Monday, October 13, 2014

CuseTV: Moving On to Florida State

After quarterback Terrel Hunt was sidelined with an injury, another member of the Orange will be making his first-career start this weekend when the Orange host No. 1 Florida State.



Head coach Scott Shafer's focus is to now move forward and figure out how to take down the Seminoles without Hunt.

"I just feel so bad for the young man as well as all the kids who go through the natural part of this game which is injuries and fighting your way back," Shafer said. "I feel terrible for him, but it is that reality and now we're going to move forward and develop a plan for Austin and A.J. and have Mitch ready to go as well.

"I think all-three of those young men have the skill sets to do it, the thing is you never know until they get out there. Austin has been out there and he's done some good things, A.J. has done an extremely good job in practice against our number one defense and he was actually scout team player of the week the last two or three weeks and he's going against the ones. A lot of comments from the defensive guys 'man, that kid is pretty good.' There's definitely a drop off because Terrel is a very good quarterback and his development just continued to go up. But now that he's out we go to the next ball player up and we're going to try and come up with a great plan, move forward and be excited about it, so that's where we are."

The decision on who will get the starting nod will be determined this week. However, it won't be entirely based on who performs well this week in practice.

"When I look at it it's going to be less of a competition as to which guy does better in practice this week to 'let's come up with a plan, if we choose to use two guys, let's use two guys and give them pieces of the game plan.' Shafer said. "There will be carry over between the two guys because of the fact that both guys can do a lot of the same things, but we also have to do a good job accentuating the strengths of each one of those guys. To me, it's similar to things we've done in the past.

"When Dyshawn Davis was a young linebacker, I put him in and I blitzed him and then we slowly taught him how to do other things and he did a great job learning them. Same thing from a quarterback point of view. You accentuate the things you know they do well, there's strength in saying these are the four or five things you do well, this will be a big part of your game plan. Then you take the next guys and say you're a different guy, you give us a change-up, we're going to use these types of things. In an ideal world, you'd love to have a quarterback that does all those things well, but the reality is that we don't want to put that weight on any singular player, so that's how we're approaching it as we put together a game plan against the best team in the country."

That team has a 22-game win streak that the Orange will try and snap on Saturday. Despite that fact, it doesn't change the way Shafer approaches the game.

"I really try and go into each game plan regardless of who it is with the same mindset," Shafer said. "Let's have every piece of ammunition that we own in our holsters as we go into this game. I always felt like you're never prepared if you go into a game saying we should beat this team we shouldn't have to use a trick play. You never know when you're going to have to pull that thing out. You don't want to look back and say I wish we had that ready to go. So this like every game, we're going to have all the ammunition that we think is necessary." 

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