Fresno State football: Offensive coordinator Dave Schramm lays out fall camp plans

Quarterback play was an issue last fall for Fresno State, the Bulldogs proving the adage that if a team has two quarterbacks it really doesn’t have one. They actually had three between a former JC transfer in Brian Burrell, graduate transfer Brandon Connette and redshirt freshman Zack Greenlee.

Burrell started, and Connette got some reps early in the season. After eight games, sitting at 3-5, coach Tim DeRuyter and offensive coordinator Dave Schramm were ready to turn it all over to Greenlee and did. But that start at home, coming off a bye week that allowed for extra time to prepare and against a fairly uncomplicated defense, did not go well. They went back to Burrell, reaching the Mountain West Conference championship game by winning three games in a row to end the regular season despite being hurt by inconsistent play throughout.

The Bulldogs ranked 11th of 12 in the conference in red-zone scoring percentage, putting up points on just 41 of 55 trips inside an opponent’s 20-yard line (74.6%).

The third-down conversion percentage was 37.4%, ranking eighth.

They threw 21 interceptions, 11th in the conference, and had 27 turnovers, tied for last in the conference and 112th out of 128 teams in the football subdivision.

And, going into fall camp, Fresno State will have four quarterbacks, hoping to find one between Greenlee, now a third-year sophomore, redshirt freshman Kilton Anderson, freshman Chason Virgil and junior Ford Childress, who started his college career at West Virginia and joined the program this summer.

Between them there are a total of 104 career passes — Childress threw 63 in two games at West Virginia in 2013 and Greenlee threw 41 last season while Anderson and Virgil have yet to take a snap.

The goal going into camp is to get all four reps, pick a starter about 10 days out from the Sept. 3 opener against Abilene Christian and go from there.

Whether that happens remains to be seen. Schramm is high on the competitors after a solid spring, but there are obstacles ahead for all four that must be taken on and overcome.

The Fresno State offensive coordinator discussed a large one, as well as the impact it had last season and some of the struggles from that 6-8 season that ended with a 30-6 loss to Rice in the Hawaii Bowl.

Question: So, four quarterbacks. Coming out of the spring, I thought it was going to be hard to get all three reps once camp started and now there’s one more in the mix.

Answer: Well, they’ll get what they earn. It is how it is. It’s really no different than it has been. We have to continue to work on not turning the ball over and I think in situations like this, this is the perfect opportunity. ... It’s what we coach, it’s what we preach and I’ve said it before, I said it last year after Derek (Carr) left: The guy that wins the job is the guy that turns it over the least.

That guy for us a year ago was Brian. We felt he gave us the best chance to win, but he kept turning the ball over so we made the change and that didn’t help. So, now we’re fighting to get into that (Mountain West) championship game and we were able to do that. But without question, the whole goal for camp and this season is we have to turn the ball over less. We have to quit making it hard for our defense and easier for our opponents. It’s such a critical deal. And it’s a hard thing because they’re all competitive and they’re all trying to make a play, but sometimes when you’re trying to make a play you’re hurting the team. There are a lot worse things than punting and I have to do a better job of getting that into their minds. Youth has a lot to do with it. Inexperience has a lot to do with it. We don’t have practice games. It’s not like the NFL where we get a preseason.

We have to treat every practice like it’s a game and learn from it and make decisions based on that and then go. We have our guys that we had in the spring and we added Ford, and we’ll see how it plays out.

Early on, that first week of camp, there has to be less margin for error. The reps just aren’t there, right? So how do they handle that? That’s going to be a big thing, after last season.

Maybe that’s a good thing for some of them. The less opportunity, the less chance they have to screw it up, right? But I would like to think as we get closer, about 10 days out, we make a decision and then we go. With Chason, Zack and Kilton, having been here, I’d say they have a decided advantage and Ford has to catch up. How fast does he do that? The thing about him is he probably has more game experience than any of them. How will it play out? We’ll see.

It is what it is. They understand how important how their role is. They touch the ball every single play, so we have to trust them and we have to trust that they’re going to do the right thing with the ball. First and foremost, before you can start making plays, it’s: don’t hurt the team.

And the quarterback, he gets a lot of the negative when an interception is thrown. But is it always the quarterback’s fault? Is he throwing it when he’s getting hit or is the wide out running the route at the right depth? Or, did he run the right route or did he throw the ball where he was supposed to and the DB just made a play? All those things can add up, but that guy has got to be able to handle that stuff. Just like the offensive line always gets blamed for sacks when most of the time it’s not the line’s fault.

