Get out your magnifying glasses and fingerprint kits, junior Bevos, and let's try to figure out what's going on with Texas' quarterback competition this spring. First question: Wait, is there a real competition?On one hand, Mack Brown's first move after finalizing his totally revamped coaching staff was to declare the job "wide open" on national television, despite the return of Garrett Gilbert, the once-hyped, homegrown product who took every meaningful snap last year as a true sophomore. Then again, insisting "there are no incumbents here" is the tried-and-true mantra of pretty much every coach who's ever approached a rebuilding job with a focus on challenging the team's complacent attitude with a dose of competition. If fact, all the jobs are open: "We haven’t thought about any of that," Brown told ESPN on Wednesday. "I haven't thought about anything but getting better. No expectations. No starting lineup. Nothing. We are working hard to get better every day."
On the other hand, Brown specifically focused on the quarterback in the same interview – "You are not going to win games at Texas like we want if you don’t have a great quarterback. So we've got to have somebody that will be great." – and lumped the incumbent in with "all four of them" practicing this spring on allegedly equal footing. And let's face it, if there's any full-time incumbent in America facing the hook in 2011, it's Garrett Gilbert. He rode into last season on a wave of offseason optimism, forged first by his five-star recruiting hype and then by his ability to remain in a (mostly) upright position in the fire of the BCS Championship Game, the worst possible place for a true freshman to make an emergency appearance for the first meaningful snaps of his career. Instead of a precocious up-and-comer, though, the Longhorns got arguably the worst starting quarterback in the Big 12 last fall, finishing at or near the bottom of the league in interceptions, touchdown-to-interception ratio and overall pass efficiency as the vaunted Longhorn offense failed to top 24 points in any conference game.
At least it's a resumé: The competition – sophomore Case McCoy, redshirt freshman Connor Wood and true freshman David Ash, an early enrollee – have nine snaps, one pass attempt and only a fraction of Gilbert's incoming hype between them. Their size and scouting reports suggest they also a nearly identical skill set. Unless one of them indisputably outplays the incumbent over the next few weeks, then, their main asset in the competition is their "challenger" status. GIlbert's inadequacy is what Donald Rumsfeld might call a "known known." The rest are unknown. They may be inexperienced, and they may not come as unanimously guru-approved. In McCoy's case, he doesn't really even look the part at just 200 pounds. But they're not Garrett Gilbert. And isn't that what's really important here?
To a sizable chunk of the UT faithful, still licking a season's worth of deep, unexpected wounds, yeah, probably. To Mack Brown and new offensive coordinator Brian Harsin, who have a lot to lose on the eventual bet, probably not so much. Even if Gilbert doesn't offer an advantage athletically, he's the one guy on the depth chart who's played, started, been in the huddle, been on the road, been hit, had some success – and he's still only a junior, with two full years still in front of him. The most certain way to ensure he's damaged goods over that period is to toss him aside for one of the younger faces without a chance to demonstrate his progress. Rhetoric aside, unless one of the contenders pulls so far ahead in practice that he can't possibly be denied, it's hard to see how Gilbert won't get that chance in the fall, however briefly.
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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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