A funny thing happened to Cyler Miles before he could become the future of Washington Huskies football.
It started when former coach Steve Sarkisian left the Huskies to take the USC job, while Boise State’s Chris Petersen was hired to replace him.
Miles was then suspended in February due to an on-campus incident. The quarterback was reinstated by the team in May after he wasn’t charged in the incident, but he already missed all of spring practice.
Between last season and today, Miles may have fallen too far behind in the quarterback competition to become Keith Price’s heir apparent.
"(Miles is) behind,” Petersen told local media during his pre-camp press conference. “He’s done some things, as much as he can after spring ball, to get caught up. That’s a lot of meeting time, that’s a lot of practice time, that’s a lot of reps. He’s had these concepts, a lot of them. Some of them might be renamed and those sorts of things…that’s such a detailed position it’s going to take him a while to process that. It’s hard. He missed a lot.”
The competition will be a four-horse race between Miles, Jeff Lindquist, K.J. Carta-Samuels and Troy Williams to win the starting quarterback job. Petersen isn’t too worried which quarterback receives the first repetition at the start of camp Monday.
“I don’t even know,” Petersen said. “That’s how important I think it is, or don’t think it is. All these guys are going to get reps. We’ll divide the quarterbacks up two and two -- I believe Jeff and Troy will go in the morning; K.J. (Carta-Samuels) and Cyler (Miles) will go in the afternoon. That’s the hard one right there…how do you get your quarterbacks all the reps that they need when you’re trying to look at all these guys. That’s going to be tricky all the way through fall camp. We’re going to continue to evaluate it day by day, to tell you the truth.”
“Certainly that quarterback situation, if there is one position you would like to have stabilized it would be that, but if we don’t know, I think I said this before, even game week hopefully we’ll have that figured out, who that guy is going to be and if it’s both of them then we’re going to have to figure that out. When we know we’ll know. we don’t’ want to set a timetable on that.”
Even if Miles wins the competition, the sophomore won’t be able to contribute to the team Aug. 30 against the Hawai’i Warriors after being suspended for the season-opener. And he’s not guaranteed to start the second game either.
“I hope that’s a problem I have to deal with,” Petersen said. “And that’s an assumption from you guys. You know better than I do. You’ve seen him a lot more than I have. That’s something we’ll deal with down the road. We don’t know. I’m anxious to get him back in the mix and see what he can do. He’s like a freshman. I’m always so anxious to get the freshmen out there. You’ve recruited them, you’ve seen them but you don’t’ know until you go out there and watch them run around. You’re really excited about some and some you’re like ‘I thought he would be a little further along.’ It’s always such an interesting process and for Cyler I feel the same way because he just wasn’t with us. I’m anxious to get him out there and see what he does.”