Welcome to the Line of Scrimmage.

Ahead of each game this football season, we’re giving you insight into Florida State’s opponents from those in the know.

This week, we welcome Brad Everett, who covers sports at all levels as a reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The Seminoles open the season against the Duquesne Dukes, who have found a relative standard of success in the Northeast Conference on the FCS level.

• Duquesne is coming off of a 7-3 season that included their first win over an FBS opponent. The Dukes are preseason second in the Northeast Conference, can you speak to the overall success of the program under head coach Jerry Schmidt? Is there a particular area that Schmidt has excelled in during his tenure?

Brad Everett: They’ve just been consistent. I mean, ever since he’s been there. You know, this is a program that you know, I mean, I’m sure not a lot of your readers or listeners are very familiar with Duquesne athletics. But I mean, up until, you know, up until 1993, this was the division three program. You know, they weren’t even at the division two level. They’ve only had two coaches since 1993. Jerry Schmidt’s been at Duquesne for 18 years, he’s actually longer tenured than Mike Tomlin is here in Pittsburgh.

• On offense, the Dukes enter the season with the always favorite quarterback competition. Do you have a pulse on how this completion shakes out and also some background on Joe Mischler and Darius Perrantes?

Brad Everett: Yeah, they’re in a unique situation. And, you know, it’s not a case, you know, some schools are still trying to, you know, are still trying to figure out how to have one decent quarterback but you know, Duquesne has, you know, not only to decent ones, but two good ones. Both of those guys, you know, have good arms can move. Not your traditional, like dual-threat guys, like, they’re not gonna, you know, be doing these 20 - 30 yards runs that Jordan Travis might be pulling off or something, but they can both play and they both have experience under their belt.

• Switching to defense, the name that sticks out islinebacker Todd Hill. If you could give some details to the listeners on him and also the base defensive formation that Duquesne runs?

Brad Everett: This is a team that’s been strong defensively in recent years. They went out and they got a new defensive coordinator this year. They went out and got a guy named Mike Craig, who was previously defensive coordinator at IUP up here in the area, a really strong division two program and so he’s bringing that three, four defense over there.

Todd Hill, he played at a local high school, Still Valley High School, was the day one starter there his freshman year and was just a kid that just produced and produced and produced throughout his career, just made plays every time you saw him. And it’s like, man, like this dude, you know, this dude is good enough to play, you know, he can go anywhere. He, I mean, he can go anywhere he wants in college, but there’s the size issue, he’s not very tall. And you know, and that’s what you’ll get a lot of these FCS schools, you know, guys that if they were three or four inches taller, they’d be playing on ACC teams. he’s going to be playing more of an edge position this year, and they’re going to try to deploy him in a lot of different ways. They’re gonna try to keep offensive coordinators guessing as far as where he’s gonna line up at on defense, but they expect him to have a really, really big year. 

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