UGA football roster: D’Wan Mathis faces uphill battle for starting job

Jamie Newman, Carson Beck and JT Daniels are the talk of the UGA football starting quarterback race, but now healthy, D’Wan Mathis is very much in the mix.

The beginning of D’Wan Mathis’ UGA football career was eventful to say the least. Weeks after impressing fans with a solid performance in the G-Day Game last April, doctors found a cyst on Mathis‘ brain that required immediate surgery. The cyst was only discovered when Mathis told UGA medical director Ron Courson about headaches and sinus pain he had been experiencing.

The operation went well, but Mathis was unable to compete to the fullest during the 2019 season and was only recently cleared for contact. Now that he’s cleared, Mathis can finally begin competing for Georgia’s starting quarterback job.

Though, just winning the backup job won’t be easy, Georgia’s quarterback room is loaded this season. The group includes a pair of skilled and experienced transfers in Jamie Newman and JT Daniels (though he isn’t cleared to play in 2020 yet), plus true freshman Carson Beck who was a highly sought-after quarterback in high school.

But there is still a quarterback battle to be had and Mathis isn’t going to go down easy. Mathis has a strong, accurate arm to stretch defenses, and a fast and nimble set of legs to make them pay for not keeping him in the pocket. He was tad lanky coming out of high school, but he’s since added 10 lbs. to a frame more than capable of carrying the added load.

The largest knock against Mathis is that he wasn’t the most mechanically-sound quarterback coming out of high school. But without getting to see him during spring practices, there’s no way of knowing how much Mathis has improved his mechanics since arriving on campus last January. Mathis can realistically win the backup job from Beck if Daniels isn’t cleared, but Newman’s experience as a starter might be too much for Mathis to compete with this year.