Estimated read time: 5-6 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
SALT LAKE CITY — Sophomore quarterback Tyler Huntley has completed his first season of nonconference play and has already added an entirely new element to Utah’s offensive identity.
The Florida native has taken a traditionally run-heavy offensive style at Utah and morphed it into a viable threat in the passing game. In fact, Utah is 31st in the nation in passing offense — an incredible improvement from the last few seasons where Utah ranked closer to the bottom (2016 - 78th, 2015 - 105th, 2014 - 95th) nationally.
While much of that can be credited to the new offensive schemes of offensive coordinator Troy Taylor, Huntley has been the perfect fit at Utah to execute the offense at a high rate.
In Huntley’s three games as a starter, he’s thrown for 868 yards on 80-of-111 passing for a completion percentage of 72.1 percent (14th nationally) and is averaging 7.8 yards per passing attempt. He’s also thrown five touchdowns and has an average quarterback rating of 149.03. His average total offense of 360 yards ranks him second in the Pac-12 and 10th nationally.
If Huntley were to keep up this level of play, he’d finish the regular season around 3,500 passing yards. That would rank him third all-time at Utah in passing yards, behind Scott Mitchell’s 4,322-yard season in 1988 and Mike McCoy’s 3,860-yard season in 1993, and first all-time at Utah in a season’s completion percentage, beating out Lee Grosscup’s 68.6 percent mark set in 1957.
While that level of production will be difficult to maintain, particularly as the season shifts to Pac-12 play, there is promise in the rising quarterback.
“Troy Taylor has done a great job of presenting the new offense to him and getting him completely where it needs to be as far as his reads and progressions and where he's going with the ball. He's a good decision maker — very good decision maker,” head coach Kyle Whittingham said. “Over 70 percent completion is — if we can keep that trend — we're going to have a very successful year.”
Charting Huntley’s passes this season, he's been most accurate 5 yards behind the line of scrimmage to the 15-yard mark. In all but one area within 15 yards — center of the field between 10-14 yards — Huntley is completing the ball with better than 66.7 percent completion rate, with most nearing 80 percent.
Huntley still has some work to do on passes over 15 yards, particularly on the right hash of the field from 15-35 yards where he's 5-of-17. However, with receivers like Darren Carrington II, who continually managed double-figure yards after a catch, Huntley’s sweet spot of 15 or fewer yards is a win for the offense. Carrington leads the team in average YAC at 4.27 yards.
Huntley tends to favor the right hash of the field, which comes as no surprise considering he’s a right-handed quarterback, but two of his higher production areas comes on the left hash of the field from 5-14 yards where he’s 14-of-18 passing. It does help that Huntley’s three top receivers all have a catch rate higher than 75 percent: Carrington (86.7 percent), Sampson Nacua (77.8 percent) and Troy McCormick (83.3 percent).
Most importantly for the offense, Huntley has a 50 percent success rate, which ranks 24th nationally. For a play to be considered a success, the offense must get 50 percent of its necessary yards on first down, 70 percent on second down and 100 percent on third and fourth down.
Whittingham calls Huntley “a work in progress” but is encouraged by the progress of the young quarterback. He credits Taylor as a big part of that success.
“Troy Taylor is an outstanding tutor — quarterback tutor — and teacher of quarterbacks and he's dialed in, Tyler is, into his progressions and his footwork is outstanding and so credit to Troy for molding Tyler,” Whittingham said.
Carrington sees Huntley as a younger version of Marcus Mariota, a former Heisman Trophy winner and No. 2 overall pick in the 2015 NFL Draft.
“Well he's not up there yet, but almost; he's young,” Carrington said following Utah’s 54-16 win over San Jose State Saturday. “But he reminds me of Marcus a lot, just how he can run and throw off the run, and throw off his back foot like 70 yards if he wants to — make people miss.
“When it's all said and done — one of the greats.”
Whittingham, who is usually fairly conservative with hyping players up or comparing them to other players, said he saw similarities in the two quarterbacks.
“Well, they're certainly comparable in their athleticism and the way that they are a true dual threat,” Whittingham said Monday. “I mean Marcus, that's a pretty favorable comparison because Marcus Mariota obviously was … amongst the first players taken in the draft a few years ago, so that speaks to what Tyler's shown so far.
“There are a lot of similarities in their style of play,” he added. “Marcus was very accurate, as is Tyler, so yeah I think there's some merit to that. It's still really early in Tyler's career; he's got a lot of football left to play for us. But what we've seen so far has been very positive.”
While unfair to compare Huntley to any Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback, Huntley’s first nonconference season is comparable to that of Mariota’s redshirt freshman nonconference season, which was Mariota’s first year starting. Mariota threw for 802 yards on 70-of-99 passing for a completion rate of 70.7 percent. He averaged 8.1 yards per attempt and threw nine touchdowns and three interceptions for a quarterback rating of 160.71.
Mariota did not run the ball much his freshman season during nonconference play, finishing with only 108 yards rushing on 22 attempts for an average of 4.9 yards per attempt. Huntley, however, has utilized his legs more and currently sits at 212 rushing yards and three touchdowns on 51 attempts for an average of 4.16 yards.
Huntley has still yet to prove himself against better competition, but he’s trending in a positive direction.
