If you’re at home this weekend and you find yourself with some spare time on your hands, you’d be wise to tune into the entire slate of SEC spring games.

Beginning with Kentucky on Friday night and continuing with Mizzou, Florida and Texas A&M on Saturday, there’s a common link between them that you might notice. All of them have potential to be middle-of-the-pack SEC teams with complete wild cards at quarterback.

Each of the 4 spring games will have a new wrinkle added to the quarterback situation. For Kentucky, it’ll be a new battle with the arrival of JUCO transfer and former Oregon quarterback Terry Wilson. For Mizzou, it’ll be all about how Derek Dooley’s return to the SEC impacts record-setter Drew Lock. And at Florida and Texas A&M, quarterback gurus Dan Mullen and Jimbo Fisher will get their first progress report on their respective QB battles.

In all likelihood, we won’t get definitive answers to who starts where. We definitely won’t get an answer to the most important question that’ll be a pressing topic with the aforementioned quarterback situations.

As in, how far can each of them take their teams?

Credit: Dale Zanine-USA TODAY Sports

Can Terry Wilson be a game-changer?

With Benny Snell back, Kentucky has potential to take another step up in 2018 if it can find someone who can stretch the field. That’s a big “if.” Right now, we don’t know if Wilson can be that guy. What we do know is that ESPN rated Wilson as the No. 1 JUCO quarterback in the country, and that’s enough of a reason to get excited for Kentucky fans.

We also know that there are some reasonable questions about his abilities as a passer. Averaging 6.3 yards per attempt at a junior college isn’t exactly stellar, and a 57.6 completion percentage isn’t great, but those were his numbers as a redshirt freshman. I want to see what Wilson can do stretching the field and making plays with his arm.

Perhaps Gunnar Hoak steals the show and looks like the significantly better passer. Given what Kentucky already has in Snell, that’s such a crucial element to turn this into a balanced offense.

But no, I don’t expect we’ll have an answer on Hoak or Wilson by night’s end.

The Dooley-Lock Experiment

Dooley did enough to persuade Lock to stay in Columbia for one more year. As for whether the former will make the latter a bit more money, that remains to be seen.

What I want to see Saturday is how comfortable Lock looks running Dooley’s offense. And really, how different is Dooley’s offense going to look from Josh Heupel’s, in which Lock threw an SEC record 44 TDs? It was odd to hear Dooley say that Mizzou is still “searching for its offensive identity” when he returns the nation’s leader in touchdown passes.

It’ll be interesting to see if Lock looks like someone learning a new playbook or if it seems like Dooley is basically replicating the same spread-it-out attack that Heupel ran. We probably won’t see much of Lock on Saturday. Still, the last thing Mizzou fans want to see is their starting quarterback confused and inefficient.

Jimbo’s quarterback situation

If you watched the Belk Bowl, you got to see Fisher comment on Nick Starkel as he was playing. Sure, it was a limited sample size, but I found that much more interesting than hearing him talk about either Starkel or Kellen Mond in a post-practice interview.

I’m looking forward to seeing that dynamic play out Saturday.

We know that Fisher has a very hands-on approach when it comes to his quarterback. He takes pride in coaching them up and given his track record of producing NFL Draft picks at the position, Fisher should have Starkel and Mond’s attention. With the two splitting first-team reps throughout spring camp, both will have a fair shot to emerge.

The assumption was that by nearly throwing for 500 yards in the Belk Bowl gave Starkel an advantage in the A&M quarterback battle. But if Mond balls out Saturday and looks like the better option, it’ll still be a coin flip heading into fall camp.

Mull-ing it over

You see what I did there? Excuse the horrible pun and let’s move on to what everyone in Gainesville wants to see. That is, does Florida have a capable quarterback on its 2018 roster? Coming off a year in which he was less than stellar with a prime opportunity to become the guy, Feleipe Franks didn’t exactly get rave reviews in the first part of spring camp.

Franks did bounce back in Florida’s second scrimmage, so maybe he looks a bit more comfortable in Mullen’s offense. Still, I question how he can run Mullen’s offense with limited mobility.

What’s more intriguing to me is how developed Emory Jones is. Florida reportedly has been bringing him along slowly, which suggests that the idea of him starting as a true freshman isn’t gaining much momentum. That’s not much of a surprise considering the way Mullen usually handles his quarterbacks.

But what happens if Jones looks like the guy Saturday and it isn’t Franks or Kyle Trask? That’ll be Mullen’s first big test because you know that quarterback-starved fans will want to see Jones if he looks like the real deal. That’d be a good problem for Florida to have.

Just don’t expect Mullen’s first major project in Gainesville to be finished by Saturday.