Drew Mestemaker has the starting quarterback job locked down at Oklahoma State, but the race behind him is still very much alive.
That backup battle took another turn Saturday during the Cowboys’ closed scrimmage, when three quarterbacks got work with the offense: transfer Grant Jordan and true freshmen Broderick Vehrs and Luke Tepas. For now, Oklahoma State is not rushing to narrow the field.
Last week, head coach Eric Morris appeared to signal that Jordan and Vehrs were the leading candidates to serve as Mestemaker’s backup for the Sept. 5 season opener against Tulsa. But quarterbacks coach and offensive coordinator Sean Brophy said the plan is to let the competition “let it ride.”
There’s a clear reason for that approach. Jordan brings experience, having played at Yale and UMass and entering his seventh year in college football. Vehrs, meanwhile, offers upside and arm talent, and simply being in the mix this early says plenty about where he stands in camp.
But this job is about more than arm strength or familiarity with the playbook. The quarterback who backs up Mestemaker has to handle the mental load of the Air Raid, an offense that asks a lot from the player running it.
“Our offense is huge,” Brophy said to reporters last week in comments captured by OState Daily. “You think about the success Drew had early on.
So much of it is because of his mental capability, right? His ability to process information and recall, which allows us to have a lot of volume in our offense - but also variety and variance week to week.
“If those guys can't handle that mentally, they're not going to be they're not going to stick around here that long.”
That’s where Jordan’s background stands out. He earned his economics degree at Yale before transferring to UMass last season, and the expectation is that his experience could help him absorb the offense quickly. Still, Vehrs could keep pushing if he keeps flashing in camp and proves he can retain the same kind of information Mestemaker handles so naturally.
Mestemaker threw for 4,379 yards at North Texas last year in this offense after spending a season learning it as Chandler Morris’s backup. Now entering his third year in the system, he knows it well. If he were to miss time, Oklahoma State would need one of these three quarterbacks to step in and make it work.
At the moment, the backup job may come down to the player who proves he understands the offense best.
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