Virginia Tech football: Hokies not sure which Notre Dame quarterback will play on Saturday.

Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly met with the media on Monday to talk about this week’s game. This week’s game happens to be against the Virginia Tech Hokies in Lane Stadium on Saturday evening.

As with the usual coach presser, you got a lot of “this is the best team we have ever seen” talk, followed by some valuable nuggets of information.

Notre Dame enters this week’s game with a record of 4-1. The Fighting Irish lost their first game of the season last week to the Cincinnati Bearcats. Cincinnati is really good, by the way.

But before the Irish lost their first game, they had struggled at times in previous weeks, most notably against Toledo. One thing this Notre Dame team lacks that the previous versions Virginia Tech faced is stability at quarterback. In the previous two meetings, Notre Dame had the dependable Ian Book under center.

Notre Dame has been unable to replace Book this season. Senior Jack Coan has been Notre Dame’s primary passer this year, but he isn’t the most popular player with Fighting Irish fans.

So, back to Kelly. On Monday, he was asked who would be starting at quarterback and he did not give an answer. Here’s what Kelly said, per our friends at One Foot Down.

We’ll talk to the guys today when they come over, but it’s not any different from what I kind of mentioned to everybody here. We’re going to have one guy and we’re going to let him know that the reps are for him to be the starter, and focus on one guy. We just haven’t gotten a chance to talk to that individual yet. We know exactly who it is.

Who graded out well, who played well. Nobody was perfect, as we know, at the quarterback position. There were some mistakes made by all three. But I think at the end of the day, who gives you the best chance to win. This is still about winning football games. We feel like we’ve got a team that can win the rest of their games and we want to be able to put the quarterback out there that we believe gives us the chance to do that.

I think I probably won’t announce it. I’ll probably just talk to the kids, we’ll rep it and you guys will do fine investigative work and probably figure out who it is.

I think I’m more interested in what we do more than I’m trying to hide something from Virginia Tech. Look, they’ve seen all three play. They’re pretty smart. They can figure it out. This is really not about trying to gain a competitive advantage more so I just want to focus on talking to our kids today and getting them moving and start the process.

Look, Virginia Tech isn’t going to say who it would want to face. Playing a quarterback like Doan would eliminate the dual-threat passer that has given the Hokies trouble in the past.

Regardless of who is under center for the Fighting Irish this weekend, the Hokies need a signature win.