Game Over 
Arms Race
After decades of irrelevance, Texas passers—from Colt McCoy and Greg McElroy to Drew Brees and Vince Young—have suddenly become the dominant players on football fields at every level. What turned our little old high school programs into virtual quarterback factories?
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Though Colt’s senior year hadn’t been nearly as pretty as the previous season—it was balkier, less consistent, a lot of times just plain out of sync—nothing could have prepared him for the events of January 7. Texas had the ball after a moronic Alabama fake punt, and Colt’s brain was just beginning to process the Tide’s defense. “It was only the fifth play,” Colt says with disbelief. Greg Davis’s call was a quarterback run option, which means that Colt could pitch it to his running back, but the play was designed for him to keep the ball. Alabama’s strong-side linebacker took away the pitch. So he did what his craftsman’s brain was programmed to do—he held on to the ball and looked for an opening in the line where he could slide through for a few yards.
The hit came from Colt’s right, from an Alabama defensive end named Marcel Dareus. Colt, whose mind contains an exhaustive catalog of past injuries, can transport himself back to the moment. He notices that the sensation in his right arm feels completely different from the stinger that knocked him out of the Kansas State game his freshman year. This time, there is no pain. “My arm was completely numb,” Colt says. “My whole right side is just dead.” He picks himself up off the grass and motions to the bench with his left hand.
Standing on the sidelines, Brown saw Colt coming toward him and frantically scanned his face. “I was hoping he was fine, because he didn’t look like he was in any pain,” Brown says. But up in the stands, Coach McCoy knew. He had seen enough Colt knockouts to recognize game-over body language. The trainers guided Colt into the locker room, and when he didn’t return after the end of the first quarter, Coach had to get down there, because somebody had to be with Colt—had to sit with him while he processed the fact that his great career had gone wildly off track.
Coach has a metaphor to describe Colt as he found him in the locker room. Colt, he says, was an animal that had been hit by a car on the highway—one of those squirming armadillos you see on the side of I-20 on the way to Tuscola. He was hurt and scared and angry—not only inconsolable but unreachable. It was as if Colt had reverted to his typical pregame mental state. At first Coach couldn’t touch his son. Couldn’t even hug him.
Brown didn’t see Colt again until the half. He came into the locker room and found him with Coach and the trainers, and Colt told him, “Coach, I’m ready. I’m going to go out and play.” Over Colt’s shoulder, Kenny Boyd, the head trainer, pitifully shook his head no. Brown asked Colt to throw the ball to his dad, and when Colt couldn’t do it, Brown told him he was through. Colt fought him, Brown says. “And that’s when I said, ‘Colt, I love you, I admire you, I know you want to play, but you can’t. We’ve got to be smart here.’ ” They took away Colt’s helmet, Coach says, and locked it up.
His mind still reeling, Colt put his pads back on—that was a point of pride, even if he couldn’t feel his right side—and trotted back out onto the sidelines for the second half. He found himself meeting with Garrett Gilbert, the freshman from Lake Travis—the third Texas schoolboy quarterback to play in the national championship game. Davis remembers it being surreal, Colt, reduced to a supporting player, pointing out to Gilbert how to watch the Alabama safety.
Do not be fooled by Colt’s Zen demeanor and his doe-like eyes. He is furious about what happened that night. “I get to that point where I know we’re going to play great,” he says. “Then five plays into it, we’re just done. I was upset. I was disappointed, because I knew what would have happened in that game. That’s something I’ll think about forever.”
What most angers Colt—he said this to his dad as they sat in the locker room, watching on TV as the Longhorns played without him—is that he knows he had them. The Crimson Tide were lining up in the beatable formations he’d studied for weeks. Colt knows, with an athlete’s self-assuredness, how his arm and his brain would have carved them up. And yet this is secret, useless knowledge. “Nobody knows that except me and my coach,” Colt says.
