Assistant head coach/offense and quarterbacks coach Dan Morrison (photo by SMU athletics).

As the SMU Mustangs get ready for the upcoming spring workouts, the quarterback position has a completely different look from a year ago at this time. Kyle Padron is in the unique situation of heading into his first spring workouts after earning a bowl game MVP award. Former starter Bo Levi Mitchell has transferred, and transfer J.J. McDermott has ascended from running the scout team offense to one of two passers hoping for a shot at the starting job.

SMU assistant head coach/offense (quarterbacks coach) Dan Morrison sat down with PonyFans.com to break down the position, how he plans to tweak the rotation during practice with just two quarterbacks in camp, and what he expects from the passing game this spring.

PonyFans.com: At what point last year did you begin to think Kyle Padron was ready to play, and what made you think that at the time?

Dan Morrison: We were trying to get Kyle as ready as possible, and I felt last year, right around the Navy game was when … “OK, he’s ready now.” That was halfway through the season. It was his decisions in practice, and talking to him in our meetings, and watching how fast he was starting to see things and answer questions. I watched how his throws were coming out of his hand better, and his feet were better.

Kyle Padron threw for an SMU-record 460 yards in SMU's rout of Nevada in the Hawaii Bowl (photo by Travis Johnston).

Everything sort of slows down when they’re thinking too much, trying to figure it out. So the move is that it goes from being processed in their minds to just reacting, and that just takes reps and reps and reps and reps and reps.

I remember thinking at the time, right around the Navy game, “he’s getting there.” I didn’t know how that was going to play out, obviously, but it played out that the next week was Houston, and he got in. When Bo got hurt, he had his opportunity. If that (Mitchell’s injury) had occurred three weeks earlier, he wouldn’t have been where he was, in terms of his development. He wouldn’t have been ready. It just worked out that about the time he was ready was when his opportunity appeared.

Even when he went in against Houston … what happens, sometimes, is that a kid comes off the bench, and sometimes they’re ‘lights out’ because they haven’t had time to think about it — they’re just thrown into it — and it’s the next week that you start to see where he’s going to be, when he’s had a week to think about it. In Kyle’s case, that was Tulsa, and he did very well.

So he kept progressing, and I kept checking with the huddle — I checked with Emmanuel (Sanders), with the offensive linemen. “How is that going? How is that manifesting itself, with him in the huddle?” They kept reporting that he’s fine, he’s calm, everything’s (play calls) coming out clean, he’s very much in control. They said he’s not yelling or doing anything like that, but he’s very much in control.

It didn’t surprise me, because of who he is, but you also never know what you’re going to get. You could have a kid like that, that’s calm, that’s bright, that’s mature, and for the first time, is going to be a little rattled — he was not. So it didn’t surprise me, just because of who he is, but I was asking because you can never know. None of us (coaches) is out there, and you’re not sure. But he was handling it very well, and the players were very much impressed with his poise and his maturity for a young guy.

And then in each game, he started doing things that indicated he was going to be OK. He was doing things right. There was no dramatic dropoff. Every week, he was getting better.

But then at the end of the season, what happens because of the bowl game, what you’re getting is like an extra spring practice. You get about 15 extra practices to prepare for the bowl, and it was in there, those practices, that he took an even further jump. As we were preparing for Nevada, he started to show even a little quicker decision making, even a little quicker arm. Everything was speeding up a little bit. Talking to him in our meetings, he knew what to say when it came to a certain route. There are just different things that he was starting to articulate in our meetings that indicated he was starting to get beyond the “I’ve got to think my way through this” part. So that really helped us, the practices here and then the practices in Hawaii … it was like having two spring practices.

Kyle Padron is in the unique situation of having won a bowl game MVP award before going through his first spring practice (photo by Travis Johnston).

I remember Kyle and I had a discussion, where we talked about how the first step, in the development of a program, is to win games in the fourth quarter when you had been losing those games before. There were several instances last year when we actually won games in the fourth quarter; that was a progressive step in changing things.

What he and I talked about as the next step — I think Emmanuel and I talked about this, too — is when you play somebody that, whether it’s for that day or for whatever reason, you’re better than they are, then you don’t win, 27-23. You win — and I think I said 41-7 or something. When you’re that much better than someone that day, that’s when teams progress to the point where they’re getting very good. They don’t win close — they’ll jump up and beat somebody pretty good, because they’re physically better, or at least that day, they’re better. Doggone it, in that bowl game, if we didn’t just crank one out. That’s the next step — you start beating people you should beat, and you beat them pretty handily.

PonyFans.com: So when you saw Kyle in those practices leading up to the Hawaii Bowl, you knew he had a 460-yard, two-touchdown performance coming up, right?

