Two weeks ago at this very moment, the question centering around the Texas quarterback position was whether Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian would stick with freshman Hudson Card or make the switch to Casey Thompson.
Two weeks later, the questions are quite different.
For example, one of the questions I found myself asking on Saturday evening was whether Thompson is the best quarterback in the Big 12. As the founding member of the Hudson Card Fan Cub, I have to admit to channeling my inner Ferris Bueller after the last two weeks.
There are two pieces that one must consider in the discussion - Thompson and then the rest of the Big 12 quarterbacks.
Let's start with Thompson, who doesn't yet have enough passing attempts to qualify for the official NCAA and Big 12 stats, but still sports a 207.2 quarterback rating through the first four games of this season.
For those keeping score at home, that's almost 10 points higher than the best passing efficiency season that Baker Mayfield ever enjoyed and more than five points better than Joe Burrow's Heisman season from two years ago.
It's a completely unsustainable number ... I think ... mostly because the history of the sport tells us it is.
That being said, Thompson has played six games in the last two years in which he has thrown a pass. Check out the efficiency numbers from those six games:
2020
vs. UTEP - 217.4
vs. Colorado - 354.8
2021
vs. Lousiana - 214.9
at Arkansas - 122.4
vs. Rice - 185.4
vs. Texas Tech - 252.0
You chop it all up and you're left with a career rating at this point of 214.0, which is actually higher than his current season total.
We'll come back to Thompson in a moment, but let's take a look at the rest of the Big 12 through the first third of the season.
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What are we supposed to make out of the players that qualified for the list?
Spencer Rattler was a pre-season favorite for the Heisman and he's currently just playing pretty well.
Meanwhile, Brock Purdy is on pace to throw for as many interceptions as touchdowns this season for the suddenly .500 Cyclones.
It might be time to give Baylor's Gerry Bohanon some damn respect, even if his No.1 rating is currently 30 points lower than Thompson.
The bottom line is that I can't tell you that Thompson is the best quarterback in the Big 12, but I can't tell you that he isn't, either.
That's one hell of a change of narration from two weeks ago, which is both an indicator of just how well Thompson is playing and just how unimpressive the rest of the conference has been at the most important position in the sport.
No. 2 - About the James Brown comparisons ...
I recently wrote about the Casey Thompson/Hudson Card situation and compared it to the quarterback battle the Texas program watched take place in 1994 with James Brown/Shea Morenz.
In this comparison, Thompson played the part of James Brown, which is a comparison that starts to make more and more sense for me with every game that passes.
Take a look at each player's second start after taking over control of the starting job.
Thomason vs. Tech (W 70-35): 17 of 23 for 324 yards, 5 touchdowns, 1 interception and a 252.0 rating.
Brown at Baylor (W 63-35): 18 of 25 for 289 yards, 5 touchdowns, 0 interceptions and a 255.5 rating.
Vince Young never posted a game rating this high in his entire career as a starter. Colt McCoy did it only twice in his entire career, both against Rice.
Thompson and Brown both did it in their second games after winning the starting job.
Kind of spooky.
No. 3 - The state of the Big 12 ...
Oklahoma (No. 6 AP, No. 4 Coaches Poll), Oklahoma State (No. 19 AP, No. 18 Coaches Poll) and Baylor (No. 21 AP, No. 24 Coaches Poll) represent the ranked teams in the Big 12 after this weekend and I have to be honest when I say that I don't know what to think about any of the three.
All three are undefeated, but all three seem incredibly beatable. In fact, a case can be made that one-loss Texas has been more impressive this season, at least to the naked eye, than any of the teams ranked ahead of Steve Sarkisian's squad.
How the Longhorns do against TCU this weekend will tell us a lot about what kind of contender the Longhorns really are, but I'm starting to think that Texas should be a favorite to make the Big 12 championship game.
If we rank the remaining games on the Texas schedule in terms of difficulty, it probably looks like this as of today:
1. Oklahoma (4-0)
2. at Baylor (4-0)
3. vs. Oklahoma State (4-0)
4. at Iowa State (2-2)
5. at TCU (2-1)
6. at West Virginia (2-2)
7. vs. Kansas State (3-1)
8. vs. Kansas (1-3)
No. 4 - More randomness with a day to chew on things ...
... It feels like Bijan Robinson is due for a 200+ yard monster kind of game and after watching TCU give up 350 yards rushing to SMU on Saturday, it feels like the only thing that might keep Robinson from that kind of statement-making game is volume.
... The Bijan Robinson vs. Zach Evans storyline that will be told this week in the media is quietly a very good one. Evans currently averages more yards per carry and more yards per game than Robinson, which is kind of hard to believe.
... Xavier Worthy Watch: The freshman receiver went into this season with 800 yards and 10 touchdowns as a stated goal and through four weeks of the season, he's currently on pace for 738 yards and 12 touchdowns, not including post-season games.