As Colt stood on the sidelines, his right arm hanging at his side the way he showed us in Tuscola, a strange thing happened. Gilbert, the Longhorns’ eighteen-year-old from Lake Travis, threw two beautiful touchdowns to Colt’s pal Jordan Shipley. Texas clawed back into the game, cutting the deficit to three points, and the dazed Longhorns fans began chanting Gil-bert! Gil-bert! Gilbert? The greatness of Colt had been so overwhelming that little attention had been paid to the six-foot-four sandy-haired kid who had won two state titles with the spread at Lake Travis. Gilbert had also grown up playing 7-on-7s, and he learned from his own quarterback craftsman dad, Gale, who played eight seasons in the NFL. Gil-bert—yes! Here was the next great Texas quarterback, never mind that wounded animal on the sidelines with the secret knowledge that he’d had Alabama right where he wanted them.
Is the true ending of the Colt McCoy story becoming clear? Do we need to make it more explicit? Well, let’s leave the McCoys and drive east from Tuscola, taking a left turn at Fort Worth and heading north on I-35 West, to Denton. There stands the field house of Denton’s Guyer High School. The star quarterback here is a senior named J. W. Walsh, eighteen years old, two hundred pounds, and the highest-rated quarterback on all the Texas recruiting sheets. His father—his coach—is John, a man with brown hair and cobalt-blue eyes, who has been ministering to his son just as carefully as Coach McCoy did to Colt.
It was in second grade that Coach took J.W. into the backyard and said, “You play quarterback, son. I’ll play wide receiver.” By the fourth grade, J.W. was turning his school assignments into meditations on the art of quarterbacking. One worksheet asked him, “The kinds of decisions that are hardest for me are . . .” And J.W. wrote in his shaky handwriting, “When I have to choose which way to run the veer.” Coach proudly pulls that page out of his desk—he’s had the thing laminated!—to show that J.W. knew he was going to be the next great Texas quarterback, the heir to Colt and all the rest. J.W., too, is aware of this noble lineage. “Yessir,” he tells you, “I’ve been playing in 7-on-7s since sixth grade.”
You see how this is going to end, right? How this new quarterback is constantly compared to Colt McCoy, for the way he commands the spread, throws those outs, and takes off in slick scrambles. How Greg Davis made the pilgrimage to Denton, just as he had to Tuscola six years earlier, and looked at J.W.’s size and said that, just like Colt, he was plenty big enough to be a Longhorns quarterback. Davis and Texas ultimately chose another for next year’s class, a kid from Belton High—so many quarterbacks to choose from! So J.W. committed to Oklahoma State, but there are still letters piling up on Coach’s desk, from LSU, Auburn, Florida State—schools that have had one Texas quarterback on the roster and want another one. “J.W.,” the college coaches write out in longhand (it looks more sincere), “if anything doesn’t work out with the Cowboys, you call us. You’re the next great Texas quarterback, the inheritor, the man.”
Coach Walsh takes us out to the field for spring practice. The Wildcats are running the spread offense—of course they are—when J.W. takes a snap and notices three big, unruly defenders streaking toward him. He takes off in a sprint toward the right sideline, stops just before he goes out of bounds, and fires to a receiver named Cameron Hunter, who leaps in the air and hauls it in, eliciting a big whoop from Coach. We know this play, because Colt ran it his junior year against Colorado, with the same sneaky speed, and hit Jordan Shipley for a touchdown.
Let it be said that Colt and J.W.—and Garrett and Greg and all the rest—have a ton of God-given ability. But they are players in something huge, this factory that spits out quarterbacks at a frightening rate and disperses them all over the country. Colt McCoy could master the spread offense; he could lead his team through 7-on-7s; he could win more games than any quarterback in the history of college football and make himself Austin’s latest folk hero. But now there’s a shiny new model right behind him. Actually, a few dozen models. That’s the true ending of Colt McCoy’s story, the one that makes it feel as if there is something bigger at work here than some little hit and a numb right arm. In Texas these days, as singular as a quarterback may seem, as frighteningly good as he may become, he is instantly, abruptly replaceable.
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