Corncrow: QB1 Has Been Awesome for Oklahoma State Since the Bye Week

Corncrow, I believe, is the name of the thing I’m eating right now. It’s delicious. Not a ton of meat there and it’s well-aged but it tastes quite good.

Contrary to what social media mobs I’m not sure I was leading the #FreeSpencer charge earlier this season, but if I wasn’t, I was at least part of it. I had my reasons, one of which is going to manifest itself in 2019 when an OSU team coming off a 7-6 season is preaching patience at QB with somebody who could have led them to a 7-6 season the year before and gotten invaluable experience in the process.

But we don’t have time to get into that right now.

What we do have time to get into is how fantastic No. 14 has been since the bye week. It makes sense, I suppose, that an inexperienced QB would make a midseason leap, but that doesn’t mean I saw it coming. I’m not sure anybody did, really. If you thought Taylor Cornelius was anything other than average over the first seven games, you are probably either 1. A family member or friend of his (which is fair) or 2. Completely misremembering what a great college QB looks like.

His splits were, well, average.

• First seven games: 59% | 287 YPG | 2.3 TD | 1.1 INT

He had two good games against real teams (Iowa State, and I guess Kansas, if you can call them that), and the rest of it hovered between below average to above average. Add it all up and you got one of the Big 12’s interception leaders who also could not complete a deep ball to save his life. There were signs, sure, but signs do not justify rolling out a super senior QB in a lost season when The Franchise is on the bench.

With Texas, OU and West Virginia coming and Corn coming off that disaster in Manhattan, there may have been signs but there wasn’t a lot of hope.

Then it all flipped on Homecoming. Corn looked fabulous from the first drive. He threw for 241 yards in the first half on a Texas defense that, to that point, had allowed more than that in just four total games on the season. OSU throttled back in the second half and let him use his legs to seal it.

Then against OU last Saturday, he played the game of his life. A Bedlam-record 501 yards and just the third game of 500+ in OSU history. He joined Mason Rudolph (540 yards against Pitt in 2016) and Brandon Weeden (502 against K-State in 2011) on that list. More importantly maybe, he marched OSU down the field with three minutes and change on the clock on a drive that could have swung some #narratives.

Did Corn make bad throws on Saturday? Sure. Look no further than what would have been the game-winning 2-point conversion to Tylan Wallace for that. But he also encountered a bevy of drops and was on point more often than not. On a day when a probable Heisman finalist was quarterbacking the other side, he at least made people question which signal caller was having the better game. And the throw he made to No. 2 to make it 48-47 was the stuff of legend. I cannot stop watching it!

If you don’t think Corn has been good over the last three weeks then you’re holding him up to a mythical standard that Mason Rudolph and Brandon Weeden never actually achieved. Those guys were great — they were pros, much better than Corn — but Corn’s three-game transformation has been undeniable — he’s put up 822 yards, 6 TDs and 0 INTs against OU and Texas. That’s outrageous. The Baylor wasn’t as good, but he protected the ball, threw for 300 yards in windy conditions and had another TD. Compare his most recent split to his first seven outings.

• Last three games: 63% | 370 YPG | 2.3 TD | 0.0 INT

The field seems to have opened up for him, too. The game seems to have slowed down. We don’t think of him as young because he’s 23 going on 40, but he’s effectively 80 percent into his “freshman season.”

I asked him about a renewed field vision and handle on everything on Saturday after he burned OU’s secondary to the ground, and he downplayed the whole thing (which, I’ve come to find out, is Page 1 of a one-page media playbook for him).

“Maybe a little bit,” said Corn. “I feel like the past several games receivers have been getting open. They’ve been playing their butts off all year. I just have to hang in there and get them the ball.”

His head coach went a little further than that.

“He’s coming around,” said Gundy. “He’s played in 10 games now, and he gets better every game. He’s gaining valuable experience, and that’s what happens when you play that position. Coming around and getting a little better each week. He’s competed from Day 1. He’s tough. He plays hard. He’s calm. He doesn’t panic. He makes mistakes, they all do, but I’m proud of him, just like I am everybody on the team.”

If you do a blind test of him against the two best QBs in school history in their first year as the only QB to take snaps (i.e. Rudolph without Walsh), he fits in pretty nicely.

So where does all of this leave us? I think it leaves us with an answer to the question of whether Gundy and Mike Yurcich should have been playing Corn to begin with. He has given OSU a great chance to win its biggest games, which I did not think would be the case. There’s the trickiness of balancing what gives you a chance now against what’s best for the program in the long term, but I respect the decision they’ve made.

“If you’re going to measure [QB success] and say, ‘Hey he’s had a bad game,’ and yank him, you’re going to ride that wave and go down that slippery slope of really not giving a guy a chance to prove where he’s at and how much he can improve,” said Mike Yurcich.
“That’s not an easy thing to do, especially this day in age because we want to win and we want to have success.”

It’s never easy to have the tide, no matter how big or small it is, turn against you a little bit, but Corn took it and he responded. That’s awesome. His reward was a win in Stillwater he’ll remember forever and one of the great Bedlam games of the modern era.

Ostensibly you play college football to win championships. But outside of Alabama’s 85 guys, you have to figure out what else you’re playing for. Does OSU need to be winning more? Sure. But in 10 or 20 years, nobody (besides us blog boys) will remember how many wins that 2018 team had. They’ll remember a historic performance in Bedlam 2018 and a field storming in Stillwater after taking down a top 10 Texas team. Maybe that sounds like the “everybody gets a medal” culture many of you hate, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

And in a year when QB1 has been under more scrutiny than maybe any year in Mike Gundy’s tenure, Corn stood up, took his lumps and let loose against two of the best teams in the country. He may not have saved OSU’s season, but he’s gone down swinging as his career in Stillwater winds down. All the respect in the world from me for that.