How many true freshmen could have done better in his place that season? I say very, very few. He was good as a true freshman.
He wasn’t just “not good, even for a freshman.” He was almost unbelievably bad. Like it was difficult to believe any human could be so bad at being a quarterback.
That response is not a long list of people who would have been better, is it?
Like, in the history of the game of football? A lot?
I get hardly any true freshman are asked to play meaningful snaps at QB (though a lot more are doing it a lot more). But in 2020 alone, Michael Pratt, Jeff Sims (then at GT), Max Johnson (then at LSU), DJU, Harrison Bailey of Tennessee, Ken Seals of Vandy. Avery was "good" this year. Howard was not in 2020.
I'm being too hard on him by saying he was unbelievably bad in 2020. He really wasn't. But he
was a major liability on an otherwise decent team. And even for a true freshman, he was not "good." We asked very little of him most of the time: hand it off; dump it to deuce/jax in the flat; throw a 3-8 yard curl or drag to knowles/brookes/Bebe; run; don't turn it over. He could only do things 1-4 a a reasonable clip (though 50% completion when those are the vast majority of the routes isn't "good" by any standard). When we asked him to throw downfield, it was almost always a big problem (save for a few...the TD pass to knowles in the KU game was the bright spot of his season imo). When we relied on him to run, it was extremely risky - see the end of the OSU game. He did have "flashes" at times where you could see there may be something there, but they were extremely few and far between -- you can lay that at the feet of Mess or Howard, but there was very little "sizzle" to make up for the very frequent mistakes.
After 2020, plenty of people (including myself) had the view of: OK, Will was understandably not ready last year, but he may turn into something someday. By the end of 2021, the narrative (at least my view) changed from "ok, last year apparently wasn't a flukey thing. This guy does not have it." Following each of his first two years in the program (each of which included a LOT of Will Howard), I never thought "this guy is our future."
He certainly took a lot of snaps for us 2020. Beyond that, I don't know how you can say he was "good."