PROVO — In naming freshman Bear Bachmeier as the starting quarterback, BYU offensive coordinator Aaron Roderick on Tuesday said the decision didn’t surprise the team.
Same here. To anybody listening and reading several columns in this space, it was no surprise at all.
“In practice he’s proven he deserves it,” Roderick said. “I think everybody out here has watched it happen. This is not a big surprise to anybody on our team because they’ve seen it happening in practice. Now it’s our job to help him have the players around him execute so he can play in the game like he does in practice.”
Under the circumstances, upon losing incumbent starter Jake Retzlaff several weeks after spring practice concluded, going with the highly-touted Bachmeier is the correct choice. Since he was ticketed to be the starting quarterback in 2026, there was little reason not to go with him now.
Truth is, nearly as soon as an alleged sexual assault civil lawsuit against Retzlaff became public, Bachmeier emerged as the top candidate to start this season. Provided he proved the obvious in training camp, all along he was the front-runner.
After seeing enough, Roderick had no problem offering his choice to coach Kalani Sitake, who was going to sign off on his coordinator’s recommendation. Roderick also leaned on the other assistants on offense to get their input.
To the coaches, it didn’t matter that Bachmeier was barely removed from high school. Nor did it matter that he arrived on campus only three months ago after having participated in Stanford’s spring practice.
“He’s very mature, man,” Roderick said. “Our players gravitate to him. He’s a good leader. All these guys are good leaders but it’s rare to see a freshman who can lead the team the way he does every day.”
Without question, Bachmeier is the most skilled quarterback in the program. This isn’t to imply the competition with McCae Hillstead and Treyson Bourguet was only for show and neither of them aren’t good, but they were brought in to provide the necessary depth at the game’s most important position.
Roderick refrained from naming a depth chart behind Bachmeier, saying there’s still time to sort it out. Both players have been in the program for at least one year and gained valuable playing experience at other FBS schools before transferring to BYU.
“We still need them to come along and need them to develop,” Sitake said.
As written in this space multiple times, beginning on June 6, Bachmeier was likely going to beat out both players. Roderick and Sitake couldn’t say as much during interviews, but they provided insight all along.
One week into training camp earlier this month, Bachmeier was beginning to stand above the competition. Roderick quelled any doubts about Bachmeier’s ability to learn the playbook, saying “he’s up to speed.”
Last week, without officially naming a starter for the Aug. 30 opener against Portland State, Roderick announced Bachmeier was getting most of the reps with the first-team offense. At that point, as reported here, the competition was essentially over.
“What we’ve seen in camp right now and all the practices, he gives us the best chance right now,” Sitake said. “Also, we have a lot of quarterbacks that can play so that makes me feel good. Hopefully we don’t have to go down that route; but if we do, we have a lot of quarterbacks that can help us win games.”
Bachmeier, whose brother, Tiger, is a BYU receiver, becomes the only first-year freshman to start a season at quarterback for BYU. Other quarterbacks have played during their freshman season and have started as a redshirt freshman.
“We saw something in him way back when he was in high school,” Sitake said. “We’re excited to have him here and excited to have him be part of our team.”
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
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