It’s just the nature of the game and the thing that these guys have got to learn is they have to deal with that. They have to learn to deal with that pressure and all of those things. Nowadays, it’s not like it was 20 years ago. You’ve got all the social media and every guy has got an opinion about what you should do and what you shouldn’t do, and if you let that eat you up then you’ve got a lot of problems.

You have to trust that you know what you’re doing. You have to trust in the system. You have to trust in your coaching. You have to trust in your ability to get the job done, and you have to block all that other stuff out. I’m not sure Brian was able to do all that, but it is what it is. You’re a Division I quarterback. You’re going to be scrutinized by everybody, especially in a place like this where people care. If we were at some other place, a lot of places in our conference where nobody really cares, then it’s not that big a deal. But in this Valley, people care.

Like you said, 20 years ago, that’s not something you had to address much. Not to the degree you have to now. As a coach, how do you approach that?

You never dealt with it. You dealt with the newspaper. But you can’t let it affect you. It’s the same. You have to get off all the other stuff, the Internet, all the guys that think they know what they’re talking about. It’s just another process of growing up and maturing as a player. How are you going to handle the negative? What are you going to do when something bad happens? How are you going to respond? What’s your next play? What do you try to do to get back on track — are you forcing it, are you trying harder and making it worse or are we checking the ball down and trying to get a first down?

All those things come with maturity. We obviously have a long way to go there. I like our guys, and I haven’t seen Ford yet, but I like the three guys that we have and, so we’ll see.

With such young players, is that something where you make it a rule? Stay away?

I’ve never been big on babysitting guys. All I can do is advise them and try to coach them. But everybody has got their phone — I can’t help what they do in their dorm or their apartment or when they go out to eat. But I can talk to them about it and try to counsel them about, ‘Hey, look, everybody is entitled to their opinion. They’re going to have something to say. It’s how you react to that. That’s the biggest deal.’ But it is kind of a different deal than it used to be.

You have to get calloused to all of that stuff, understanding that when you don’t play well then people are going to have something to say about it and even when you do play well a lot of people still are going to have something negative to say about it.

That’s just life. That’s how it is. And you can’t let that affect you, because it has absolutely nothing to do with how you prepare or what you do on the field.

Do you have a feel for how calloused your guys are at this point?

Well, you’ve been at practice. We try to make it as hard as we can, especially with what our defense does against us. It’s pretty competitive. It’s not game-like, but I think it’s as close to game-like as we can make it, with all of the stuff they see and all of the stuff as we ask them to do in the offense.

I think every guy is different. The game is hard enough without all of those outside influences hammering on you all the time. It’s hard. But it’s like anything in life. It takes a lot of courage to play quarterback. A lot of guys playing football don’t want that. They don’t want the responsibility of touching the football on every play. They don’t want the scrutiny.

You have to understand they’re called fans for a reason. It’s short for fanatics, and I’m glad. This is the best home environment in the conference. We have a great advantage, because our fans are passionate about it. That’s one of the things when you come here you better understand. Hey, it’s great when you throw a touchdown in that stadium, but it can be awful salty if you don’t play well, and you have to learn how to deal with that.

You’ve had a chance to meet with them a little this summer. From where they left off in the spring, how do they look now?

You know, Zack is the only one that has any game experience here. Ford I haven’t had a chance to see much, other than just meeting him. Kilton and Chason, they had some real positive in the spring. They all had some real positives in the spring. We have to build on that.

Hopefully the summer program has been going well. They’re out there throwing on their own. When we come to camp we’ll see if we have to take five or six days to break a bunch of bad habits or if they’ve been going out there and doing it the right way. It’s their summer. We talked about it after spring ball. They have to take control of this. We need leadership from other positions as well. We need (Marteze Waller) and (Malique Micenheimer), (Aaron Peck) and (Justin Johnson). We need everybody to kind of take control of the summer workouts and the summer throwing.

Again, young players. The summer program, when the coaches aren’t allowed to be with them, what are the concerns there?

The thing that always worries me in the summer is are they developing bad mechanical habits and are they practicing those over and over and over? Are the receivers running their routes at the wrong depth, so the quarterback is having to get it out and all of those things? It’s one of the negative things about not being able to be out there with the in the summer, because you want them out there throwing, you want them out there working on stuff, but are they doing it right? Are they doing it wrong? I know they’ve been working hard at it. I know they’ve been out there. But how it relates when we get to practice, we’ll see.

