing—guys getting opportunities, and you’ve got to make decisions and go with them. Certainly, things are different in games, sometimes better and sometimes worse when guys get those opportunities. With the kind of kid he is and the kind of work he had put in, just watching him start to develop—which happened at the end of the previous year—you could see he was starting to understand how to play the position. I don’t think it shocked anybody by any means. Q: If you count Quincy Patterson as the winning quarterback in the North Carolina game, you have three quarterbacks who have won Division I games [Hooker, Patterson, and Oregon transfer Braxton Burmeister]. Is this the deepest quarterback position room you’ve had? BC: It’s probably the best room I’ve ever had, just top to bottom. Not only the types of quarterbacks that they are and the overall talent level, but just the types of kids they are—the character in that room, the work ethic, accountability, the team-first type of attitude those kids have with each other. It’s an awesome room, but yeah, there’s great competition at that position. Guys are pushing each other, and I think they all embrace that, and they’re excited for the spring. They know they’re all going to get their shot to get those reps with the 1’s [first-team unit] and go continue to develop. Q: Do you plan to split the reps evenly among those three if you guys are able to return to the practice field this spring? BC: Absolutely. We’ll start off spring with those three guys getting reps, and they’ll all get reps with the 1’s. Q: With Deshawn McClease leaving, how important will it be to get a pecking order established at tailback? BC: We need to find out what we have. Obviously, there are some new faces in that room. We have to teach them what to do, so we can go see what they can do physically. That will be important. All those guys have already shown the willingness to put the extra time in and catch up on the offense and put themselves in position to go play ball. The new guys, getting them caught up and figuring out who they are and what they can do, and then the young, inexperienced guys, just continuing to develop them. Like a Keshawn King, who is really explosive and talented and just kind of made it through his freshman year. That’s always tough, and he had some ups and downs. It wasn’t all clear sailing, but he hung in there and has had a really good semester so far—and what we hoped he would come back to school looking like. He’s got an extremely high ceiling. Watching a guy like him and some of those young guys develop to see what they can become and mix in some new experienced guys, that’s going to make it a competitive spring and a competitive room. I really like what the room is becoming with the type of competitiveness and focus and intensity that we’re seeing in that room from workouts and off the field so far.