[Empire Lindy]

http://news.cincinnati.com/article/2...810280383/1064

Kelly: QBs will be ready
By Bill Koch • bkoch@enquirer.com • October 28, 2008

Determined not to be caught unprepared again, Brian Kelly said today he’s preparing every quarterback in sight for Thursday’s game against South Florida. That means Tony Pike, Chazz Anderson, Zach Collaros and even Demetrius Jones have been getting more reps in practice.

“Given our circumstances at the quarterback position, I need to understand that maybe we need to get them all ready,” Kelly said. “It can’t be an excuse that we don’t have a guy ready to play.”

Kelly then acknowledged that the coaching staff should have been better positioned to deal with the loss of Pike at halftime last week vs. UConn.

“We have to do a better job than we did last week against UConn,” he said. “We’ve got to have two packages. We’ve got to have plays that are suited best for our quarterbacks during the game. Obviously we had set our game plan for Tony. I didn’t do a good enough job of shifting our game plan to Chazz when he went in in the second half. This week we will have a couple of different game plans based upon who the quarterback is.

“I’m going to give Zach reps and he’s going to be evaluated. Demetrius got a lot of reps yesterday. He’ll get some more today.”

To be fair, Kelly didn’t have much time to adjust last week. He didn’t find out until the Bearcats hit the field for the second half that Pike couldn’t play.

“We went through all of our halftime adjustments based upon Tony playing,” Kelly said. “He tried to warm up and we had the ball first in the third quarter, so we had about 90 seconds to kind of shift gears. We had to deal with it and go.”