Tennessee QB coach Joey Halzle identified advantage of playing young quarterback in Week 1

Tennessee quarterbacks coach Joey Halzle has a desirable job this season as the position coach for Hendon Hooker. The Vols super-senior starting QB made mincemeat of the Ball State defense in the limited time he actually got to play last Thursday. So among the QB room, Hooker wasn’t the main takeaway after Week 1. He just performed as expected. Instead, Halzle got to experiment a little bit. After all, Hooker only has another 11 or 12 games in orange and white. Tennessee has to cultivate his replacement by next season. And Halzle saw Thursday as an opportunity to test some of the younger guys out.

In a recent press conference, he recapped what he saw from the other quarterbacks. Starting with top-200 recruit and former four-star Tayven Jackson.

“Yeah with the the young guy, Tayven Jackson, going in there the main thing is it’s tough. Going in there, in that situation, just trying to operate under the lights, you want to call everything the correct way. Stay in your reads the correct way. And there’s always the freshman hiccups which are in there. But what I like about Tayven is his best practices in fall camp were in Neyland Stadium. He went out there and the moment wasn’t too big for him. He’s the gamer. That’s the type of guy he is. That’s what I liked about him in the recruiting process. And you saw that on Thursday night as well.”

Among the youngsters, Jackson’s the one with blue-chip pedigree. But Halzle also assessed the play of two other young QBs, not just in Thursday’s game, but so far this fall overall.

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“And then, Gaston Moore and Navy Shuler went in. We had the the fumbled exchange with Navy in there on snap. But we saw what it was once we corrected that. And all those guys had a great camp. The guys that were here had a great spring and we trusted them to go play. It wasn’t just like throwing a dog a bone like. We trusted those guys to go play because they know our offense, they’re dialed into what we’re doing and they win. They played pretty well.”

Tennessee is in terrific position at the quarterback position. Got a current star in Hendon Hooker and, according to Halzle, several younger options ready to take over as soon as next season.