The U.N.I. football team wraps up spring drills tonight with their annual spring game. The Panthers are still trying to determine who will take over the starting quarterback role with the departure of two-year starter Tirrell Rennie.
Both Jared Lanpher and Sawyer Kollmorgan have been competing for the job in practice, and U.N.I. coach Mark Farley says he wants to see how they manage more realistic game situations. “You’ll get two minute situations, you’ll get turnover situations, sudden changes, you add the punt and the kick to it, you’ll get field position changes. I think all of those things when they aren’t scripted are what needs to be worked on from the quarterback standpoint,” Farley says.
The Panthers are also looking to replace a lot of personnel on the defensive side of the ball, specifically in the front seven. Farley says he’s looking to see how those players handle “unscripted” game situations. Farley says it’s about who is going to make the plays in space and it puts the whole game in the hands of the players and they have to think without things being scripted.
Overall, Farley says it’s difficult to predict how a spring game will turn out, and he has no idea what kind of game tonight’s affair will be. “We’ll have two equal teams as best we can and see where it falls,” Farley says. He says he doesn’t think it will be a score fest or shut out either.
The Panther spring game gets started at 6:30 tonight inside the UNI-Dome.
By Jesse Gavin ,KCNZ, Cedar Falls