... D'Shawn Jamison currently leads the Big 12 in punt returns (15.0 per return).
... Cameron Dicker hasn't punted in two weeks, but he still ranks second in the Big 12 with a 48.4 average.
... Ovie Oghoufo is the only Texas player in the Big 12 that ranks in the top 20 for tackles for loss, ranking No. 20 with 0.75 per game. Oghoufo also ranks 6th in the league in sacks with two.
No. 5 – ICYMI ...
Here's a link to Anwar and me breaking down the Texas Tech win.
No. 6 – Always the bridesmaid, never the bride ...
One of the things everyone needs to keep in mind in 2022 recruiting is that the changes in the NCAA transfer rules make finishing second in recruitments a special kind of moral victory chip that you might be able to play in a year or two that was never really available prior to this season.
The idea that Texas should quit recruiting the five-stars that it covets that choose to go elsewhere because Texas needs a bunch of kids that want to play for Texas is short-sighted.
For the same reasons that everyone likes to speculate that the Brockermeyer brothers might one day transfer home to the Longhorns, the Texas staff must continue to recruit players that have either broken their hearts or one day might break their hearts because ... you just never know in this new modern age of recruiting when the next Xavier Worthy might decide he'd rather be with his second choice.
It's what I kept thinking on Saturday with Denver Harris and Harold Perkins in town for the Tech game. You never know when someone might want to come home or see a change after their first year in college.
We're in a new age of college football, one where being the bridesmaid over the course of the next decade might prove to be a very sneaky moral victory in waiting for a number of recruits.
No. 7 – BUY or SELL …
(Buy) Dream away and start scooping up tickets and hotel space in Dallas.
(Sell) It's hard for me to think this team goes worse than 9-3 against a very manageable schedule.
(Buy) Yes, to a certain degree. It's ok to hope and dream, but maybe don't start believing until these next couple of weeks are complete.
(Buy) Rice could have used him last week.
(Sell) I think Vegas will still give OU the benefit of the doubt.
(Buy) Flood was always a good offensive line coach, even with the early struggles. No one has ever suggested that he wasn't. Saturday was a good step for this group, but you'll forgive me if I find myself wanting to see more from this group and not just go crazy over the most recent thing we've seen. That group is not yet a team strength.
(Buy) Did you mean in the first half?
(Sell) He's playing better than I thought Card would.
(Buy) I do believe he'll play this season, but I don't have any expectations that he emerges as a difference maker in 2021.
(Buy) Yup.
(Sell) I think it has more to do with the narratives that get told and become hard to break in quick fashion. The rest of the nation doesn't give a damn about games against Rice and Texas Tech when it saw Texas blown out of the stadium 15 days ago on a night before Arkansas was deemed respectable. Texas will need to do it against a team with a number next to its name before respect starts to occur.
(Sell) Texas has had running backs in the Bijan zip code and Roy Williams probably would have had even bigger numbers if he played in 2021 instead of 2000. He was freaky.
(Sell) This question confuses me. I'm not sure I can completely wrap my head around the implications of what is being suggested.
(Buy) 100-percent.
(Sell) I'm sorry ... do wut?
No. 8 - Scattershooting on the sports weekend ...
... OU booing its quarterback was a reminder that every college fan base in the country can slide into the land of Unclassy Town, regardless of how much success it has known, based on a couple of sketchy quarters of quarterback play. I'm curious to see where he goes moving forward. He's not playing bad football, but the standards at OU are so high that playing at the statistical level of Sam Ehlinger has made Norman feel like it’s on the verge of being on tilt.
... Kind of feels like Alabama, Georgia and Oregon are the clear top three teams in the country in the first month of the season, but I have no idea beyond that. It's a free-for-all.
... I expected OU running back Eric Gray to be an impact transfer and he's been mostly just a guy thus far in Norman.
... Baylor looked kind of good against Iowa State. FYI.
... It's kind of crazy how good Kyler Murray is in the NFL.
... A live look at Giants fans:
... The Steelers looked absolutely awful on Sunday. Yikes.
... The Chiefs feel vulnerable.
... The St. Louis Cardinals feel like a very, very, very dangerous post-season team, especially if they can win the wild-card game.
... Holy. Freaking. Hell. 19-9? The biggest rout in Ryder Cup history? That's a nice little feather in the cap of every player on the USA team in his personal bio. They'll always be on the team that did THAT to Europe.
... Tip of the cap to Mr. 5 Points Dustin Johnson.
... Team USA needed to win just to make sure that this shot can be remembered fondly for all-time.
... Premier League Thoughts From The Weekend Because I'm Trying To Force Soccer Down Your Throat: Did Tottenham just replace Arenal as the big club under blinking red crisis lights? Did Mikel Arteta just become the new Ole Gunnar Solskjaer in the sense that he's no longer in the hot seat until the next time he's in the hot seat? In losing its bravery this week, Chelsea let Man City spread it wings at a moment when they could have had them cut off in the next week. Brutal. Speaking of brutal, Saturday was pretty brutal as a Liverpool fan. Momma always said there would be days like that, I suppose, but that was an opportunity lost.
