2014 Season Proving Fans Shouldn't Overreact to a QB's Spring Game Performance
Spring practice is a time for college football teams to develop young players and reshape their leadership hierarchies. When it's over, a live public scrimmage is often played, not unlike the talent show at the end of summer camp. The final score and stats have almost no bearing on the regular season.
Again: The final score and stats have almost no bearing on the regular season.
The first five weeks of the current regular season have been a lucid reminder of this—a reminder we probably shouldn't need at this point but do. They have chewed up and spat out our assertions from late April, especially when it comes to quarterbacks.
.jpg?w=256 "Ohio State Team Doctor")
Consider, for example, this broad-stroke list of narratives that were gaining steam after the 2014 spring games:
- Blake Sims is not good enough to start at Alabama.
- Trevor Knight's Sugar Bowl performance was a fluke for Oklahoma.
- Malik Zaire should start over Everett Golson at Notre Dame.
- Hutson Mason can be just as good as Aaron Murray at Georgia.
- Cole Stoudt is the right man to lead Clemson's offense.
Then consider all that's happened since:
| Blake Sims (ALA) | 13 - 30 | 178 | 1 / 2 | 90.84 |
| Trevor Knight (OU) | 5 - 14 | 53 | 0 / 1 | 53.23 |
| Everett Golson (ND) | 13 - 23 | 160 | 0 / 0 | 114.96 |
| Hutson Mason (UGA) | 18 - 27 | 241 | 1 / 0 | 153.87 |
| Cole Stoudt (CLEM) | 15 - 23 | 158 | 2 / 0 | 151.62 |
| Blake Sims (ALA) | 71 - 97 | 1,091 | 8 / 2 | 190.77 (+99.93) |
| Trevor Knight (OU) | 76 - 130 | 1,065 | 4 / 3 | 132.80 (+79.57) |
| Everett Golson (ND) | 94 - 135 | 1,142 | 11 / 2 | 164.62 (+49.66) |
| Hutson Mason (UGA) | 58 - 84 | 566 | 5 / 2 | 140.53 (-13.34) |
| Cole Stoudt (CLEM)* | 42 - 68 | 487 | 1 / 1 | 123.84 (-27.78) |
* Benched for a true freshman in Week 4
It feels dirty reading some of this in hindsight.
Why should it matter that Sims completed 13 of 30 passes with two interceptions in a scrimmage? It's a scrimmage! The only thing that separates A-Day from a blissfully anonymous afternoon of practice is the 73,000 butts in the stadium.
How one performs in front of fans should matter a little bit, but a one-day sample is still just a one-day sample. (Just go ask the NFL scouts who passed on Teddy Bridgewater because of his pro day.) The spring game matters more than any other day of spring camp, but not so much that it erases the previous weeks.
The coaches, of course, tried to remind us of this. They begged us to look at the forest instead of the tree.
"Everybody needs to understand that in games like today we really limit what we do on offense, we really limit what we do on defense, and we really don't try to feature players," said Nick Saban after A-Day, per The Associated Press. "That may be a little bit of a disadvantage to our players. Blake Sims did some things at quarterback that we really don't feature."
Some things that we really don't feature.
The spring game is like a science lab, or a nuclear testing ground. It's a venue for experimentation, not execution. Especially at Alabama (and Notre Dame), where a new offensive coordinator was being broken in, we should have known better than to overreact.
We should have known that it was trial with error.
But we didn't. Of course we didn't. We read the box score, saw 13-of-30 passing, knew Jake Coker was transferring from Florida State—then anointed him the next Alabama quarterback.
On the flip side, we read the Georgia box score, saw Mason completed two-thirds of his passes for 241 yards, knew what kind of weapons he was surrounded by—then anointed him a capable starter.
Never mind that he's a fifth-year senior who has been working with the same offensive coordinator for half a decade. Never mind that Georgia's defense was stocked with underclassmen and converted offensive players and coached by a first-year coordinator. Never mind that Mason was decidedly average at the end of 2013.
The Bulldogs will be fine without the SEC's all-time leading passer!
Wanna know the craziest part about the list above?
It omits the most erroneous-in-hindsight narrative of the entire spring: that Kenny Hill's arrest and suspension for public intoxication meant a true freshman, Kyle Allen, would start at Texas A&M. The Aggies didn't have a public spring game, but we didn't need one.
Our decision had already been made.
Flash forward to the start of October. Hill is the No. 2 favorite to win the Heisman Trophy, per the numbers at Odds Shark. Golson is ranked No. 3 right behind him, and Knight is in the top 15. If Sims plays well at Ole Miss in Week 6, he's a safe bet to join them.
All four of those players were trending downward during spring camp. Mason and Stoudt were trending up. The stories based around them and the hopes pinned upon them were based on the results of a glorified scrimmage. On numbers that amount to gobbledygook.
We all know this is true…except we don't. Or at least we don't remember to know it. We are blinded by three months of withdrawal, jonesing hard for a fix of meaningful football. For a box score that actually matters. And so, each spring, we are lured into the same recurrent fallacy, making assertions that will never come true based on games that aren't even really games.
And we'll do it all again in six months.
.jpg?w=480 "Ohio State Team Doctor")
