The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
New QB coach faces some fresh challenges
STORRS — In less than three weeks Mike Moyseenko went from being a quality control coach at UConn to being named as Terry Richardson’s replacement coaching running backs for the Huskies. Before he could even get new business cards printed, the former walkon quarterback at Maryland was appointed as the QB coach by Randy Edsall following offensive coordinator John Dunn’s abrupt departure for the NFL.
Then the fun started. David Pindell took the quarterback job and literally ran with it during the 2018 season as he set a UConn program record for most rushing yards in a season by a UConn quarterback. Following Pindell’s graduation, the Huskies headed into spring practice with two scholarship quarterbacks and the duo of Marvin Washington and Steve Krajewski had a combined 27 pass attempts at the college level. If that wasn’t challenging enough, Washington left the program in early June.
The UConn coaching staff had already secured a commitment from graduate transfer Mike Beaudry out of Division II West Florida and had freshman Jack Zergiotis coming in as well. Shortly before Washington’s departure, the Huskies received another transfer quarterback with immediate eligibility when former North Carolina State walkon Micah Leon announced that he was headed to UConn. True freshman Miles Foerster also joined the team after a postgraduate stint at St. Thomas More.
Moyseenko was now entrusted with the job of finding the new quarterback and only one of the candidates had even taken a snap in a practice at UConn. There would be no wading into the shallow end of the pool in Moyseenko’s new role.
Moyseenko did the only thing he could in the next few weeks and months, he gathered every piece of film of Beaudry, Leon and Zergiotis and went to work.
“We watched all the guys, Mike and Micah, they were vetted out pretty well,” Moyseenko said. “We talked to coaches, we
checked a lot of boxes before we get these guys on campus, are they compatible with our players? After we went through it all, we thought they were both pretty good fits and at the end of the day, what we were excited about is they were leaving their current situation because they were looking to compete, that is what we promised them here, we didn’t promise them anything.”
It was easy for Moyseenko to look at Beaudry’s tape when he threw for 3,215 yards and 29 games in 14 games while leading West Florida to the 2017 Division II national title game. But what about Leon, who never threw a pass in a game at NC State?
“He had a lot of practice tape, spring game stuff, we went back and watched his high school stuff as well,” Moyseenko said. “They are very similar, both really smart, both have strong arms and can make any throw on the field. There is not a ton of difference, Micah might be a little faster, not as heavy as Mike but it is going to be who processes it the best.”
In a perfect world, UConn would already have its starting quarterback so the focus could be on the top guy getting the majority of the work with the starting offense. In his briefings with the media since camp started, Edsall made it clear that there’s plenty of work to be done before settling on a No. 1 quarterback.
“It might go to kickoff (for the Aug. 29 season opener against Wagner),” Edsall said after a recent practice. “When we are ready to decide, we will decide but somebody has to give us a reason to decide because right now nobody has shown me that, hopefully we will get Micah back this week to do some things because he has been on the shelf.”
There’s plenty of attention focused on the quarterbacks who recently joined the program but Krajewski headed into camp as the one passer who had worked with the UConn staff.
Neither Krajewski nor Washington appeared to be lighting it up at the spring practices open to the media but he has had some good moments in preseason camp including a long touchdown pass to Ardell Brown.
“The best thing that happened with Steven is we had only two quarterbacks [in spring practice] and he got a lot of reps,” Moyseenko said. “There are ebbs and flows with all of that and the best thing you can say about Steven is you hope he learned from all of that, he learned from the mistakes he made. In theory this is going to be his third time in the offense with camp, spring and back to camp so you hope that he has grown. He is gonig to have every other opportunity just like those other two guys to compete.”