BOISE -- The Boise State football team has spent the last few days getting creative with their defensive backfield due to injuries.
Starting cornerback Cleshawn Page will be out for the Connecticut game, if not longer. Senior backup Bryan Douglas seems unlikely to return this week and preseason All-Mountain West selection Donte Deayon hasn't played in over five quarters.
On Monday, Boise State head coach Bryan Harsin said he had a plan though.
"We've got plan A thru plan D basically," Harsin said.
By the time he spoke again on Wednesday, he had taken his precautionary measure one letter further.
"We'll probably travel Eric Yates, one of our freshman DBs," Harsin explained. "That was we just have somebody -- worst case. That gets down to E."
In this case, "E" may unintentionally stands for Eric. The 5-foot-9, 161-pound, walk-on cornerback has spent a majority of the last month in a black practice squad jersey.
As the Broncos began gearing up for UCONN this week, his uniform color, and thus his role, had changed.
"He does a good job. He's a smart player. He's competitive," Harsin said. "He knows the defense obviously."
Why is that so obvious you ask?
Because his father is Marcel Yates, the Broncos defensive coordinator.
"It screws me up whenever I hear people yell out Yates, because I think they're talking about me," Yates joked.
"What's interesting is, last fall, I actually called coach Petersen and asked him if he could come. He told me 'Yeah.' So he was already coming back to go to school here," Yates said with a smile. "It just so happened that I get offered a job here and we both end up back here. It worked out."
As a son and player, Marcel says he holds Eric to a standard. But on the field, the elder Yates doesn't necessarily always have to see it through.
"The cool thing for me is, I'm not his actual coach. So I let coach Brown kind of coach him up," Yates said.
The man responsible for Eric's day-to-day development is a man Marcel once coach at Boise State over a decade ago.
Defensive backs coach Julius Brown.
"He's been one of those kids that has kind of been thrown into the fire. He always studies. He's a young kid that wants to be good," Brown said.
"It's funny because we always ask those guys questions in meetings and I asked him two today and he was two-for-two," he continued. "So the guys gave him a standing ovation."
