East Carolina football coach Mike Houston elaborated this week on his decision to make Jake Garcia the team’s new starting quarterback.
Garcia and teammate Katin Houser, both transfers, were locked in a competition for the starting role, and Houston announced after Saturday’s second scrimmage that Garcia would be the Pirates’ starter on Aug. 31 against Norfolk State.
Houston expanded on his decision to choose Garcia and also noted that Houser remains an important piece to the team and the quarterback room. Lessons learned from a season ago highlight the importance of depth at the position.
“Well, it was a highly competitive competition and both Jake and Katin are very talented players. They will both help our program this year and it was a very tough decision to pick between the two,” Houston said. “Just speaking on Jake, I felt particularly in scrimmage settings, I saw a lot of the same things I saw in his film from Miami. He is very poised, cool and confident. When things break down around him, he does not panic.
“He’s able to make throws and make decisions in the middle of chaos, which you know, as soon as that ball kicks off on Aug. 31, virtually every snap of the season there’s going to be some level of chaos, and your ability to execute in that setting is going to a long way towards us being successful when you’re the quarterback.”
Garcia threw for 803 yards with five touchdowns and four interceptions during his 2022 season at Miami. He transferred to Missouri in 2023 but couldn’t crack a tough quarterback room and did not play. He arrived in Greenville in January and has been competing for the starting role ever since.
Houston hopes that Garcia — and Houser — will be what the Pirates need to overcome their shortcomings that led to a 2-10 record last season. The quarterbacks in 2023 weren’t able to elevate the rest of the roster and it was part of the reason for the disappointing campaign.
Houston even said that he wished he would have been more active in the portal and with NIL opportunities to fill out a competitive roster. Instead, he went with the status quo and hoped for the best outcome.
“Last year didn’t go too well in that room,” Houston said of the QB position. “If you wanted to pinpoint one piece, it’s that we lost a lot of close ball games last year. We were in the situation to win virtually every game in the fourth quarter, but we did not operate very well at that position. We talked about NIL a while ago. We talked about other factors. I think that going back, I’d probably worry less about keeping the players I had on the roster, and I’d focus more on making sure that we had more known commodities.
“We had hoped that Mason (Garcia) was going to be a guy that could step in and lead the offense, and it turned out that was not the case. Trying to play two quarterbacks the way we did last year is not something that anybody has in their vision of something that’s going to be successful. Saying that, I do anticipate both Katin and Jake will play this year. There’s no doubt. In college football, you never know from one day to the next. We’re blessed to have both.”
Houston even noted the likelihood of seeing three different men under center this season.
“I would say you’ve got a chance to see Raheim Jeter at some point this year,” he said. “He’s improved drastically, but I do feel comfortable that we have the talent in that room that we did not have a year ago to successfully lead a highly productive and explosive offense.”
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