“We might not,” Gundy replied. “We might play two. If you were at practice today, you’d say, ‘Play two.’ They were both pretty good.

“I know people say that if you can’t name one, you don’t have any. I don’t see that.”

Brown and Sanders are politically correct with what they say about their duel for the starting job, and program insiders indicate that the quarterbacks do seem to like each other, but athletes at this level have an ego.

Every quarterback on the planet wants to take every meaningful snap.

As a sophomore in 2015, and after having been heroic late in the 2014 season, Rudolph was the starter who grudgingly accepted his time-share role. Walsh also wanted to start as a fifth-year senior, of course, but he was tremendous in his part-time assignment.

Publicly, Rudolph and Walsh said the right things.

“At first, Mason didn’t want to come off the field,” Gundy recalled this week. “But he understood, based on the strengths that J.W. provided for us, that we were a better football team (when both QBs played).

“J.W. deserved to play. He was better at certain things than Mason. Both of them were mature enough and smart enough to handle it.”