Perhaps the biggest task facing new UConn football coach Paul Pasqualoni is finding a quarterback to run his offense. Anyone half-paying attention to the program the past few months is well aware of this.
Speaking Sunday at the Northern Connecticut Scholar-Athlete Dinner where he received the Distinguished American Award, Pasqualoni talked about the quarterback situation because, well, that will be a hot topic from now until a starter is named in the fall.
"Well in any level of football and every team in America it starts with the quarterback position," Pasqualoni said, according to the Hartford Courant. "That's a process that we're going through and we're doing it the right way. It's not something you can rush, you know? You have to do your due diligence and that's what we're doing."
But there's a larger, more general issue, one that faces every new coach: whether to fit the scheme to the players or to find players to fit the scheme. Anecdotally, it seems the former is a more effective strategy, at least initially, while the coaching scrap heap is littered with guys who tried and failed to implement the latter.
So it's with some relief that Pasqualoni sounds like he's a proponent of modifying the scheme based on the strength of his roster.
"We know what we're going to do," Pasqualoni said. "We just will then take this playbook on both sides of the ball and utilize what our talents, feature what our talents, are. So you have a broad-based book but you don't on any season use everything that's in that book. You're going to take from that book what you feel your talent can do and then you're going to try to feature those concepts, so that's where we are...
"But in regard to knowing the plays and knowing the defenses we know what those are. No, we know what they are. It's just a matter of what do you want to feature."
In the long run, Pasqualoni might have a scheme in mind different from the current one. But to make it work requires recruiting players capable of succeeding in that scheme. It's a perfectly reasonable plan and one that happens in football. But if that is Pasqualoni's vision for the future, he's going to need to hit the recruiting trail. Because right now, the Huskies have a lot of work to do in that area.
