The football team held an hourlong scrimmage without tackling instead of its normal spring game on Saturday.

Head Coach Rod Carey said too many player injuries during the 14 spring practices are what led to the Saturday scrimmage at Huskie Stadium, but Carey said it was the best spring practice the team’s had since he took over as head coach before the 2013 Orange Bowl against Florida State University.

“This is by far the best spring I’ve been a part of since I’ve been here as the head coach or the offensive coordinator,” Carey said. “They were hungry to get on the field [this spring], and that is a powerful thing. They practiced like it for 15 straight practices. We had to pull them back, and that’s a good thing when you have to pull a team back. We’re a better football team [after spring]; I can tell you that.”

There were several uncertainties about the team’s depth chart heading into Saturday’s scrimmage, but the biggest position battle was at the quarterback position. Carey said the quarterback position will work itself out.

Three quarterbacks — redshirt sophomore quarterback Daniel Santacaterina, redshirt junior quarterback Ryan Graham and redshirt freshman Marcus Childers — took the majority of the reps Saturday, with Childers leading the offense to its lone touchdown of the scrimmage.

“You don’t want to play two guys there, three guys [at quarterback],” Carey said. “You want to play one. It’s been good back and forth between the top three guys in Graham, Santacaterina and Childers. It certainly has been a good battle. [Saturday], we saw some good things out of all of them. [Childers] probably played the most because he kept the chains alive. It was good to see, but we’re a long ways from deciding that one.”

Santacaterina said that with the ongoing competition, it is important to stay calm and to not force anything right now.

“If you go out there feeling like you have to prove something and you have to make plays all the time, then you’re not going to do well,” Santacaterina said. “You just have to do your reads, hit the check-downs, drive, move the chains and do your best out there. Hopefully at the end of the day, you’ve gotten better and make a difference.”

Santacaterina said the competition is healthy for the quarterbacks and the team, and it pushes him and the other quarterbacks to do better every day.

“We just want to come out here and compete every day, get better every day and [put] an emphasis on doing one play at a time, one throw at a time and just really focusing on each day and getting better that individual day,” Santacaterina said. “I think we got better [Saturday] as well, but we just have to have a strong finish [to the spring] and a strong start [to the summer and fall] and get better.”

NIU will begin the football season Sept. 1 against Boston College at Huskie Stadium.