BILLINGS — We’re not sure who won Rocky Mountain College’s quarterback competition out of camp last year, but we know who was No. 1 by season’s end.
Drew Korf took the first snap in last season’s opener. Nate Dick scored the first touchdown. Then Jacob Bakken ran away as the Frontier Conference player of the year.
But he’s gone and the Bears are now down to two.
“We’re both team guys,” Dick told MTN Sports before a recent workout. “Whoever is going to make the team better is who’s going to be out there playing.”
“I think we both bring a lot to the table,” said Korf. “There are things he does well, things I do well.”
The decision will come down to first-year head coach Chris Stutzriem, though there’s plenty of familiarity with the Bears’ former offensive coordinator.
“We ran Stutz’s offense in the fall, so a lot of it is the same,” Dick said.
“This is the offense I learned when I came in as a freshman,” Korf recalled. “Ran it my freshman year, last spring, and then having coach (Jason) Petrino keep the same offense has helped us.”
Korf actually started the final five games of his freshman year, throwing for 1,600 yards and 14 touchdowns with a 3-2 record. So he offers the experience edge.
“We get preached to all the time – a leader is somebody who can bring up the guys around him,” Korf said. “That’s one of our biggest roles, knowing the offense coming in, is making sure all the young guys get their alignments, make sure they know the playbook and just trying to help out in any way that we can.”
But Dick, fully healthy after a foot injury cut his season short after three games last year, checks the dual-threat box that so many college coaches are looking for these days.
“Somebody who can run the team very well,” Stutzriem offered on what he’s looking for. “Somebody who takes control. Somebody who makes plays when maybe the plays aren’t there to be made.”
Billings Senior fans remember plenty of that in Dick’s high school days. He went on to win Montana’s Gatorade football player of the year as a senior.
Logic says both guys will play this season at some point, but Stutzriem says he wants one guy to win the job by fall.
“I think at the end of the day, we will have a starting quarterback,” he said. “Both guys bring so much stuff to the offense, and to the team, that we’ve got to be able to use both of them if it comes down to that.”
It’ll likely take both to fill Bakken’s shoes and keep the Bears on top.
