Jake Heaps inherits all of Cougars' QB focus

PROVO — Freshman Jake Heaps now inherits BYU's total attention as the starting quarterback. It will be interesting to see how the One Guy Plan works.

Heaps is now showered with extensive repetitions and time behind center Terence Brown.

Time? You can't buy it back; you can only use what remains.

It's a QB investment BYU's program has needed since the Las Vegas Bowl last December. Giving one guy all the time ends BYU's two-headed QB situation and the split time with Heaps and Riley Nelson.

May it R.I.P.

"I didn't come to BYU to split time," Heaps told reporters this week in expressing his excitement over Cougar practices featuring him 95 percent instead of 50.

Losing Max Hall following the 2009 season was like taking a major investment portfolio and selling all the bonds, stocks and commodities in one sweeping folder-emptying trade.

When Hall left, he took with him a ton of repetitions BYU's offensive coaches had invested specifically on him since his predecessor, John Beck, left for the NFL in 2006. Even Beck, who shared time with Matt Berry when his time came for some playing time, never had the number of reps and focus Hall received in Cougar practices during his three-year career.

Heaps now inherits that attention and focus.

"Taking all the reps is tremendous," said Heaps. "I just need to step up now."

Step it up, indeed.

Through a brutal BYU schedule with road games at Air Force and Florida State, ranked by USA Today's Jeff Sagarin as the fifth-toughest in the country, Heaps' pass efficiency rating through a 1-2 start is a paltry 88.57. He has completed 30-of-60 passes for 260 yards, one TD and one interception.

His completion percentage is below normal (50 percent), so is his yards per completion (8.6). An experienced Hall's standard was 69.2 percent completions, 11.9 yards per completion and a 157 pass efficiency rating with departed pass-catching playmakers like Dennis Pitta, Andrew George, Harvey Unga and Manase Tonga.

According to Paul Pocock, a BYU fan who dabbles in statistics, in a study of 192 Division I games from 2001 through 2008, teams were 25-167 if they had less than 50 percent completions and averaged less than eight yards per completion (minimum of 20 attempts). In those 192 games, they averaged 9.1 points per game.