The Grad Transfer has beaten out the prized recruit. Collin Hill was named the starter for the gamecocks today.
The university released the news on the new starter.
Collin Hill will be the starting quarterback when the South Carolina Gamecocks open the 2020 football season against the Tennessee Volunteers on Saturday, Sept. 26, head coach Will Muschamp announced today.
Hill, a graduate transfer from Colorado State University, edged out sophomore incumben tRyan Hilinskifor the starting nod. The 6-4, 222-pounder has appeared in 18 games including 11 starts during his career while battling through three ACL injuries. While playing quarterback for the Rams, he completed 263-of-433 passes for 3,323 yards with 23 touchdowns and 11 interceptions. He has logged five career 300-yard passing games.
"Collin Hill will start the game against Tennessee," said Coach Muschamp. "I thought both guys had outstanding training camps. We can win with both guys, bottom line. Ryan's had a really good camp. Obviously, there was an advantage for Collin playing for Coach (Mike) Bobo before. Schematically there are some things that helped him. But we can win with both guys. We've got confidence in both guys and, as I told them and our entire football team, we're going into the unknown. We've got to have all hands on deck ready to play.Luke Dotyhas gotten more reps at the quarterback position, because what if we do lose Collin and Ryan to a COVID situation? We've got to have a bunch of guys ready to play in the game, but Collin will start for us.
"It was a very difficult decision," continued the head coach. "You look at our three scrimmages, which are the three benchmarks really in the evaluation. Ryan was the player of the day in the first one; Collin was in the second. Both of them played extremely well in the third. It was very difficult, a hard decision, but that's the decision that we made. As I've said before, we can win with both guys. We have great confidence in both guys and both guys know that."
Coach Muschamp made it clear that while it would be good to give Hilinski a chance to get his feet wet in 2020, that was not necessarily the plan going into the opener. "Certainly from a standpoint of the way COVID is, you want to be in that situation (where Hilinski would play), but it's Collin's game and that's the way we're going to go into the game. But like any other position, if someone's not playing well, we're going to make a change. But Collin's our guy."
The Gamecocks and Volunteers are set for a 7:30 pm ET kick on Sept. 26 at Williams-Brice Stadium in Columbia. The game will be televised on SEC Network with Taylor Zarzour handling the play-by-play, Matt Stinchcomb serving as the analyst and Alyssa Lang working the sidelines.