Tribe Building Up Offense

HARRISONBURG — Jimmye Laycock has no plans to keep William & Mary’s quarterback carousel in motion.

The Tribe want to stick with one signal-caller this fall.

“I’d really, really prefer to have one ready to go,” Laycock said. “They all have the skills as far as running and throwing, but we need to have improved decision-making. And in order to have improved decision-making, we got to get reps and in order to get reps, we have to get one guy going with it instead of two or three.”

Tommy McKee, Shon Mitchell and Brandon Battle all appeared at the position for William & Mary throughout 2017, and Laycock had to use the entire trio in the Tribe’s 46-14 home loss to rival James Madison last season.

The Dukes host William & Mary in their Colonial Athletic Association opener on Sept. 22 at 3:30 p.m.

McKee has since graduated and Laycock said he and his staff narrowed the competition down to Mitchell, a sophomore, and fellow sophomore Ted Hefter during the spring.

The 39th-year coach added he re-evaluated the entire offense after William & Mary finished 2-9 overall, 0-8 in the CAA, 110th nationally for passing offense (142.5 yards per game) and 112th national for scoring offense (15 points per game).

“I go back to the other years where we’ve been in similar situations,” Laycock said. “We’ve gone through preseason with one guy getting 70, 75 percent of the snaps because of the inexperience there.

“Now if you have an experienced quarterback that’s a little different, but with an inexperienced one, we’ve got to get one of them more reps to put them in more decision-making situations under fire. It’s one thing to just throw routes and things against air, but we’ve got to put them in more game-type situations.”

Laycock said the running backs and receivers have to help whoever wins the quarterback job more often this season, too.

In the backfield, sophomores Nate Evans and Noah Giles return. Evans had a team-high 476 rushing yards last season. Giles averaged 6.2 yards per carry. And Laycock is hoping junior Albert Funderburke looks more like he did in 2016 than last year.

Funderburke rushed for 294 yards over four games before suffering a season-ending injury as a freshman two years ago.

“It would be nice to have Funderburke back more like the full speed he was when he started two years ago before he had the knee [injury],” Laycock said. “He looked good this spring and we were cautious with him, but for the most part he did everything, and I think he’s feeling more and more confident in himself.”

The Tribe’s top returning receiver is senior Jack Armstrong, who had 22 catches for 312 yards last year.

Unlike the offense that seeks vast improvement, the defense has aspirations to build off of what it did last season when the Tribe ranked in the top 50 nationally for rushing defense, passing defense, total defense, scoring defense and were 13th in sacks (three per game).

Junior linebacker Nate Atkins had 96 tackles and was an All-CAA third-team choice last season. Senior linebacker Josh Dulaney, junior safety Corey Parker and junior linebacker Arman Jones each had at least 70 tackles, and junior defensive tackle Bill Murray recorded 6.5 sacks and eight tackles for loss last season.

“We got the core of that group coming back,” Laycock said.

And it might be good enough this season to aid the offense in its attempt at a turnaround.

“We’ve got to really be consistent defensively and we got to do a better job of getting our offense short fields,” Laycock said. “It’s one of the things we talked about and emphasized in the spring.

“We played pretty good defense last year, but we need to get the ball more and give the offense some short fields. We need to score more on defense. We need to be more dynamic defensively. We were good last year, but we need to create more big plays.”