BYU is searching for the right quarterback in a battle that has been whittled down to freshman Bear Bachmeier and sophomore McCae Hillstead. Each has been and is still being studied by offensive coordinator Aaron Roderick, day by day, practice by practice, hour by hour, rep by rep, sized up like blue-ribbon pigs down at the county fair.
All the standard QB qualities are being evaluated, from dimension — Bachmeier is 6-2, 225 pounds, Hillstead is 5-9, 195 — to arm strength to poise to acumen to mobility to command of the offense to leadership to decision-making. Blah, blah, blah. All the stuff.
But that last one is being weighed as much as any of the others for many reasons, foremost among them the most basic of football concepts, one that coaches harp on again and again and again.
Avoiding turnovers.
Who is more or less likely to throw a dumb pass that results in an interception in a key moment in a big game or even in a lesser game and who isn’t? Who is more likely to hold the ball for too long in the pocket and have it stripped away and who can feel the pressure, even from the blindside, and deal with it all proper and prudent? Who knows his receivers to the point of recognizing where they’ll be against various coverages and how likely they are to haul in a pass, be it a layered floater or a spiral boring into a small window?
Measuring that is no small task.
Turnovers are killers when it comes to attempting to win a game — more on that in a minute — but if a coach hammers his quarterback over the head and helmet on that matter too often, he might jangle the nerves and the outlook and the very soul of an otherwise talented and capable quarterback who now has the voice of that coach banging around inside his brain as he peruses potential targets.
That’s happened in the past, and darn near every football observer can recall a QB who, when doubt crept into his mind, say, on an out route in tight coverage, he threw the ball three yards out of bounds rather than spin it where it needed to go, risking a pick. Some quarterbacks have been darn near ruined by a head coach who was too overbearing in that regard. (Go ahead and name names, if you’d like.) It could be said that, at least in those cases, as many drives were ruptured by fear stirred by the coach as drives that were halted by an interception.
Allowing a quarterback the freedom to operate without the fear that he’ll be pulled for a mistake here, a mistake there is a blessing any passer craves. One, in particular, told me in confidence that he came to dislike his coach because of that man’s presence on the sideline as a kind of menacing, unrelenting dark overlord. “It didn’t help,” he said. “It hurt the team.”
On the other hand, that whole notion brings to mind the story, whether apocryphal or otherwise, that I’ve passed along before about the time early in Steve Young’s career at BYU, when he threw a pick and came to the sideline and LaVell Edwards said, “Don’t worry about it, Steve.”
“OK, OK, coach,” he answered.
When Young threw a second pick, Edwards repeated his encouraging words to the quarterback: “Don’t worry, Steve.”
“OK, OK.”
When Young threw a third pick, Edwards is said to have asked Young if he was worried about it now. When the quarterback said, “Nah,” Edwards, so the story goes, said back: “Isn’t it about time you start worrying about it?”
Believe that tale if you will. But if it is fictional, the favorable results Young piled up in subsequent games as a most collected and confident of quarterbacks is nothing but fact — at BYU and with the 49ers.
Back to the analytics on the damaging effects of turnovers. A number of studies at varying levels of football have revealed, rather unsurprisingly, that the team that wins the turnover battle usually wins the game. One study showed that a team that won that battle by a differential of one ended up winning just shy of 70 percent of games. If the differential was two, that team won 84 percent of games. Make the differential three, and the win percentage soared to 90 percent.
Other pundits, even some coaches, believe gaining a turnover edge, while normally an advantage, is sometimes overcooked. Teams have won league championships and still had a subterranean turnover margin. And teams with positive turnover results have had losing records.
BYU’s turnover margin in 2024 was favorable, sitting at an overall plus-8, an advantage of 0.62 per game, which ranked 24th nationally. The Cougars suffered 14 picks, and got 22 back on defense, which was tied with Texas for tops in the country.
Fourteen interceptions was not great, and a couple of picks cost BYU in a major way in its losses to Kansas and Arizona State. But the Cougars still finished at 11-2. Another counterpoint, if we get all historical here, is that the year Ty Detmer won the Heisman — 1990 — he threw 28 interceptions. (He also passed for 41 touchdowns and 5,188 yards.) The Cougars finished 10-3 that season.
An obvious bottom line, at least in a majority of cases, for a quarterback and the offense he runs: interceptions bad, completions good. There have been hints that the Cougars could run the ball a bit more this season, which will put an emphasis on a quarterback who can lead and inspire and organize an attack on the whole and capitalize on pivotal downs where BYU faces third-and-5-or-longer situations, needing the QB to target the right receiver at the right place to keep drives and eventual scoring opportunities alive. There’s also the consideration regarding which quarterback’s growth, whose line of ascension through the season, from beginning to end, is the greatest.
Whoever can do that, can fit that mold, is likely to — and should — get the starter’s job.