No. 9 - Top 10 Thoughts on Band of Brothers ...
Early this week, I finished my binging of the HBO classic Band of Brothers. Given the magnitude and historical scope of the show, I thought I would include my thoughts on the show in this section of the column.
Let's get to it.
1. Let me just start off by saying that it was incredibly fascinating to jump into a piece of pop culture greatness 20 years after it was created without much background going in. For instance, I had no idea that Billions star Damian Lewis was one of the two leads of the show. None. Same with the rest of the cast. I only knew that Ron Livingston was in the show about two weeks before I started watching it this month, which was weirdly one of the things that made me realize I needed to watch the show. It felt a little like having never seen Casablanca and then when watching it for the first time not realizing, "Wait a minute, Humphrey Bogart is in this?" I can't think of another situation in terms of major television productions where I had been so clueless about. Other than knowing it was a Spielberg/Hanks World War II project, I really knew very little about what I was getting into.
2. Before I started watching the show, someone on Orangebloods mentioned that Dick Winters (Lewis' character) was one of his favorite TV characters of all time. Reading that comment actually impacted how I watched the series because I was a little confused by the show's weekly changes in first-person narration because I kept watching every episode for him to emerge as the type of character that would carry the weight of such a claim. Eventually, it all made sense upon the completion of the series, but the story of Winters inside the show is a slow burn, which is probably appropriate because everything about what Easy Company went through was a slow burn.
3. It's a little hard to get beyond the fact that Ross Geller is front and center at the start of the show as the strict disciplinarian First Lieutenant/Captain. Can you imagine being a family member of the real Herbert Sobel? The show, which follows the book, portrays him as a guy that would have gotten everyone killed without moving him out of the leadership position within Easy Company and the guy from Friends is the one portraying the character? I think I'd be on major tilt if my dad or granddad jumped at Normandy, earned a Bronze Star, survived the war, went on to serve in the Korean War and then ended up only being remembered as the least-liked person in Easy Company.
You had to know I would do a google search on Sobel and if you didn't know about how the rest of his life went, just read this from Wikipedia: "In 1970, Sobel shot himself in the head with a small-caliber pistol in an attempted suicide. The bullet entered his left temple, passed behind his eyes, and exited the other side of his head. Both of his optic nerves were severed by the shot, leaving him blind. Soon afterward, he began living at a VA assisted-living facility in Waukegan, Illinois. He died there of malnutrition on 30 September 1987. No memorial services were held for him."
That's hard-core, man.
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4. The biggest miss of the entire series is taking the time to tell one of the episodes from the perspective of Albert Blithe, only to get the details of his life and death completely wrong. It's a tremendous failure to have him navigate episode three "Carneton" for the audience and then tell us at the end that he didn't recover from his wounds in the battle from being shot in and that he died in 1948 when it turns out that he not only recovered from his wounds, but served as an active member of the military until 1967! If that mistake gets made in 2021, the series would have been ruined from a reputation standpoint. How have 20 years gone by and they've not corrected their mistake? For my money, it's one of the single biggest mistakes in the history of television. I can't even begin to explain my thoughts when the episode ended and I googled "Albert Blithe" and found out that he had survived another two decades.
5. Captain Ronald Speirs is one hell of a complex character. It's a hell of a thing that there's an implication that Speirs committed war crimes in slaughtering German soldiers, only for him to turn out to be one of the more interesting and dynamic characters in the entire series. His heroism at the Battle of the Bulge is almost impossible to comprehend. Honestly, you can make a case that Speirs is right behind Winters when it comes to navigating the soul of the story. The complexity of his story has probably stayed with me as much as anything that happens in the series.
6. Episode 9 "Why We Fight" might have been the most powerful of the entire series. To have Livingston's character Captain Nixon seemingly questioning the entire purpose of their time in the war and to have it met head on with finding a concentration camp was beyond powerful. It was haunting. That it didn't actually happen in real life with Easy Company is a piece of creative liberty that I thought worked really well.
7. I was really pleased that Easy Company captured Eagle's Nest. Seeing them rewarded for all that they'd gone through with something so historically cool was something out of Hollywood, except it actually happened. Unreal.
8. It kind of feels like an elementary school in every town in America should be named after Dick Winters or someone like him.
9. The secret star of the show is its cinematography and set locations. Stunningly beautiful.
10. Overall, it's pretty incredible that Band of Brothers basically launched the beginning of the Golden Age of TV and prestige TV, even if it occurred just before the idea of either is generally believed to have occurred. In the 20 years that have passed, what they set out to achieve has never been done better.
No. 10 - And Finally ...
... Justin. Freaking. Tucker. Gets. His. Own. Section. Legend.
