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Alabama's Jacob Coker, the former Florida State quarterback tries to avoid Wake Forest defensive end James Looney in the second half in Winston-Salem, N.C., on Saturday, Nov. 9, 2013. Florida State won 59-3. (AP Photo/Nell Redmond)

TUSCALOOSA, Alabama -- Jacob Coker's twice-a-week, three-hour drives between Tallahassee and Mobile are officially a thing of the past.

Coker made one last road trip over the weekend, trekking a little more than three hours north from Mobile to Alabama's campus. Freshly graduated from Florida State, the Crimson Tide quarterback arrived three weeks before the start of summer semester to make up for lost time.

Alabama's quarterback competition won't officially resume until the team regroups for practice in August, but the next three months are just as pivotal. The long-promised "opportunity" to compete for the starting job begins now for Coker, who can achieve plenty behind the scenes before two-a-days.

"You have to step up not only in a physical sense leading these seven-on-sevens and all those things but also you have to be that vocal leader, the guy that holds the other players accountable," said former Alabama quarterback Greg McElroy, who is now an analyst for the SEC Network.

"The guy that does that the best will have a significant head start going into the fall."

Because of those repeated drives between Florida State and his home town, Coker won't have the kind of rust typical for a player who hasn't participated in an official practice since November.

On Mondays and Fridays, Coker met with his longtime quarterback coach David Morris, the same instructor who has worked with AJ McCarron for years. The sessions would last roughly one hour, 45 minutes and grew in intensity as winter turned to spring. Recovering from the season-ending knee surgery he underwent in November, Coker was "limited a good bit" during the earlier workouts, Morris said.

By the end, Coker was "better now than he's ever looked."

"I think that's just because of a combination of a number of reasons," Morris said. "He's a more experienced quarterback, he's grown into the position. He's had a lot of reps practicing through the years. I was really pleased with how he kind of didn't miss a whole lot. He didn't miss a beat.

"He really looks strong right now."

Morris said he tried to gear the workouts around the types of throws he expects Coker will have to make within new Alabama offensive coordinator Lane Kiffin's pro-style scheme. That meant plenty of work on one-step, three-step, five-step and seven-step drops while taking snaps both under center and out of the shotgun. Quick, intermediate, deep and play-action throws were also drilled.

"In general, you're kind of trying to get him familiar with all those situations, which he's familiar with anyways," Morris said. "It's getting him back familiar because of his time off with the injury.

"Initially, you're not pushing him too hard because he wasn't 100 percent. You just kind of monitor and make it into a process. Last week, we were really able to move faster and pretty much do about everything we wanted to do."

Blake Sims, Cooper Bateman, Alec Morris and the rest of Alabama's quarterbacks received a 15-practice head start on Coker simply because they were in Tuscaloosa for spring football. All of them, though, were essentially starting with a fresh slate because of Kiffin's arrival.

The differences between Kiffin's offense and the one Doug Nussmeier operated for two seasons haven't been blatantly obvious and they certainly weren't on display at A-Day. On his post-spring SEC teleconference, Alabama coach Nick Saban simply said the offense Coker learned for three seasons at Florida State and the one he'll operate with the Crimson Tide in 2014 are "similar."

"We're talking about learning a system so ... when the opportunity comes in August that he's going to have a better chance of going out and feeling comfortable playing with confidence and developing the physical skills to implement the things we want to do, which probably is not as different as people would like to make them from what he has done," Saban said. "It's just the idea of terminology and understanding and feeling comfortable in the system that we have.

"The learning curve is going to be steep but he's a bright, young guy."

McElroy said it would initially be difficult for Coker to establish a "rapport" with players who have worked with the other quarterbacks for, in some cases, as long as two years. It just isn't an impossible task, especially for a quarterback talented enough to run neck-and-neck with future Heisman trophy winner Jameis Winston in their competition last fall at Florida State.

Saban, more than anything, values "intangibles" when identifying his starting quarterback, McElroy said. That area of Coker's game will be tested more than any other during the next three months.

"To run his system you have to be smart, you have to be tuned into the game plan," McElroy said. "The guy who is able to showcase that the best in the fall will be the guy going out there starting against West Virginia in Atlanta."