Leading up to the Iron Bowl, Auburn has gone through many changes, including a new head coach and a new starting quarterback.
With these changes, the difficulty of preparation for Alabama football coaches has increased due to a lack of film on the different quarterbacks and the interim coach's style of play.
Auburn started the season with Oklahoma transfer Jackson Arnold at quarterback until a change was made before the Kentucky game on November 1, in which Stanford transfer Ashton Daniels was handed the starting duties. Over the course of his three games played, Daniels has passed for 538 yards with two touchdowns and one interception. On the ground, he has rushed the ball 40 times for 172 yards and two touchdowns.
“I think Ashton has done a really nice job,” Wommack said. “I think they’ve come up with a game plan that he can operate very efficiently, and thought he did a really good job against Vanderbilt of taking care of the football, putting the ball in the right direction, working through his progression properly. Then certainly, he does things from the run game that cause challenges and issues for you, and really every quarterback does.”
In efforts to preserve Daniels' redshirt, a third Auburn quarterback was thrown into the mix with freshman Deuce Knight given the start last week against Mercer. Knight earned SEC Freshman of the Week with 239 yards passing and two touchdowns through the air while also running for 162 yards and four more scores.
Despite the three different quarterbacks Auburn has trotted out there, Wommack doesn’t see much difference in how the offense operates under each quarterback.
“Sometimes you get a throwing quarterback or a runner, vice versa, they’re relatively similar in what they’re doing,” Wommack said. “We will anticipate the potential that we might see two or maybe three of them, but from our standpoint, I don’t think it’s really going to change how we see them and how we view them from a game plan standpoint.”
Wommack was asked on Monday about the challenges of planning for multiple quarterbacks in the upcoming Iron Bowl.
“You certainly want to identify each of them, and are there things that one of them does that the other one does not?” Wommack said. “I thought Deuce had a really good game the other day. There’s things in the passing game that with a young quarterback, you’re not going to go maybe farther down in some of the schematics that they’re doing there. But at the same time, he did a really nice job of pulling the ball down, and he ran all over the field there. When he got out in the open field, he was able to create the big, explosive play. But for us, when you look at it structurally, I think they’re doing the same thing. I think they have an identity of what they do and how they do it, and I don’t think that changes from one quarterback to the next. But you certainly want to be mindful of what each quarterback does well. Like anything, you try to identify those things and make them play left-handed – or in Ashton’s case, right-handed.”
Alabama will travel to Auburn on Saturday at 6:30 p.m. The game will be televised on ABC.
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