Shaq Hill became a member of the Eastern Washington wide receiver group 10 years ago, in 2011, when he redshirted during his first year on campus.
At that point, “the big three,” as he called them, were Brandon Kaufman, Greg Herd and Nicholas Edwards. All three were juniors, and Hill looked up to them.
“When I came in, you could just see the mentality in that room, and the way Eastern recruits, they recruit good guys,” Hill said. “You want to follow in their footsteps. You want to be as good as they are.”
Kaufman (221 receptions), Edwards (215) and Herd (165) are all ranked among the top 13 in career receptions at Eastern; Hill is eighth, with 179.
Just as those three showed the way for Hill and other young teammates, Hill then did the same for players who followed him, and on and on it has gone at Eastern, a place that continues to develop and produce some of the best receivers at the Football Championship Subdivision level.
This year’s veteran corps is off to a strong start this season, catching passes from arguably the best quarterback in the FCS, Eric Barriere, who will lead the sixth-ranked Eagles (4-0, 1-0 Big Sky) onto Roos Field on Saturday night against the fourth-ranked Montana Grizzlies (3-0, 1-0).
“The level of play just keeps going,” Hill said. “People always say, all we do is reload, and it’s really true.”
Hill had moved on from Eastern by the time current senior Johnny Edwards IV and current junior Andrew Boston arrived on the team as freshmen in 2017, but players like Nsimba Webster bridged the gap, just as the Eagles have seemed to do consistently at the position.
It was players like Webster whom Boston and Edwards learned from when they first arrived.
“As I was playing (when I was) younger, there were guys to lean on,” Boston said this week. “The roles have kind of reversed. Now as you get older you have to fill those shoes of the older guys.”
After playing together last spring and being granted an extra year of eligibility, Boston, Edwards and the rest of the corps are enjoying a strong season. Statistically, senior Talolo Limu-Jones leads the group with 23 receptions and 345 yards.
But with Barriere at quarterback, there have been plenty of receptions and yards to go around. Redshirt freshman Efton Chism III is next on the team with 17 catches for 300 yards and a team-high four touchdowns. Boston has 17 for 275, followed by redshirt sophomore Freddie Roberson with 16 for 250.
Running back Dennis Merritt has 13 receptions, and Edwards has just five receptions but 153 yards and two touchdowns.
Limu-Jones needs 55 more yards to reach 2,000 in his career at Eastern, which has spanned 46 games so far. Boston, a junior with 36 games played, needs 73 to reach that milestone. Roberson is 60 yards shy of 1,000, and Edwards needs just 24 to reach that mark.
Statistically, then, Saturday’s game could be a momentous one for the Eagles’ receivers.
“We are all playmakers in different ways. We can count on each other for something different,” Limu-Jones said. “We complement each other because there’s no hate. We love to see everybody else eat.”
‘I saw myself within that group’
When Edwards was looking to choose a college football program, Eastern’s history of producing great receivers was a huge factor, he said.
Some FBS schools were on his list, but Nicholas Edwards – the former Eagles’ player who had by then returned to be the Eagles’ receivers coach – was able to talk about Kendrick Bourne and Cooper Kupp, both of whom are now in the NFL, and that was big, Johnny Edwards said.
“It played a huge role in why I chose Eastern,” Johnny Edwards said. “I saw myself within that group.”
He said he is careful, however, to not make comparisons to previous years. Each group is its own.
“We try not to compare ourselves to years in the past or bring up stats and accolades of players in the past because it really doesn’t matter,” Edwards said. “Their stats don’t contribute to wins for this season.”
So, he said, the group sets out to set the standard for the next year and to be as good as they can be this season.
Part of that, then, is spending time in meetings, and in those meetings the veterans take on the role of mentors for the younger players. Edwards used to take a lot more notes during those meetings, but at this point he doesn’t have to as much, he said.
“Now that I’m one of the vets in the room, I know how to dissect the film pretty well,” Edwards said. “Whenever the young guys have a question, they don’t have to ask coach (Pat) McCann. We can handle it for them.”
Eagles coach Aaron Best said that the ability of receivers – as well as players at other positions – to hand down the “manuscript” to the next year is a testament to the players themselves, who often have had multiple position coaches during their time at Eastern.
“Eric Barriere’s been coached by multiple guys in his tenure here, but he’s taken a little bit from everybody and applied it,” Best said. “But he’s also applied those things to the guys that are underclassmen to him. You make it your own.
“It’s like reading the ingredients, making anything at home. You always want your own twist on things, but the base (recipe) is the base.”
Certainly the continuity at quarterback has spilled over into the success for the receivers this year. The seven games the team played last spring served in some ways as a trial run, Limu-Jones said.
“Then, we all stayed together in the summer. The whole team, we stayed,” Limu-Jones said, “That played a huge part in it because I’ve been here when we stayed and I’ve been here when certain people left and didn’t stay (over the summer). I’ve seen how the team is. It’s a different feeling.”
Barriere also said now he knows the offense inside and out, and that he knows “where to go with the ball, making the correct reads.”
“I was watching film of my (younger) self actually, a couple hours ago,” he said Tuesday, “just looking at what I was doing wrong back then, and just a lot of the mistakes I made. (I’m) correcting them, just (trying to get) better.”
In-game, they are comfortable on the sidelines, swapping ideas on what they see in the other defense but also, Barriere said, there’s plenty of laughing and giggling, even if they have a bad series.
“We know what we’re capable of as an offense and what type of skill set we have,” he said, “so we just try to brush it off and play the next play.”
They also put in a lot of effort building their off-field relationships, Barriere said, which is crucial to those moments when he is scrambling and looking for someone open downfield.
“The receivers, we make different eye contact, where if we didn’t have that connection outside of football,” Barriere said, “that stuff probably wouldn’t happen.”
Defenses often give the Eagles unique looks, Edwards said, too, and that teams will completely switch their tendencies when they play Eastern. That might mean a team with a 30% blitz rate will blitz 50% of the time against them, Edwards said, or a defense that won’t have bracketed receivers in any previous games will come out and bracket Eastern’s receivers.
But even if teams are able to neutralize their passing game, or the running game that has complemented it so well the last few seasons, “you still have to account for EB,” Edwards said. “It’s extremely fun to play in (this offense).”
And between running, passing and Barriere’s scrambling, Edwards said, “we’re pretty much a triple threat.”
Against Montana: Hold blocks and execute
In 33 starts with the Eagles, Barriere is 24-9. In 14 home games, he hasn’t lost. With 10,437 yards in his career, he is within reach of Matt Nichols’ school record of 12,616.
As Boston put it, “He has full control over the offense.”
Saturday, the Eagles will face their stiffest test of the season against a team Barriere has not yet defeated. Montana’s defense has allowed just two touchdowns so far this season.
They stunt a lot, Barriere said, and they pressure offenses and speed up a quarterback’s read recognition.
“So, the gameplan is we’ve got to hold up blocks and execute really well, because it’s a game of two really good teams,” Barriere said.
That will make his relationships with his receivers – who will need to be ready for throws whenever they might come – all the more crucial.
“(Great defenses) always bring out the best of you,” Edwards said. “It makes the game a lot easier to play because you don’t have to worry about bringing the juice, bringing the energy. The fans are roaring, coaches are screaming. It’s just a great environment.
“To play a team like that, once a season or every game, is just a blessing. … Playing against good defenses is what we came to college for, what we came to Eastern Washington for.”
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