OSU Coordinators Agree, the Most Exceptional Thing About Mestemaker Is Not His Arm but His Brain

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STILLWATER — Someone can spend a lot of time lauding Drew Mestemaker’s stats and breaking down advanced metrics that explain what makes him such a good thrower of the football.

​Last month, Todd McShay, who is literally paid to evaluate these guys not as elite college football players but as NFL hopefuls, praised the one thing almost impossible to see from Mestemaker in practice — his brain.

On Thursday, Oklahoma State’s coordinators chose to single out the same stuff when asked about QB1.

“Our offense is huge, right, and you think about the success that Drew had early on,” offensive coordinator Sean Brophy said. “So much of it’s because of his mental capability and capacity, and his ability to process information and recall, which allowed us to have a lot of volume in our offense but also a tremendous variety and variance week to week.”

When asked to name specific improvements, Brophy praises Mestemaker’s progress across the board before complimenting his ability to show up every day weighing 219 pounds.

According to the official UNT roster, Mestemaker weighed 211 pounds last season, and it’s common for football players to lose weight once the season begins. So it sounds like the coaches wanted their quarterback to put on a little weight this summer.

Brophy then circled around to the mental component second.

“We’re spending so much time with him in the film room, and we’ve reached a point now where he knows our offense extremely well,” Brophy said. “We’re able to challenge him in different ways and put more on his plate and show him different looks.

“And it’s talking about inches where ball placement is, right, as opposed to just completions. And so he takes all that stuff in stride so well. He’s a football junkie. He’s always sending me stuff and talking through coaching points.”

Again, just eerily similar stuff to what seemed to excite McShay and his podcast cohost Steve Muench.

“I really thought this kid showed a great grasp of the offense and was more developed as a quarterback and understanding concepts and how to attack coverage than I expected,” Muench said.

On Thursday, Brophy described Mestemaker as a coach on the field and added that he can line guys up correctly and get in and out of run checks at the line. Although not uncommon, these aren’t things you always put on young quarterbacks.

Speaking of which, both Morris and Brophy sound excited to have a guy back for a third season, even though this will only be Mestemaker’s second as a starter. During their three years together at UNT, they coached three different starting quarterbacks, including Mestemaker last season.

“It’s great because we were rolling through them there for a while,” Brophy said. “And so to have the consistency, I think it’s been great for us. But I think it’s been great for him as well.”

Although Mestemaker’s decision to follow his coaches to Stillwater was an incredible boost for Oklahoma State’s offense, those guys aren’t the only ones who benefit. Not every defense in the country has a quarterback with what seems like legitimate NFL talent on the roster they can practice against.

“It is great to go against a quarterback, obviously of that caliber, consistently every day in day out,” defensive coordinator Skyler Cassity said. “… It being competitive and continuing to sharpen each other’s blade essentially on both sides of the ball. And so Drew obviously does a good job. If you give tells away and things like that, he’s going to expose you for it. When he’s got good matchups that he likes to take advantage of, he’s going to challenge you. And our guys welcome the challenge.”

It’s so well documented that Mestemaker had zero starting experience at the high school level before walking on at UNT that some college football fans around the country probably already refer to him as that “guy that couldn’t even start at high school.”

On Thursday, Cassity made a great argument for why that path might have served Mestemaker well.

“With him playing defense in high school, one of the things that he does such a good job of is processing defensive looks extremely fast,” Cassity said. “He sees tendencies, he sees tips, things like that. He does a really, really good job of that.”

This is what Oklahoma State’s defensive coordinator wanted to discuss when asked to name the one thing Mestemaker does so well that gives his guys the best possible look to get ready for the season. And Cassity wasn’t done.

“And he knows where the ball is supposed to go really, really early on in the process,” he said. “So showing him post-snap movements and things like that obviously is something that he’s really, really good at evaluating. So he does a great job of that, and I think he does a good job of that and exposing us. So when we give tips away and things like that, he’ll expose you in practice if it happens.”