SPOKANE, Wash. – At his first media appearance since losing the best quarterback in the country, Aaron Best did his damndest to act like nothing had changed.
That’s Best’s evaluation, by the way, but it’s an easy case to defend when talking about Eric Barriere. Best, blusterily charming and confidently long-winded in a way that makes it difficult to believe he was a former tough-as-nails offensive lineman (although he was), loves talking about Eric Barriere, whose destiny has been linked with his ever since the whip-thin redshirt sophomore from La Habra High School led Eastern Washington to the national championship game in 2018-19, Best’s second year as head coach of the Eagles. It was Best’s 22nd overall year on the staff.
From that auspicious beginning, there followed a litany of joint successes – for Best, a Big Sky co-Coach of the Year Award, with a 41-17 record and three FCS playoff appearances in five seasons. For Barriere, even more gilded laurels – 13,809 passing yards and 121 touchdowns, both Big Sky Conference records; back-to-back Big Sky Offensive Player of the Year awards, making him the third Eastern Washington player to accomplish that feat this decade; three top-five finishes in Walter Payton Award voting, including a win in 2021 that neatly validated his head coach’s oft-repeated claim that the best signal caller in the country resided in Cheney, Washington.
For those four years, Barriere was the best show in the Big Sky, a true one-of-one – just over six feet tall but blessed with a Gold Glove shortstop’s arm, a throwing motion so sudden and abbreviated it looked like a special effects studio had edited out a step between wind-up and release; just a 4.7-second 40-yard dash runner but blessed with a centerfielder’s quick first step that let him escape the pass rush, dropping his right shoulder and wheeling back towards the sideline in a short, tight circle like a shorebird in flight.
“He’s good,” even Bobby Hauck allowed, the only Eastern Washington player Hauck deigned to mention individually before Montana’s playoff rematch with the Eagles a year ago, two months and a day after Barriere had beaten the Griz with 422 yards and 24 fourth-quarter points on the red turf in Cheney.
But the essential nature of college sports is that transcendent careers are as short as they are brilliant, and that second Montana game, in which he threw for 530 yards and five touchdowns on 80 attempts but also coughed up a late pick-six and lost 57-41 on a rabid, wolfish night in Missoula, was the final involvement of Barriere’s Eastern Washington career.
So now Eric Barriere is in Alabama, where he threw for 118 yards in two games as a backup for the Michigan Panthers of the USFL this summer – his head coach was Jeff Fisher and his primary quarterback competition was Paxton Lynch – and on Monday, Aaron Best was in Spokane, answering a barrage of questions that all circled around one big question – what will he do without his quarterback?
The Eagles return Gunner Talkington, perhaps the most well-prepared backup quarterback in the country – in five years at Eastern Washington, he’s sat behind Gage Gubrud and then Barriere, both Walter Payton Award winners. Talkington, from Battle Ground, Washington, is listed at 5-10, 215 pounds. He’s thrown 64 passes in his Eastern Washington career, completing exactly half for 365 yards. He’s a much-scrutinized cipher, in other words, although history says that he’ll probably be pretty good – seven different Eastern Washington quarterbacks have combined to win 11 Big Sky Offensive MVP awards in the last 20 years.
“It’s really his spot to lose, and he’s done a good job,” Best said. “He takes nothing for granted. … We’re looking for big things out of Gunner, and/or the position. All indications are that Gunner will be the guy, but time will tell.”
Eastern Washington is also bringing in Jim Chapin, formerly of the University of Sioux Falls, to replace Ian Shoemaker at new offensive coordinator.
Elsewhere, the Eagles look to be much as they have been the last several years – an envious stable of skill players, particularly at wide receiver, where they return pass catchers like Freddie Roberson and preseason all-conference pick Efton Chism III, along with a defense that, despite players like destructive interior lineman Joshua Jerome, probably doesn’t have the depth to edge much past average.
Talkington’s level will probably go a long way towards determining their final record, and it’s a scary prospect to rely on a player whose career number of touchdown passes (five) is just one higher than his number of career appearances on the Big Sky All-Academic team (four).
It’s never easy, but one gets the sense that, more than anything, Aaron Best is possibly even a little excited about moving on, about losing the inevitable asterisk that marks all discussions of Eastern Washington. Yeah, they’ve done great, but they had Barriere. This season, he’ll get a chance – we all will – to see the true strength of his program, if the culture he’s instilled in the roster he’s built can survive the seismic departure of an icon.
For the first time since his rookie year as a head coach, Aaron Best is on unstable ground. He sounded eager about the prospect.
“It’s going to be fun, it’s going to be challenging, it’s going to be different,” Best said. “The standard is going to be the same, but how you get there may be a different route. … You don’t change the core, the culture, the family, the commitment level. What you do is attack in different ways, and we’re excited to see how we attack this fall with the guys we have.”
Photos by Brooks Nuanez, Blake Hempstead and attributed. All Rights Reserved.
