I was excited when Shula landed Jimmy because at the time he was rated the second best QB out of California with only Mark Sanchez grading out better than him. Later, when I saw Jimmy play in his first A-Day game, the only word that kept coming to my mind was "slow"! The guy looked like Quasimoto under center and as bad as our OL was in 2006, there was no doubt we needed much more mobility from the position than Barnes could deliver. He ran an improvised bootleg against FIU and I thought it was going to take the poor guy 2 minutes to find the chalk on the sideline.
The only way that this would have been about politics is if we woke up the morning of the Western Carolina game only to find that Barnes was the starting QB. Fact of the matter is Jimmy is not used to being a big fish in very large lake and is used to being the big fish in a small pond. Weber St. and Ogden, UT., fit the bill very well for Jimmy (almost a very large high school environment) and I'm happy for him. If his dad could only get by his parental predjudice he would know, as a football coach, there was a good reason why Mike Reilly sent his son to Mike Shula to begin with and it wasn't because Reilly thought Shula was such a swell guy either. :roll: