A Statistical Oddity, Indeed

Photo Attribution: Icon SMI

On Friday night, amid all the hoopla of #2 going down and all the tragic words written about an event much bigger than a college football upset, Brandon Weeden broke a record that has only been broken five times since World War II.

On a 10-yard pass to Josh Cooper with 7:00 left in the second quarter of a 10-7 game, he became OSU’s all-time passing leader with eight-thousand three-hundred and eighteen yards.

He broke Zac Robinson’s still-pretty-fresh record of 8,317 in 28 games. It took Zac 45 games to break Gundy’s old record of 7,997 yards, which it took the head ball coach 42 games to set.

Here’s where it gets strange though…

I tweeted after Weeden broke the record that he had just passed Zac, to which Zac responded a little bit later via Twitter asking me to look up how many attempts they both had.

I looked up his and counted up Weeden’s and at the time he asked they both had exactly 999 attempts. Weeden finished out the game and threw for 300 more yards on 25+ more attempts but at one point in the game their career stats looked like this…

Weeden: 999 attempts | 8,472 yards | 71 TD
Robinson: 999 attempts | 8,317 yards | 66 TD

And when Weeden broke the record they looked like this…

Weeden: 982 attempts | 8,318 yards | 69 TD
Robinson: 999 attempts | 8,317 yards | 66 TD

That’s pretty bizarre for such diametrically opposed signal-callers. One, a swiss army knife of offensive production, the other a singularly gifted, unflappable talent who scrambles about as well as a Molina brother.

And they’ve both given us some truly great and, more importantly, equally enjoyable years as QB1 at Oklahoma State.

I just wonder if Weeden still has to give him strokes when they golf.