Brad Edwards, College Football 9y

Mixed history for first-year QBs

College Football, Alabama Crimson Tide, Baylor Bears, Boise State Broncos, Georgia Bulldogs, Auburn Tigers, Notre Dame Fighting Irish, Oregon Ducks, LSU Tigers

Editor's note: Since this article was published, the official CFB QBR values were updated to reflect improvements made to the algorithm. Other than triple-option QBs, changes to a player's QBR were very minimal on the season level - within a point or two or a couple ranking spots either way.

One of the major talking points of this college football offseason has been the number of high-profile teams with some sort of question mark at the quarterback position.

A glance at our ESPN Power Rankings shows eight Top 25 teams -- Auburn, Baylor, Alabama, Oregon, UCLA, Notre Dame, Ole Miss and Boise State -- don't have a QB on the roster with more than two starts at the FBS level (Oregon's Vernon Adams did, however, start three games against FBS teams while playing for FCS Eastern Washington). Throw in Florida State and Georgia, which each avoided the list because of a graduate transfer who previously started at another FBS school -- plus LSU, which seems likely to go with a new starter -- and you have the possibility that more than one-third of the preseason Top 25 could start a quarterback with little experience at the highest level of college football.

Many variables make it difficult to predict which teams are more likely to get that production, but one approach is to look at the head coaches of these teams and how much success they typically have with a first-year starter.

In order to go through this exercise, we need to set a few conditions. One is that the coach -- either as head coach or offensive coordinator -- needs to have had at least three first-year starters in the previous 10 seasons. A first-year starter will be defined as a player who had no more than three career starts entering that season. Also, that quarterback didn't necessarily have to start the season opener, but he must have begun receiving significant snaps in the first month of the season and then went on to start a majority of the team's games.

These conditions eliminate UCLA and Ole Miss, because Jim Mora and Hugh Freeze have each had only one previous first-year starter at the FBS level. Florida State is also eliminated, because Jimbo Fisher has had only two first-year starters in the last 10 years by our definition (EJ Manuel didn't qualify). That leaves us with eight coaches to evaluate, and here's how they stack up, using an average of Total QBR for each season as the gauge for how well their quarterbacks performed. Remember that QBR is on a zero to 100 scale.

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