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August 12, 2007
Along Came Jones
by
TODD D. BURLAGE
Assistant Editor
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The public practice was only about five minutes old Saturday at the stadium and I had already solved the burning question of who the next starting quarterback at Notre Dame will be.
Demetrius Jones was working with center John Sullivan, tailback Travis Thomas and fullback Asaph Schwapp in the first drill of the day. Evan Sharpley was working with the projected second stringers and Jimmy Clausen was working with a threesome down on the depth chart, including fullback Dex Cure.
 Jones is the starter, Sharpley the backup and Clausen No. 3 – mystery solved, case closed. That was easy. There was even time to stop for breakfast on my way home.
But just about the time I had my computer bag packed and car keys in hand, Sharpley lined up first with the sure starters in a different drill. Now what? Well, at least I knew which were the top two candidates, or so I thought.
A few minutes later, Charlie Weis devoted his undivided attention to Jimmy Clausen for about 20 minutes in an important 9-on-7 drill while Jones and Sharpley worked with Ron Powlus about 50 yards away.
I should have left when I had all this figured out.
“We’ve had different quarterbacks doing different things on different days,” Weis said afterward to muddy things even further. “Sometimes they run 9-on-7. Sometimes they throw 1-on-1.”
Weis warned not to read too much into what we saw at one 150-minute practice but it was impossible not to. He said the quarterbacks routinely rotate through different drills. The fact that Clausen spent much of his day handing the ball off and throwing only soft shot put passes while Sharpley and Jones whipped it all over the field was based only on whose turn it was to do what Saturday.
“Can (Clausen) throw the ball deep ball,” Weis asked rhetorically, “I think we’ll have to wait until Sept. 1 to find that out.”
Okay, with a remark like that, Clausen sounds like the sure bet to the starter.
It was fun but futile trying to identify the starter because Weis may not even know whom the starter is yet. My hunch is he knows which two will be the starter and the backup but the order remains to be determined. His evaluation of the three after practice fell somewhere between pessimistic and glowing.
“They’ve been okay,” Weis said. “They haven’t been great, they haven’t been terrible...I think that we’ll be good enough to win.”
Again, if you go only by what you saw Saturday, Jones will be the starter and Sharpley will be the backup to start the season. Jones was the first one out with the first unit every time and Sharpley worked right behind him. The offense even showed a brief look at an option formation with Jones under center.
 Jones also got an indirect vote of confidence from Weis early last week when the coach said the inexperience of the offense lends itself to a higher-risk higher-reward quarterback more than a low-risk game manager.
“You can’t just count on a guy just to manage the team because then the only games you’re going to win are the games you’re supposed to win,” Weis said. “Those nail-biter games – the ones that could go either way, it’s a pretty even matchup on paper. If you want to win a fair amount of those, you can’t just take the easy way out and go the safe route.”
As far as performance on the field, it was hard to argue that Sharpley threw the best Saturday. To these untrained eyes, Sharpley’s passes were crisp, well timed and in the perfect spots. Jones’ passes were a tick late and often behind. Clausen didn’t throw enough to make any evaluations, but something didn’t look right when he did throw.
Weis said the first phase of installation will be complete after Monday’s practices and that will put things “right at about the time where all these guys have given us an opportunity to start evaluating whether there’s separation between them.”
But for now, all we have is this one practice to mold our judgments and try to solve the biggest mystery in college football. And if you base everything on this one practice, my mind was made up in just five minutes that Jones is the man.
Of course, that was before Weis sent walk-on Justin Gillett out to run the first team later on.
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