Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly-ish column on the Texas Longhorns.
The great thing about quarterback controversies is that if the team loses, the coach is wrong, and if the team wins, the coach still might be wrong. This is how society has collectively decided to handle such things, and we’ll be damned if we let our better graces keep us from joining the pile this fall in Austin.
On the surface, this really doesn’t seem much like a competition. Hudson Card “knows the system,” but he knew the system late last year and nobody seemed to think it worth giving him another shot. He was only a four-star recruit, whereas Quinn Ewers was the perfectest quarterback prospect there ever was until Arch Manning came along and then Malachi Nelson also came along but we don’t talk about Malachi Nelson. The talent favors Ewers. If knowledge of the system holds him back, that might be a problem with the system.
Given that Texas’s offensive line figures to be patchy for at least another autumn, playing the highest-upside option at quarterback seems a little more essential. This perception could be flawed, but a perception exists that if you’re good enough, you can put more of a “game manager” under center, limit your risk, and let the rest of your offense carry you. Texas is not good enough to do this. The rest of Texas’s offense cannot carry it. It needs to take a shot.
This, of course, leads to other problems. As Jay Cutler or anyone who tried quarterbacking Kansas in one of those single-player campaigns in the old NCAA Football video game can tell you, a good quarterback behind a bad offensive line is not a good quarterback. Add in Ewers’s lack of experience, and Card’s lack of experience, and the greater Longhorn narrative especially primed right now to give up on this season, with dreams of Manning tiding it over, and the mind conjures images of lambs—maybe calves, rather—being led to slaughter.
There’s a good case, though, for each quarterback. For each, it consists of the offensive line outperforming expectations, but it’s still a case!
Card could be effective. He could limit mistakes, he could make the throws he needs to, he could facilitate and keep the defense honest enough for Bijan Robinson to do his thing. His name, after all, is Hudson Card. That’s a good Texas quarterback on paper.
Ewers could downright dazzle. The guy’s supposed to be the best QB since Vince Young. Was he good enough to play at Ohio State? No, but neither was Joe Burrow, and that turned out alright. At least here and there, Ewers could lead some high-octane performances. That might be enough to keep everyone optimistic.
It’s not an envious position for Steve Sarkisian. It’s not an envious position for either quarterback, each of whom is likely set up to fail. But when you agree to play football in Austin, you agree to be part of the circus. And this should be a good little circus.