Morrison: No, I don’t know about that, but the reality is he was getting better. Those practices were clearly doing him a favor. That’s a real advantage teams that go to bowls have, those extra practices.

PonyFans.com: A year ago at this time, you were heading into spring workouts with a quarterback who had 12 college games under his belt. Now you’ve got a guy with only six college games, and only five or six games in high school … how do you like the status of the position as you head into spring?

Morrison: The biggest thing is just seeing Kyle progress every day, and seeing him go through the 15 days and demonstrate that he’s still moving in the direction he has to move in. Then we have another quarterback — instead of “quarterbacks” — and everybody is moving up a level as we head into the fall. That’s what you have to have.

Personally, I’ve always believed that you have to have at least three ready to play, ready to go win, because they’re such the centerpiece of the offense — you can’t hide the quarterback in this offense. You can’t have an injury, and then when the quarterback comes out, you’re handing the ball off all the time just to hide him. I believe the second and the third guy have to be ready to play and to win football games. That’s our responsibility, as coaches, to make sure they’re in that position. Because you’re just one early injury away from having to play at least one other guy — maybe two — so the third guy can’t be too far away. He’s got to be close. Those second and third guys have got to be ready to go, ready to play and ready to win.

PonyFans.com: What kind of interaction have you had with Kyle and J.J. since the bowl game?

Morrison: We stay away from them a lot, because of course we can’t do anything with them on the field. They can come in and watch film, and they’ve been working out, but this is the time of year when we (coaches) are meeting and getting ready for spring and doing clinics around the country.

But they both have seen the bowl game — we’ve walked through the bowl game with each of them. It will come back, but it’s almost like you want to be careful not to over-do it. You don’t want to do so much that they become robotic — there has to be a little bit of an edge, so they still feel like they’re still learning, and I think coming in here too often doesn’t advocate that.

Kyle’s very bright, and J.J.’s very bright. They’re both extremely smart kids, so as we start spring, and they start looking at things and doing things, it will all start to come flooding back, and they’ll be fine.

Dan Morrison said Padron was ready to get into a game around the Navy game last year; a week later, he got his chance (photo by Travis Johnston).

PonyFans.com: In Hawaii, you had a quarterback who played as a true freshman in Timmy Chang, who ended up passing for more yards than anyone in NCAA history. But they’re different styles of quarterbacks … are there any parallels that can be drawn between the two?

Morrison: There’s some similarity, but Timmy played that offense in high school for three years. Kyle played in a really sophisticated passing offense — it wasn’t quite this — but it was pretty sophisticated, and he did a good job. But even if Kyle starts every game for the rest of his career, he’s not going to play as many games as Timmy, ever. There’s no way he can. Timmy played all of his freshman year, played three games his second year and then gets injured. Then he gets that year back, so he played four years, three games that second year and the bowl games … plus, Hawaii was playing more games each season than most people.

PonyFans.com: In the fall, you said you really didn’t see J.J. a lot, because he was always over running the scout team’s offense. How much have you seen of him, and what are your impressions?

Morrison: He’s got a different throwing motion, but the end result is (that) he’s fitting it in some pretty tight windows. He’s going to be physically strong enough, so it’s going to be, again, reps, and all of a sudden, not thinking his way through things — just reaction. Remember, he ran a different offense every week last year, so getting to that place where he’s not thinking about things, just reacting — that might take a few weeks … just like it did with Kyle. It took (Padron) like half the season, and really, that’s pretty fast for a true freshman.

PonyFans.com: Is J.J. sort of like a true freshman, in the sense that he ran the Tulsa offense one week and the UTEP offense another week and the Houston offense another week … and he hasn’t spent any time running your offense yet?

Morrison: It’s been more mental reps, and there’s some throwing that we do. But it’s all about getting him reps, and getting Kyle reps, and then in August, getting Stephen (Kaiser) reps, too, because June (Jones) will want to give (Kaiser) an opportunity, so we can see where he is.

(Kaiser) will have all the want-to you can ask for — he’ll have all of that. There will be some throws that come out of his hand that will make people go, “wow!” But there also will be a throw or two that comes out and makes you wonder where that came from … and that’s normal.

PonyFans.com: You talked about J.J.’s somewhat unorthodox release (which is often between sidearm and a three-quarters position) … you hear a lot of coaches say they don’t want to recruit a short quarterback for fear of passes being knocked down at the line of scrimmage, but in J.J., you’ve got a tall (6-4) guy with pretty long arms. Is that something you’ll want to correct in his throwing mechanics?

Morrison: No. The reality with quarterbacks is, it doesn’t matter if he’s 6-6 — he’s still going to have to find passing lanes and get the ball where it needs to go, and if he can’t do that, it is going to get knocked down, no matter how he throws it. The taller guys sometimes have a little advantage seeing things, but they still have to learn how to throw in the passing lanes.