No. Nonononononononononono. No. This is not okay. This aggression will not stand, man.
Former Texas Longhorns offensive coordinator Greg Davis, who now holds the same position with the Iowa Hawkeyes, isn’t exactly known for bombastic statements, but he certainly dropped one recently with his statement about his current quarterback, senior CJ Beathard.
“I think he has a chance to be the best I’ve ever coached,” Davis said on a local radio station. “He’s got a wonderful feel for the game. We give him a lot of flexibility. He’s fixing to get a lot more flexibility because we feel like he’s ready to handle that and do a lot more at the line of scrimmage.”
While claiming that Beathard could be the best quarterback Davis has coached in his four years in Iowa City is one thing, claiming that Beathard could be better than Vince Young and Colt McCoy?
That seems like something veering on the blasphemous considering that Young was ranked the best college football player of the BCS era by Athlon Sports in 2014 and McCoy was the winningest quarterback in college football history at the end of his tenure in Austin.
And that’s the shortest summation possible to acknowledge the incredible careers that both players had in burnt orange.
Let’s at least call it some outsized hyperbole. That seems about as charitable as possible.
To be sure, Beathard is a fine player who had a good 2015 season in the improbable run to the Rose Bowl for Iowa, having dealt with numerous injuries throughout the year. But his passer rating sat at No. 40 nationally and he struggled against ranked teams, throwing four touchdowns and four interceptions in those four games.
In that Rose Bowl appearance, he didn’t exactly have a positive impact on the proceedings in the blowout at the hands of Stanford, in sharp contrast to the two consecutive transcendent performances by Young.
We can’t speculate on what Davis might be smoking up in the cornfields of flyover country, but he should probably just diagram some new variations on his favored horizontal passes and dial down the rhetoric before a horde of Longhorns fans descend on him with pitchforks and righteous indignation.