Strike 2: The quarterback carousel in the state of Colorado has finally come full circle. Three FBS football programs, and a total of eight quarterbacks have taken meaningful snaps before the calendar turns to October.

With the struggling CSU Rams finally pulling the plug on Brayden Fowler-Nicolosi and replacing him with third-year sophomore Jackson Brousseau, all three of the major college teams along the front range have played at least two QB’s during meaningful moments in the season’s first four weeks. Before making the change to Brousseau, the Rams had already used running QB Tahj Bullock in special packages – including the game deciding 2-point conversion attempt last Saturday night. Colorado has started both Kaiden Salter and Ryan Staub and used highly touted freshman JuJu Lewis early in the second game against Delaware. Air Force has rotated Josh Johnson and Liam Szarka with pretty good success.

You can’t tell the signal callers without a program.

“I don’t like to change quarterbacks,” said CSU head coach Jay Norvell after the Rams took a late fourth quarter extra point off the board and ended up losing to the University of Texas-San Antonio 17-16 at Canvas Stadium.

He didn’t have a lot of choice given Fowler-Nicolosi’s ongoing struggles. Brousseau entered early in the fourth quarter and rallied the Rams to two touchdowns, only to see the otherwise stellar defense give up a back breaking 74-yard TD pass on a screen pass. Brousseau led CSU to their second TD with just 29 seconds left, but after an offsides penalty gave them a chance to go for two from a yard and a half way, a trick play went awry and the Rams fell to 1-2.

Regardless, Brousseau did enough to earn the chance to start next week against Washington State. Ironically, it was two seasons ago when Fowler-Nicolosi entered a game against those same Cougars at Canvas Stadium in relief of the ineffective Clay Millen and never gave the job back. BFN lit a fire under an otherwise stagnant Rams offense that day, throwing for 210 yards and a pair of fourth quarter TD’s to make an otherwise lopsided 50-24 loss to Cam Ward and WSU look a tad more reasonable.

Now the script has been flipped – at least for now – as CSU looks to right the ship.

Meanwhile, the Colorado Buffaloes have given the keys to three different guys in four games already, and now appear set on going with transfer senior Kaidon Salter after his complete game, 300-yard passing effort in the Buffs win over Wyoming. Does that mean we’ve seen the last of highly touted freshman JuJu Lewis or former third stringer turned starter Ryan Staub? Probably not. There are a lot of games left.

The one team that going into the season had fully planned on playing more than one guy under center was Air Force. And if early returns mean anything, Troy Calhoun and his team may have found the best of the state’s QB bunch, and he’s from right here in the Centennial state.

Sophomore Liam Szarka from Grandview High School has shown brightly in the early season. After entering the game for the Falcons’ fifth offensive series, he lit up the Boise State defense. It’s been six seasons since the Falcons had a QB pass for more than 200 yard (242 with a pair of touchdown tosses) and rush for 100 (111 with another TD) in the same game, even as AFA suffered a 49-37 shootout loss to the Broncos. Szarka did all this after entering the game in relief of starting QB Josh Johnson, who hasn’t played poorly himself. In three games, the junior has completed half his 18 passes for 224 yards with a pair of touchdownss and posted a QB rating of 180.1. He’ll likely get more snaps too, but it sure looks like Szarka is going to be the guy moving forward.

Maybe the moral to the story is that the state’s big three football programs don’t have to recruit California and Texas or head for the transfer portal to find a high caliber quarterback. Both the Buffs and the Rams could be better football teams right this minute if they had Szarka taking snaps.