Big 12 Daily Fever: Can McCoy be the next Brees?

Posted: Dec 18, 2009

Colt McCoy has done almost everything at the college level. He has won major awards, put up huge statistics, set the NCAA record for wins by a quarterback, and led the 'Horns to the BCS Title Game in '09. But what about the NFL level? In recent years, we've seen many Big 12 quarterbacks (Jason White, Graham Harrell, Chase Daniel) light up the conference, but then struggle to find success at the professional level.

Many in the media may group McCoy in the same class as the aforementioned signal callers, but some football people have compared him to Drew Brees. Here are the interesting details:

An NFL scout of over 20 years thinks so. “(McCoy) looks like a bigger, stronger Drew Brees,” Dave Razzano told a reporter last month.

Archie Manning thought the same last summer when McCoy was a counselor at the Manning quarterback school. “I hadn't seen much of him,” Manning said. “But after I watched Colt throw for 30 minutes, the comparison I thought of was Drew Brees.”

McCoy isn't exactly the same as Brees. McCoy played college football in Austin ; Brees just grew up there.

Still, they have a few similarities. Brees also won the Maxwell Award as the college player of the year, only to finish third in the Heisman voting. Brees' final college game was in Pasadena. And when scouts looked at Brees before the 2001 draft, they didn't think he was, well, perfect.

We'll see how McCoy and Oklahoma's Sam Bradford work out on the next level. It will definitely help Big 12 schools recruit the best quarterbacks in Texas (college football's top producer of current big time signal callers) if those players go on to see some success in the NFL.

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