Urban Meyer talks about importance of building up QB1's confidence

Few coaches in college football have been as good for as long as Urban Meyer at building confidence in his starting quarterback. Meyer has had elite quarterbacks everywhere he’s gone, from Utah, to Florida, to Ohio State.

So what’s the secret to Meyer’s success building confident starters? Meyer laid out his five secrets to success recently on the Urban’s Take with Tim May show.

“There’s things at quarterback, like any position, but at quarterback one through five, the easiest to the most difficult and make sure you ease them into it,” Meyer said.

“For example, the first thing you can do is have a great running game. Let that quarterback calm down. Hand the ball, have good running backs, pound the ball a little bit. The second thing is you can break the pocket and give him just an isolation read out there. Take away the whole field. Then the third thing you can do is the quick game. That also gets the ball out of his hand fast. The longer you hold onto the ball bad things can happen. Then you have the RPO game and the play-action game.”

Of course, the latter stages don’t really come into play until a quarterback has proven he’s confident and capable.

Often with a new starting quarterback those stages are a long time coming. Simply getting a new starting quarterback comfortable with going out there and throwing the ball around can be a tricky task.

“Confidence is so critical, and I go back to Cardale Jones, first start was the Big Ten Championship Game,” Meyer said. “And you think, the first play of the game was a little sprint-out to his right. He’s right-handed. Throw it to his right. He told me after the game, he said I needed that just to start to breathe.”

Ohio State is one of several potential College Football Playoff contenders that will have a new starting quarterback in 2023. So too will Alabama, Clemson and Georgia.

Meyer offered advice to coaches breaking in new starting quarterbacks at those programs.

“The thing you want to stay away from is full-field reads, holding onto the ball,” Meyer said. “Don’t do that. If you go back to that, what we did with Cardale Jones, we had a good running game with Zeke Elliott. Then we threw the ball on the outside, but the other thing you can do is take isolation shots downfield. If you miss it it’s second down and 10.

“You don’t throw the ball, it’s kind of a good story, but don’t you dare throw the ball down the middle of the field early in a game with a young quarterback. Don’t do that, because you want to destroy confidence, those are called, lot of times he’s fired up, the adrenaline’s flowing and he throws it high down the middle of the field, it’s an interception. Ryan (Day)‘s smart enough to do that.”

Will the other programs breaking in new starting quarterbacks also figure it out?

“I’m anxious to see, three of the top four teams in America have new quarterbacks,” Meyer said. “This will be really interesting to watch.”