Wulff finds his scout team QB

PAUL WULFF found his man on Monday. With an injury plagued quarterbacking corps, the Cougar head coach turned to the student body to find a new signal caller for the scout team. In an audition featuring 29 contenders, a freshman from the Seattle area was the last man standing.

Peter Roberts, a two-year starter at Woodinville High who was named second-team all-King-Co 4A last season, is Washington State's new scout team QB.

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Roberts (6-1, 195) threw for more than 1,600 yards with a combined 15 touchdowns and 55 percent completion mark in 2007. He was also an all-league baseball player at Woodinville.

"We just picked him this morning...he's a good kid," said Wulff.

Washington State resorted to holding an open campus tryout after losing Gary Rogers and Kevin Lopina in Week 3. With them out, No. 3 man Marshall Lobbestael moved to No. 1, followed by J.T. Levenseller. And walk-on Dan Wagner, the scout team QB, was elevated to No. 3.

Wagner now needs to take turns with the regulars, so the Cougs opened auditions for the scout team role. The Cougs have five other players on the roster who played quarterback in high school but who are lining up at different positions and Wulff clearly didn't want to move them: linebacker Kevin Baffney and defensive backs Eric Block, Kevin Frank, Xavier Hicks and Kyle McCartney.

The scout team quarterback's primary job is to help prepare the first team defense. He generally "throws off a card" -- meaning he's throwing to a specific spot on a passing play, in order to give the first team defense the right look, in order to best prepare them for that week's opponent.

If the defense has the right defense called, if there are two players ready to jump the route, so be it -- decision making and similar kinds of skills are purely secondary when it comes to running the scout team.