Texas' star-studded Colt
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Longhorns' redshirt freshman quarterback not playing like a first-year starter.
BY TODD HENRICHS / Lincoln Journal Star
AUSTIN, Texas — Imagine, if you would, that Nebraska’s starting quarterback on Saturday was a home-grown talent.
Not some hot shot from the Class A ranks, mind you, but a product of high school football on a much smaller scale. Say he hails from Boone Central in Albion or Southern Valley near Oxford, both Class C-1 schools, and that he has that combination of small-town charm and big-time talent.
He’s a freshman, and in his first go-around as a college quarterback, he’s breaking records and completing passes with the efficiency of a ballyhooed veteran. His team, coming off winning the national championship the year before, is again among the very best in the country.
Were that true, the state of Nebraska would be turned on its ear by such a tale. But indeed, that’s just what is happening in Texas, where redshirt freshman Colt McCoy, raised on a 10-acre spread outside the tiny Texas town of Buffalo Gap, has in seven starts written a better script than any fictional storyline that might show up on the weekly television series “Friday Night Lights.”
“He fits the characteristic of a small town in his demeanor,” said Brad McCoy, his father, high school football coach and the man who knows Colt the best.
“He’s a quiet kid, but he’s just got great character and all the things that you’re able to develop in smaller schools,” he added. “Discipline is a big thing with him.
“That he has not faltered in the large scale that he’s been thrown into, I don’t know what to attribute that to other than he prepared himself to be in this spot from a very early age.”
Even as the younger McCoy prepares to lead No. 5 Texas into its first true road game of the season, there are few Longhorn followers fretting over how the freshman will handle Saturday’s 11 a.m. nationally televised test at No. 17 Nebraska.
Certainly not McCoy’s teammates, who showed their faith in young Colt — his given name is Daniel — from the moment that three-year starting quarterback Vince Young announced on Jan. 8 that he would be leaving Texas for the NFL.
By nightfall, Brad McCoy says most of the Longhorns’ returning starters had, in a vote of confidence, found Colt’s phone number and reached him at the family’s home.
As a redshirt leading the Longhorns’ scout team a year ago, McCoy made quite an impression on his teammates, including Young, who even as a rookie starter for the Tennessee Titans this fall still finds time to speak with McCoy once a week.
Senior running back Selvin Young was Vince Young’s roommate at Texas last season. He said poise and confidence are two things that McCoy and Young share as quarterbacks.
“I watched him close when he first came in his freshman year, and I was impressed with the fact that he wasn’t scared to do anything,” Selvin Young said. “We’d go out in 7-on-7, and you’ve got Vince Young right there in front of you, and he’s stepping in there and throwing the ball and not looking like there’s a problem whatsoever.
“Watching him watch Vince and this team, I felt like he understood what he had to do to be the leader this season.”
At 6-foot-3 and 195 pounds, McCoy became the first freshman quarterback to start and win a Texas season opener since NFL Hall of Famer Bobby Layne in 1944. In that win against North Texas, McCoy was 12-of-19 for 178 yards and 3 TDs, good for a pass-efficiency rating of 194.0.
Now, more than halfway through the season, McCoy is continuing to show the maturity of a veteran. He’s completed 68.7 percent of his passes for 1,229 yards, but even more impressively, McCoy has 18 touchdowns and only three interceptions.
In last week’s 63-31 win against Baylor, McCoy set a Texas record with six TD passes, four of them when the Longhorns faced third down.
“Six touchdown passes in one game? That’s phenomenal,” said Nebraska coach Bill Callahan this week. “It seems like he really understands the whole concept of what they’re trying to get achieved.”
McCoy set the goal of being a Division I quarterback before ever donning a helmet for a junior high game, says Vince Lavallee, an assistant principal and assistant football coach at Jim Ned, a high school of close to 320 students in Tuscola, Texas — pop. 714.
At Jim Ned, McCoy threw for 9,344 yards and 116 touchdowns, ranking second in Texas high school history, and as a runner, added 1,575 yards and 21 TDs. From junior high through high school, his teams lost only twice with McCoy on the field, the first time coming as a junior in the Class 2A state championship game.
“We’re 14-0 in the state finals and we get beat on a cold night in Dallas,” recalled Brad McCoy, now the head coach at Graham, Texas. “I remember he’s at midfield sobbing, and I really felt like it was too much, so I picked him up and said I understand it’s a state championship game and all.
“With tears rolling from his eyes, he stopped me and said, ‘You don’t understand. This is the first time I’ve ever stood on a football field after a game that I’ve lost.’ That’s his mentality.”
Yet the coach in McCoy does marvel a bit at how the young quarterback has been able to limit turnovers and lead an offense that seemingly hasn’t missed a step without Vince Young as quarterback. Texas ranks second nationally in scoring offense at 42.7 points a game.
And with the Longhorns 6-1, McCoy is just two wins from tying the Texas record for victories by a freshman quarterback set by Major Applewhite in 1998.
Bill Little, the former Texas sports information direction and current special assistant to head coach Mack Brown, said in all Little’s years around the Longhorns, McCoy has already made his mark as someone truly special.
Little attributes McCoy’s off-the-field ease to his upbringing. Whatever happens Saturday, you’re likely to find McCoy at the University Church of Christ bright and early Sunday, Little says. On Monday afternoons, when the Longhorns are off, McCoy is apt to go bird hunting.
As for what he’s accomplished on the field, Little says being a coach’s son helps, but that playing Texas high school football — whether in 10,000-seat stadiums or in small towns lucky to have 10 storefronts — prepares a quarterback for almost anything.
Little hails from Winters, a town just 20 miles from Tuscola in the Big Country south of Abilene.
“When Winters and Jim Ned played, it was every bit as big as whatever rivalry you can think of,” said Little, who was reminded of that when invited to speak to a group of Winters residents visiting the state capitol a few years back.
As he moved about the room, renewing acquaintances, Little recalls meeting three ladies in beehive hairdos. One of them asked if the Longhorns were recruiting a young man named Colt from down the road.
“She said, ‘You know, we don’t like them’,” said Little, who still chuckles at the comment.
“When you grow up in a small town in Texas, football is a big part of the lifeblood of that community,” Little added. “The pressure of playing quarterback wherever you are in Texas is pretty significant.”
Reach Todd Henrichs at 473-7439 or thenrichs@journalstar.com.
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