By Mick McGrane, GoAztecs.com Senior Writer
(@MickOnTheMesa)
Oh, there's precedent, all right. Precedent aplenty. Precedent paved with broken bones and balky knees and backup quarterbacks who assumed center stage and never budged.
There was the fractured ankle that ended the season for Ryan Katz in 2012. The back issue that sidelined Adam Dingwell in 2013. The torn anterior cruciate ligament that marked the end of Maxwell Smith's career in 2015.
Now, for the fourth time in seven seasons, San Diego State's football team has issued a call to the bullpen, one that comes in the wake of a medial collateral ligament sprain suffered by starting quarterback Christian Chapman in last week's win over Sacramento State.
And while the natural response necessarily includes the usual wailing and gnashing of teeth, it might be pointed out that disaster need not portend doom.
Fact is, where Aztec backup quarterbacks have been involved, triumph has more often trumped tragedy.
To wit: When Katz went down in the first quarter of a Week 8 game at Nevada, Dingwell, then the team's No. 2 quarterback, threw three touchdown passes in rallying SDSU to a 39-38 overtime win. Dingwell, who also delivered the game winner when he completed a two-point conversion pass, helped lead the team to five straight wins before the Aztecs lost to BYU in the Poinsettia Bowl.
To wit: When Dingwell was troubled by back issues at the outset of the 2013 season, backup Quinn Kaehler took the reins during a Week 2 loss at Ohio State. Despite facing the No. 2 team in the nation, Kaehler threw for more than 200 yards and proceeded to lead the team to eight wins in its last 10 games, one of the losses coming in overtime.
To wit: When Smith was injured in the 2015 regular-season finale, Chapman, then a freshman, was merely called upon to start the Mountain West championship game a week later against Air Force. In the first start of what would become a run of 24 career wins, the most in school history, Chapman's pass efficiency rating of 209.7 in the title game was the second-highest ever for an Aztec quarterback making their debut. Prior to being injured last week, Chapman had lost just seven games, having entered the season with a winning percentage of 79.3, the highest in SDSU's Division I history (since 1969).
Enter Chapman's backup, junior Ryan Agnew, the product of a throw-it-all-over-the-yard offense at Carroll High in Southlake, Texas, where he was recruited by SDSU associate head coach and offensive coordinator Jeff Horton. Having played at the same high school as Chicago Bears quarterback Chase Daniel, as well as former Alabama and New York Jets quarterback Greg McElroy, Agnew threw for nearly 7,000 yards and 60 touchdowns before arriving at SDSU in 2015. He has never started a game.
His first assignment? Beating No. 23 Arizona State on Saturday at SDCCU Stadium.
"It's just the unknown," Horton said. "A lot of times you get thrown into the fire so fast that you don't even have time to think about it. Obviously, he's going to have a week of preparation, but, to me, Ryan is like a real-life Clark Kent. He's very unassuming, looks like the reporter with the glasses, then he steps on the field and all of the sudden he's got a real calmness and uniqueness about him. I think he'll really respond, but you've also got a situation now where Mark Salazar (a redshirt freshman who entered the season as the team's No. 3 quarterback) has to be elevated quickly. That presents some problems, especially when we're going to be playing against a very heavy pressure defense. You've got to get guys prepared quickly."
For his part, Agnew, who has appeared in 16 career games, seems largely unfazed. When Chapman was injured last week, it was Horton, not Agnew, who found himself in a state of alarm.
"I was panicked, looking around trying to find (Agnew), and he was standing right next to me," Horton said with a laugh. "He said, 'I'm right here coach.' I was amazed at how calm he was. I was the one panicking and he wasn't panicking at all.
"He's a kid who started for two years at one of the best high schools in Texas, one that has a great quarterback tradition. There have been a lot of talented quarterbacks to come out of there, guys that all played on big stages before 40,000 or 50,000 people in the state playoffs. I looked at him as being an athletic kid who could run around, but you also wondered if he could adapt to playing in a pro style offense like ours. But I thought the positives with Ryan far outweighed the negatives. He had a great attitude. He was always a team guy. He wasn't one of those robo type of quarterbacks who are mass produced out there. His demeanor was the complete opposite of that. It was always "we" before "me," and I really liked him for all of those reasons."
Prior to last week, Agnew had attempted a total of nine career passes, completing six. And while he is a threat to run, having averaged nearly 6.0 yards per carry in his first two seasons, doing so with frequency against Arizona State could be chancy. An injury to Agnew puts the ball in the hands of Salazar, who has never seen the field.
"Ryan is a little faster on his feet and more athletic (than Chapman), which gives him more of an opportunity to make plays with his feet," Horton said. "Last year, we tried to create some packages for him where he could go into the game and do those kinds of things. But now, with Christian injured, I'm not sure you really want to run a bunch of that stuff. If he gets nicked up, now you're in a situation where you're switching quarterbacks again."
If Agnew appears relatively unflustered by the task at hand, practicing every day against the same defensive alignment he'll see on Saturday has its advantages. Former SDSU defensive coordinator Danny Gonzales, now the defensive coordinator at Arizona State, is employing the same 3-3-5 scheme utilized for years by Aztecs head coach Rocky Long.
"Our defense is crazy to go against sometimes," Agnew said. "They get 11 hats to the ball and they do it consistently. They have great energy and they create a lot of havoc. It definitely makes us better going against them every single day."
Alas, this is not practice and these will not be friendly faces, at least not those staring him down from across the line. Yet Agnew is far from foolhardy. He knows full well where to locate his support staff.
"It makes it very comfortable for me to turn around and see the eyes of (starting tailback) Juwan Washington," he said. "Then you turn around and see those giants (the offensive line) in front of you who run block as well as anybody in the country, and that's pretty comforting. I also have great receivers that I've trusted ever since I've been here. I think this is going to be a really exciting opportunity to see what we can do."
An opportunity that comes 44 games into a career that included redshirting in 2015, a season in which he was dubbed the team's offensive scout player of the year.
"Even though I hadn't been working with (the first string) before Saturday, you still spend a lot of time building relationships with those same guys during summer conditioning and when you're throwing during the summer. When something like this happens, you want to be ready, because you don't want to lose one player and see the whole season go down. You have to prepare for anything. It's always about the next man up. You can't just throw it all away because one player goes down."
Said Horton: "It's sometimes easy to do as coaches, but you never want to give up on a player too soon just because they haven't had a chance to play. We've never given up on Ryan, but this is his first meaningful playing time. There's excitement about seeing what he can do and how he handles it. He's prepared for it. We don't have to change anything in the playbook. He's a very smart kid, he understands what we're trying to do. I think he'll be able to step up and, hopefully, help get us a win."
There's certainly precedent. Precedent aplenty.
McGrane: Aztec Backup QBs have History of Success
