Scouting Slovis: Harrell's Take on the Match-up

Thursday's season opener highlights a pair of quarterbacks who have history with each other and WVU's new OC.

Both of the 2022 Backyard Brawl's quarterbacks played in rooms coached by WVU's newest addition: offensive coordinator Graham Harrell.

WVU QB1 JT Daniels met Harrell after committing to play for the USC Trojans under head coach Clay Helton. When Helton redistributed his assistant coaches in 2019, Harrell was hired to take over the OC/quarterbacks coach job. In the quarterback's room he inherited: a sophomore JT Daniels and a true freshman Kedon Slovis.

Three seasons later, this trio is 2,432 miles away, reuniting at an NFL stadium in a rivalry game of which neither of the three has prior knowledge.

Although the combination of Harrell and Daniels only shared a single game prior to the sophomore's season-ending knee injury, Slovis and his QBs coach spent the remainder of Harrell's time in California working together. 

After Daniels' injury, true freshman Slovis effectively took over as starter, and Daniels entered the transfer portal in Apr. 2020.

Harrell and Slovis worked diligently on USC's Air Raid offense, and the duo produced a string of solid seasons in the cardinal and gold. Now, they're pitted against each other, and Harrell joked that he may have to delete Slovis' number out of his phone ahead of Thursday.

"I know Slovis pretty well," Harrell said. "He's a very accurate passer. He does things very well. I've talked to our defense a lot about Kedon, because I know him really well. I don't know exactly what [Pitt's] doing, because I haven't watched their offense, but it's probably something totally different from what we were doing at SC, so I think from that standpoint, you kind of have to figure out what they're going to do and see how [Slovis] fits into that.

"He's a talented passer. He's very gifted. He's very accurate... It's going to be interesting to see how they use him. It'll be different for me, obviously. Watching him play, I've been pulling for him for a long time. This is the first time I'll have to pull against him, but it'll be fun to watch, and I'll be interested to see what he does out there."

The two can scout each other incredibly well, and, rightfully, it's cause for concern. Harrell said that when he got to West Virginia, he began the semantics shift. Plays and routes were renamed in an effort to disguise any snippets of scheme that the Panthers could possibly use against the Mountaineers on game day.

"From a signal perspective, we've had to pretty much change everything," Harrell said. "I think [Slovis] can cheat better than I can cheat this week. We changed a lot of that stuff to try to protect the signals and stuff, but from a scheme standpoint and all that, there's not a lot you can learn from him that you can't turn on the tape and see. From that standpoint, I'm not too worried about it. From a signal and stuff like that standpoint, if they're trying to dig, we've changed all of those up from what we signaled at SC and what we signal here. Just trying to protect those the best we can."

It remains to be seen what will come of the original USC trio's newest meeting; one's thing's for sure, though. When the No. 16 Pitt Panthers welcome the West Virginia Mountaineers to Acrisure Stadium, all eyes will be on the quarterbacks.

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