Having Jordan Wynn here as a volunteer, given what he did in his playing career starting as a true freshman for you at Utah, I would think that’s a big thing for them. Or, it could be, if they make use of it.

He’s limited (by the NCAA) with what he’s able to do. He can’t do a lot with them. But I think he’s a good sounding board for those guys. Really, the only thing that he can do is break down film and kind of be around, but I think that, with those guys, if they have questions, and not even so much about the offense, but how you handle yourself. ... Jordan, as a true freshman, he was as mature a guy as I’ve ever been around and he has a way about him. He’s got a way of handling things and he has a way of handling negative things. Hopefully, those guys, as they get to know him ...

Sometimes it’s had to come to talk to me and they know, you may get ripped now, not because I’m pissed at you, but because you need to, whether it’s something going on when we’re on the field or in the classroom, whatever. So, Jordan is a little younger than me, not much, so it’s always a little easier for those guys to go to (graduate assistant Dylan Cruz) or Jordan. Dylan Cruz has done as good a job as any grad assistant as I’ve had. He is able to meet with those guys and he is able to be around them. Having those guys around, maybe it is a little bit easier to go to them and feel more like, ‘Hey, these guys talk my language.’ ... They can Twitter back and forth.

And into the season ...

Well, he’s a volunteer. He’s volunteering his time until he can find a job somewhere, hopefully this December. He’s looking for a job, but there’s not a whole lot of hiring going on this time of year in our profession. He’ll be here to do whatever — working camps, breaking down film. Again, by rule there’s not a whole lot they let him do, but he can at least chart stuff, have another set of eyes on opponent tape and help chart in the box on game day.

It’s obviously a plus for us. Just somebody that knows the offense. He knows it inside and out. He understands what the deal is. He played in it and he played at a high level.

And he played really young ...

Really young. Maybe when he tells them to throw it quick and don’t get hit they’ll listen.

So on the first day of camp, how do the reps get divvied up?

They’ll all take reps with the ones and the twos and I think we might have enough for threes for a while. We’ll just go, and they’ll play themselves into or out of the position. Obviously, they have to be consistent and they have to be consistent in not turning the ball over and they have to be consistent in checking the protection the right way. It’s easier said than done. In the spring, you saw some times where guys had flashes, all three of them. And in the spring, you saw some times where you were like, ‘We just did that two days ago and now we’re not doing it.’ But the blitz might have been different or something else might have happened. But you have to manage those situations, even if it’s having the composure to throw the ball away and we’ll punt it. Don’t force it in there. Don’t take a sack. Don’t make a bad play worse. OK, so you don’t check the protection and the blitz is coming, how are you going to handle that? What do your mechanics tell you to do?

Navigating that part of it, managing that part, probably the biggest deal this spring for all four of them, especially not having done it ...

No question. And just reflecting on last year, there’s no question, there’s no question the biggest improvement that has to be made is I have to make sure I’m not asking these guys to do stuff that they can’t do, or they’re not comfortable doing. I probably put a little too much on Brian’s plate, because there were some times he would and there were times he wouldn’t. There were some inconsistencies there, and I probably forced it a little too much.

In hindsight, which is easy to do, I probably would have backed off a little bit more and not given him so much. It is what it is. I can’t change it. Hopefully, I learned from it. To me, that’s the No. 1 thing in coaching. Don’t put your guys in positions they can’t be successful. Put them in a position where they can be successful and then try to build on that. Our install will be much less than it ever has been, mainly because of the quarterbacks. We’re pretty inexperienced at wide out, too, with our inside receivers. It’s good to have (tight end Chad Olsen) back after a year, but he’s still just a sophomore. We still have to settle on our outside guys. Hopefully, we can lock some guys into place so they can just be there instead of getting into that deal we got into a year ago where we were having to move guys around.

We want to get our best guys on the field. But there’s no question we have to be a lot more efficient in what we do in playing fast. Going back and looking at it, there were times we were playing fast and going and it was pretty good. And there were times where it really wasn’t. For whatever reason. You look at San Jose and Nevada and you think, holy smokes. You look at UNLV and Wyoming and it’s like, wait a second, how can this be? But it’s our job to get it fixed.

I was going to ask you about last year. Little rough. But the one thing that stuck out to me was if you can’t block on the outside you’re losing a big chunk of what you want to do.

You’re right. And I think that our lack of consistency blocking on the perimeter, because that all ties into the running game, for Brian I think that it kind of gets into your head a little bit that, ‘Well, the last time I threw that ball out there nobody blocked, so I don’t want to do that.’ ... When, really, we should be throwing the ball out there. Our numbers in the scheme of what we’re doing is telling us to throw the ball out there, but we’re not doing it. Well, why? It all comes back to, ‘I’m not sure that guy is going to block that guy.’

