COLUMBIA, S.C. — If you don’t know who Zeb Noland is, Shane Beamer has plenty of intel on the graduate assistant who came to the program in June and two months later is back on the field at quarterback.
Zeb Npland played at Iowa State and North Dakota State. When Noland was with the Cyclones of Iowa State, Beamer watched him put up 360 yards and two touchdowns against Oklahoma. At North Dakota State, Noland was the backup to first round draft pick Trey Lance, a rookie with the Niners, before Noland earned the starting lineup for the spring.
But with the quarterback room in need of depth as well as another healthy body on the practice fields to ease the load of the other quarterbacks, Noland is returning to a familiar role in a move that Beamer said the coaches had been pondering even before Doty went down with the sprained foot.
“It’s not like I walked around the corner to the Budweiser distributorship and went to the loading dock and saw and asked if any of those guys played high school quarterback or went down to Five Points and was at a bar last night seeing if anybody was a high school quarterback,” Beamer said.
“We’re not in that situation. We’ve got somebody here on our team that can help us and increase the competition in the quarterback room.”