Backup QBs Suck

I'm not familiar with the inner workings of recruiting in college football, but if it's anything like the game, the head coach and his staff visit potential recruits during the off-season. Since the coach can't be everywhere at once (well, except for Charlie Weis, because he's literally everywhere at once), he'll often send assistant coaches out on recruiting visits. It's reasonable to assume that head coaches visit their top picks, while assistants make some of the trips to visit guys who will end up being second- and third-stringers.

That's how I think it goes, anyway. But I'm pretty sure Bob Stoops and Mike Bellotti either sent summer interns to recruit their second-string QBs, or in the midst of arranging the depth chart for a roster of over 100 players, they simply resorted to going by alphabetical order.

I mean, I thought that teams in the Top 25, let alone the Top 5, had talent so deep that you could shoot your starting running back in front of the team in order to make an example, then promptly send the backup in without missing a beat, not unlike the faceless henchmen of a Bond villain... or a row of shark's teeth.

In a heartfelt homage to the team that royally screwed them last year (the first one), Oklahoma's Sam Bradford, like Oregon's Dennis Dixon Thursday night, got injured in the first quarter of tonight's game against Texas Tech, apparently suffering a skull-on-brain collision, or as smarty-pants doctors call it, a concussion. And just like Oregon backup Brady Leaf, Oklahoma's backup QB, Joey Halzle, proceeded to successfully pilot the Sooner Schooner to the bottom of Lake Suckville.



Here's a tip, coaches: you know how you have extra batteries lying around the house in case your TV remote goes dead, rendering you unable to quickly change the channel from some skin flick on Cinemax to some dreadfully boring interview on Charlie Rose when your wife walks into the room unexpectedly? Backup QBs are just like those extra batteries. Only they don't come in packs of eight and 16.

Update (11:16 pm): Halzle almost made me eat my hat by nearly engineering a comeback victory. It's a good thing he didn't, because the only other hat I have is a Toyota hat, and that's just lame.