Monday practice notebook: K.C. Keeler details QB competition, single digits, injuries

In the midst of talking about various preseason camp position battles, the single-digit selection process and even referencing roller coaster rides at Dorney Park, Temple head coach K.C. Keeler provided an important injury update after Monday’s practice. 

Kevin Terry, the team’s starting left tackle, is likely to miss “a couple weeks,” Keeler said, with a “low-grade MCL” injury to his right knee, noting that the team had not yet received the imaging yet from the medical evaluation.

If that holds true, having their left tackle miss important reps over the next two weeks ahead of the Aug. 30 season opener at UMass is less than ideal, but it’s also a bit of a sigh of relief for the program after Terry needed assistance to leave the field in obvious pain after hurting the knee during Saturday’s scrimmage. 

“The injury is brutal in terms of painful,” Keeler said, “but it’s one is those where the pain is worse than the actual damage in the knee.”

Redshirt freshman Giakoby Hills, who had already seen an uptick in snaps with the second-team offense, stepped in for Terry with the first team at left tackle, and Luke Watson was the second-team left tackle. Watson, a redshirt sophomore who missed all last season with a knee injury, had been getting second-team snaps at right tackle prior to Terry’s injury. 

Apart from Terry’s MCL injury, Temple has remained relatively healthy through preseason camp. Keeler said Monday that tight ends Jake Woods and Ryder Kusch, both of whom missed Saturday’s scrimmage, should return to the field this week. 

You can listen to Keeler’s post-practice interview with reporters here.

Single-digit selection

Keeler has previously noted that he learned through conversations with players that they felt the process for selecting single-digit players had become a bit of a popularity contest. Keeler doesn’t want to replicate that feeling, so players will have more hurdles to clear this time around to wear a single digit this season. 

All of that will be presented to the players Monday, Keeler said. 

“They’re going to know up front [single digits are] going to be hard to get,” Keeler said, “especially since we’re coming off a situation where some of the guys felt it became a little bit of a popularity contest.

“And so, there’s a nominating process the players have so they can nominate guys to be single digits. And then it goes through every department in the building, from the trainers to the equipment people to the strength staff to the academic people, in terms of, like, not adding names, but just saying, ‘Oh no, this guy doesn’t show up for training room. We can’t have him as a single digit. We’ll pull him off.’ So the team will nominate guys, and then we’ll go through a vetting process, and at the end of the day, the coaches are going to look at that final list and make it. So it’s not going to be easy.”

Players can earn a single digit during the season if numbers 0 through 9 have not all gone out prior to the season opener, and Keeler implied that could be the case. 

“The single digit is really important around here,” Keeler said. “We get how tough it’s going to be. But if there’s guys who have been borderline guys, and then we’re four or five games in, and it looks like, ‘Hey, this guy is leading us. This guy’s doing all the things a single digit (does.) He just needed more opportunity.’ Yeah, I think that’s very reasonable.”

Getting off the roller coaster

So how did Keeler connect his dislike of a roller coaster ride at Dorney Park with the consistency level of Monday’s practice?

Well, after giving the team a day off Sunday after Saturday’s physical scrimmage, Keeler saw what he felt was inconsistent effort Monday and compared it to how he felt riding a roller coaster at Allentown’s Dorney Park near his hometown of Emmaus. 

“I never went on (the roller coaster) again,” Keeler said. “I don’t like roller coasters. I saw a little bit of a roller coaster ride today.”

The QB competition presses on

As for some of the details of Monday’s workout, Evan Simon and Gevani McCoy continued to split first-team reps, with Simon getting more of the first-team reps in the first half of practice and McCoy getting the first-team work after a break that preceded the last 30 minutes of the day. 

“I think we have two quarterbacks that can play in this league,” Keeler said, “and so it’s going to be a process to figure out which one we’re going to go with. But I’ve been really happy. I think they’re both in the 70s in terms of completion rate, and they’ve done some really good things.”

Keeler said Simon had “a bit of a lead early” given the fact that he was with the team during spring drills while McCoy spent the spring at Texas State before transferring to Temple and knows the offense better. 

Asked if McCoy has since pulled even with Simon, Keeler said he wanted to talk more with his offensive coordinator, Tyler Walker. 

“I’ll have to talk to Tyler more about that,” Keeler said. “I haven’t gotten really caught up too much with where’s everybody at and those kind of things. It’s a process. It’s just going to work itself out. They’ve got to keep on playing. We’ve got to get them in more game situations. 

“What you’ll see from this point forward is more game situations. You’re going to see us bring referees in more on a regular basis, and I know the defense really needs that badly. And I think our quarterbacks need that, too, more of that game sort of tempo.”

Keeler said he’ll look to have more referees in for practices on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, and that he and his staff are about a week away from introducing prep work for the Aug. 30 opener at UMass. 

“I think a lot of it right now has been just about us getting better,” Keeler said, “but we will get to UMass, I’d say, sometime after this next scrimmage.”