That can’t happen. Everybody has got to do their job. So, we have to get better there. We have to get better everywhere. But that’s certainly an area where we’ve got to, if that’s going to stay a part of the offense, we have to make sure people have to defend it. It’s all a numbers game, so we have to be better out there.

For you, that goes back to putting those pieces together and making sure they have the right plays at the right times and can execute the right way.

Absolutely. And they’re going to do. I think one of the things, two years ago those guys, Josh (Harper) and Isaiah Burse and Davante (Adams), they took pride in that part of the game. They understood that, hey, this is something that’s really good for us if we’ll own it and take pride in it. We have to do a better job coaching it and getting them to understand the importance of how it fits into what we do and how critical it is. Just like last year, there were times we could flip the ball out there and it’s an 80-yard touchdown, but we’re not throwing it because we don’t have confidence in doing it. We have to get that confidence back.

What you learned from last year, working now with a younger group ...

Again, like I said, I have to do a better job not asking guys to do things they’re not comfortable doing. I think we had the right players on the field for most of the year. I don’t second-guess any of that stuff. But I do question, as I went back and I looked through our game plans and looked at our stuff, we probably had more in than we should have, even though at times it was demonstrated that we could do those things. It wasn’t consistent enough all the time and I probably should have cut back some of that stuff and made more of an emphasis on it during the week.

That’s the most important thing, because you want guys to be extremely confident in what’s called and have no second-guessing whatsoever as to, ‘Well, I’m not sure about this,’ and then the ball is snapped and now you have a problem.

With who we are offensively, we’re obviously going to rely more on the guys up front and the running backs. We’ll probably run the ball more, which we did pretty well, and which should help more outside more, you’d think. If we’re successful running the football, they’re going to have to put an extra guy or an extra half a guy in the box, which can help open up things outside. But when we have those plays called, we have to be able to execute them.

It seems pretty simple, but it did last year, too.

The thing that gets really frustrating is that when you go back and watch the film, one week you’re doing really well and the next week you’re thinking, ‘What happened? This is hardly any different from what we did the week before.’ So what’s going on?

It’s the mindset of the team and the mindset of the players, and it all starts with them having confidence. Again, maybe as they started to grasp onto some things I said, ‘OK, now we can do more’ when I should have said, ‘All right, let’s keep doing what we’re doing here because it’s working pretty good.’ I’d be shocked if there was another quarterback in the country that had a longer touchdown run than Brian Burrell did against Nebraska. The guy had a 70-yard touchdown run (66 yards). It wasn’t a fluke, either. It was on a base play that we run all the time.

When stuff like that is happening, to me, we’re guessing a lot more than were reacting to what’s going on, so we need to back up and we need to slow down. Like I said, our install for this camp is a lot lighter than it has ever been. We just have to get better. We have to gain experience fast. And we have to rely on those guys that have played a lot for us, the offensive line and the running backs.”

I think the difference in there, with this offense, is that you could see it growing through the year this season where last season maybe not as much with the personnel and experience level.

I was really pleased with the progress that we made from the start of spring all to the end of spring ball, just the growth. There were times where we were going well, we’d sputter a little bit when we shouldn’t and guys were forcing, trying to make plays, and hopefully we learned from that and understand that’s what caused us those issues.

But we have to take that next step. We have to continue to grow. Young guys are going to do young things. Inexperience lends to making bad plays and losing games. We just have to make sure those bad plays don’t cost us games, because we’re going to be inexperienced outside and we’re going to be inexperienced at quarterback. We have two guards we have to replace, but I like our candidates in there. It’s a good group. They’re developing. They’re coming along, according to plan. We just have to make sure we continue to lean on those guys and we’ll lean on our running game a lot more and trust that it opens up the outside stuff.

I think in some of those games last year, the UNLV game in particular, basically they just said, ‘Your quarterback is not going to beat us’ and so they loaded the box and it affected us. We didn’t play great outside. We didn’t play great at quarterback, and we still had a chance to win the game because we still were able to run the ball well at times and get the mall to Marteze on some screens and stuff.

But if that’s going to happen we have to be able to hit some throws. I think we’ll see that a lot. But as a quarterback, that’s what you have to want. You have to want that.

This story was originally published July 25, 2015 at 2:54 PM with the headline "Fresno State football: Offensive coordinator Dave Schramm lays out fall camp plans."