EDITOR’S NOTE: This story originally ran on Skyline Sports on October 16, 2021. Sac State beat Montana 28-21 days later in Missoula.
When Asher O’Hara decided to transfer from Middle Tennessee State after the 2020 season, his strongest FBS interest came from UConn and UMass — or UCan’t and UMess, as the New England schools are referred to on the ESPN.com Bottom 10 list, a ranking of the sorriest FBS programs in the country, where they make frequent appearances.
The Huskies are 0-7 this year, with a 10-point loss to unranked FCS school Holy Cross. The Minutemen are 1-5, with their only win coming against…UConn, last week.
“I wasn’t very interested,” O’Hara said matter-of-factly.
That’s when Troy Taylor stepped in like a fairy godmother.
O’Hara’s old offensive coordinator Tony Franklin set up a Zoom call between O’Hara, a two-year starting quarterback at MTSU, and Taylor, the head coach at Sacramento State.
Just like in the fables, the shoe fit perfectly.
“It just turned into another Zoom, and then another, and then it felt like home,” O’Hara said. “I mean, as much as it can from a Zoom call. It felt like a great place, good staff, and I was just loving it, ready to commit.
“It was completely out of the blue, I had never heard of the school.”
Now, as the Hornets visit Washington-Grizzly Stadium on Saturday to take on Montana, O’Hara is part of one of the most unorthodox offensive experiments in the country.
Along with Jake Dunniway, he’s one-half of Sac State’s two-quarterback system.
Through five games, Dunniway has attempted 99 passes. O’Hara has attempted 95. The two sub out for each other constantly, even in the middle of drives.
That kind of parity is unheard of. This isn’t Tommy Mellott replacing Matt McKay a couple times a game to run a quarterback draw for Montana State. It isn’t even Chris Leak and Tim Tebow at Florida under Urban Meyer, which is revered as an example of a two-quarterback system working in college — until you look up the stats and remember that in 2006, the only year they played together, Leak attempted 365 passes and Tebow attempted…33.
When Sac State came out of nowhere to win a share of the conference title in 2019, Taylor’s first year at the helm, the Hornets were led by Kevin Thomson, who threw for 3,216 yards and 27 touchdowns, ran for 619 yards and 12 more scores, and was named the Big Sky’s Offensive Player of the Year.
Now it seems Taylor is trying to replicate that complete package by getting the best out of two very different players.
For as nearly identical as some of their stats are — through five games, Dunniway is 59 of 99 passing and O’Hara is 56 of 95 — the two have clearly defined strengths.
Dunniway has thrown for 862 passing yards, five touchdowns and one interception. O’Hara has 588 passing yards, two touchdowns and three picks — but also has 72 carries, nearly three times as many as anyone else on the team, for 289 yards and four of the team’s six rushing touchdowns. Dunniway has six carries for negative-25 yards.
That’s the kind of wrinkle that could challenge Montana’s fearsome defense.
“I don’t think that’s the way it has to be called, but that’s the way they chose to call it,” Montana head coach Bobby Hauck said. “That’s the way they’ve decided to go with it, and it’s been effective for them. … Using the two quarterbacks, it looks to me like they try to highlight their strengths, where they just had one guy doing it before.”
Taylor is one of the best offensive minds in the Big Sky. He was the offensive coordinator for Eastern Washington for one year, 2016, which was the year Gage Gubrud set a new FCS record for passing yards and Cooper Kupp had 1,700 receiving yards for the Eagles.
Prior to taking the EWU job, he was the co-head coach at Folsom High School, where his teams lost three games in four years, set the California state record for points in a season and featured future Washington star Jake Browning at quarterback, who threw 91 touchdowns (!!!) his senior year and 229 touchdowns in his three years as the Folsom starter.
After leaving Cheney, Taylor spent two years as the offensive coordinator at Utah before taking the head job in Sacramento — the first time the experienced coordinator has been a solo head coach, at any level of football, in his career.
He’s tested every crazy hypothesis and arcane idea that has to do with gaining yards and scoring touchdowns — but even he’s never tried playing two quarterbacks before.
“It is unorthodox and I’ve never done it before so I went in not knowing what to expect, and it’s been really good for us,” Taylor said. “The reason it works for us is I trust both guys. Both of them know the offense and both of them are very talented.
“And they are both quality guys. They root for each other. There is no animosity and our team feeds off of that.”
There’s a good reason Taylor and most head coaches don’t try the dueling QBs.
Playing two QBs often ends up like wolfing down one last slice of congealing pizza, or ordering one more shot at the bar — it seems like a good idea at the time, but is almost guaranteed to cause a mess and a fair bit of regret.
Coaches are forced into it by injury or incompetence, playing multiple guys in an effort to outscheme the shortcomings of their roster. It’s a decision that comes from a place of weakness, not strength.
Even if you can’t figure out which quarterback is better than the other, the conventional thinking goes, it’s best to just pick one, so that they gain the confidence of rhythm that comes with consistent reps.
With O’Hara and Dunniway, Taylor has eschewed that convention — and after some early hiccups, it appears to be working.
After scoring 19 points (just 17 by the offense) in a season-opening win over Dixie State and 16 the next week in a loss to Northern Iowa, the Hornets have gone 2-1, with conference wins over Idaho State and Southern Utah and a 30-point effort in a loss to FBS Cal.
“I mean, no college quarterback experiences that because at your high school, you’re the guy, obviously, to even get recruited,” O’Hara said. “So we’ve both been adapting the past couple of weeks. … Sometimes you can feel like you’re coming off the bench cold, but in reality, now that we’ve been doing it, it just feels natural. You just come in and do your thing.”
Before coming to Sac State, O’Hara had basically been Middle Tennessee’s entire offense for two straight years. In 2019, he threw for 2,616 yards and ran for 1,058. The next-best rusher on the Blue Raiders’ offense had 290 yards.
Dunniway, meanwhile, was the heir apparent for the Hornets, backing up Thomson in 2019 and throwing for 384 yards and four touchdowns in his only start that year, a win over Northern Arizona.
Both would have reasonably expected to start coming into the season — but so far, they’ve avoided the predictably ugly outcomes that might spiral out of splitting plays – and stats, and potential glory – at one of the most individualistic, ego-driven positions in team sports.
“Usually in college QB rooms, there’s just something in the air where you can’t fully be yourself, you’re not really rooting on the other guys,” O’Hara said. “But from Day 1, (Dunniway) and Kaiden Bennett have helped me with the playbook. … We have a great quarterback room. We all are rooting for each other.”
“You watch film and highlights of the guys that come in,” Dunniway said. “So, you know, I watched his highlights, and I knew he was a player. And same thing with him, he knew I was the guy, so we were excited to compete. I feel like when you bring in a guy, it just makes you better, so I didn’t shy away from that when they went and got another quarterback.”
O’Hara and Dunniway bonded over their shared backgrounds and hardships. O’Hara didn’t have any scholarship offers coming out of high school and had to play a year for the College of Dupage, a junior college in Illinois, before ending up at MTSU.
Dunniway walked on and redshirted at UC Davis for a year before bouncing back to junior college at San Diego Mesa JC.
Compared to that, sharing snaps is easy — and that’s helped the Hornets succeed with their unique, nearly unprecedented offensive experiment.
“We’re in and out multiple times a drive, or maybe I’ll play the whole drive, maybe he plays the whole drive. It doesn’t really matter,” Dunniway said. “Coach doesn’t even tell us who’s starting each game, it’s really just whatever play he wants to call first. So we just take that approach that we don’t have one starter, we have two. And we kind of just roll with it.”
