Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly column on the Texas Longhorns.
Rice didn’t get the ACC invite, evidently because Rice didn’t want it bad enough. SMU? They wanted it bad. SMU is going to spend a few dozen million dollars and accept no media money for the right to play Boston College and Virginia in football, and Rice—a better school in another big market which was also left behind when the SWC got too bad at football and had to fold—was not. It’s refreshing, in this era of booming tuition and corporatized college, to see a school like SMU act in the best interests of its students, shelling out eight or nine figures in the long run in exchange for a marginally higher likelihood of getting College Gameday to University Park. Dubya, celebrity guest picker. We can see it now.
Since Rice doesn’t care enough about its students enough to spend this kind of money on football, we aren’t going to care about Rice. No JFK mentions, no talk about the tower, no discussion of the possibility that Rice might be the worst FBS team this season. Instead, we’re going to rehash Tim Tebow vs. Colt McCoy.
With McCoy cut by the Cardinals this week, evidently deemed too good a quarterback to lead them into this acquisition of draft picks, the standard McCoy discourse is circulating again. We’re getting links to the What-If game. We’re getting links to his college stats (more than 13,000 career passing yards, and Mike Leach was the opponent, not the coach). We’re mostly getting links to the What-If game. The What-If game has managed to overshadow the rest of Colt McCoy’s career. Colt McCoy is most remembered by some for the game his team lost after he got hurt on his opening drive.
What we aren’t talking about enough is Colt McCoy vs. Tim Tebow, which was once a fun debate. Let’s resurrect it here, tale–of–the–tape style.
- Career college pass yards: McCoy 13,253; Tebow 9,285
- Career college rush yards: Tebow 2,947; McCoy 1,571
- Career college touchdowns: Tebow 145; McCoy 132
- Career Heisman Trophies: Tebow 1; McCoy 0
- Career National Championships: Tebow 2; McCoy 0
- Career NFL starts: McCoy 36; Tebow 14
- Career NFL receptions: McCoy 2; Tebow 0
- Career Minor League home runs: Tebow 18; McCoy 0
- Career lives saved from seizure: Tebow 1 (through the laying on of hands); McCoy 1 (through swimming three hundred yards across a lake then climbing six hundred yards of rocky road, barefoot, at the age of 19)
- Career little brothers who weren’t that good: McCoy 1; Tebow 0
- Career trademarks won involving own last name: McCoy Unknown; Tebow At Least One
- Career tabloid covers: I’m going to guess Tebow won this one
- College program’s current AP Poll ranking: McCoy 11th; Tebow Unranked
It’s hard to choose a winner. On the one hand, Tim Tebow was a uniquely dominant offensive force the likes of which college football had never seen and has never seen since. On the other, Colt McCoy was a better traditional quarterback and less of a weirdo. I would go with McCoy, but that’s mostly because of the seizure–swim–climb story. I read that when I was thirteen and that is an impressionable age.
