Welcome to Quarterbacks Week at Testudo Times

Good morning. Maryland’s 2016-17 sports season is over. Across all sports, the Terps collected 234 wins, 162 losses and four ties. We’ll remember this season for the two lacrosse championships won on Memorial Day weekend, with plenty of memories made on all fields along the way.

Now it’s summer. College sports don’t happen in the summer. This makes life difficult for blogs like us, who rely on having college sports to write about.

So here at Testudo Times, we’re about to spend the next 10 weeks going in-depth on every position group for Maryland football.

Traditionally, we’ve spent the summer months writing mini-profiles of every player on the team, with previews of the Terps’ schedule and position groups coming along for the ride. This time, we’re here to add some rhyme and reason to it. Hopefully, it’s easy for you all to follow along.

This week, we’re looking at Maryland’s quarterbacks.

Once again, quarterback is one of Maryland’s biggest question marks.

Perry Hills was last year’s starter when healthy. With him and Caleb Rowe graduated, there isn’t exactly a ton of experience coming back.

Pigrome and Bortenschlager both picked up starts during Big Ten play last season, and both looked somewhat overwhelmed as true freshmen. The two took the majority of the snaps during April’s spring game.

Two newcomers make this a more interesting and promising race.

Caleb Henderson transferred to Maryland from UNC in August 2016, and after sitting out a year, he’s eligible as a redshirt junior. He’s seemed like the favorite to enter the season with this job for a while, but a broken foot suffered the week of the spring game raises legitimate concerns, even though he expects to enter fall camp healthy.

True freshman Kasim Hill won’t have nearly as much time to acclimate himself, but he has the talent to make a run at the starting job. Hill was the top quarterback prospect in the DMV for the Class of 2017, and it’s possible he turns into Maryland’s best option sometime this year.

With those two competing alongside Pigrome and Bortenschlager, there’s reason to hope that whoever emerges from fall camp with the job is fully capable of running the offense.

We won’t have answers here for a while.

This staff doesn’t seem to be into officially naming starters. Last year, we found out Hills won the job when he simply trotted out for the first series against Howard. We’ll have a better idea as fall camp starts and the team opens practices to the media, but that will primarily be speculation.

“The first rule of being a decision maker is take all the time that you have, and I got till Friday night at about midnight before we play Texas,” Walt Bell told Testudo Times in April.

Until then, Henderson and Hill and Pigrome and Bortenschlager—and even walk-ons Ryan Brand and Legend Brumbaugh, in theory—all have a chance.