How good is Will Howard???

[chum1]

My solitary Will Howard take is that if you measured him on a true freshman curve, he was actually very good as a true freshman.

[MakeItRain]

it is pretty funny though that osu thinks they're getting a dual threat qb

I mean he is. You don't have to run a 4.4 to be a run threat as a QB. He's got 19 rushing touchdowns in essentially 2 and a half seasons of starts. Only Braxton Miller and JT Barrett have more rushing TDs from the QB position at Ohio State. Will has more rushing touchdowns than Terrelle Pryor, of fewer starts.

[MakeItRain]

My solitary Will Howard take is that if you measured him on a true freshman curve, he was actually very good as a true freshman.

Hell yeah, considering he had to play without the benefit of spring football or "fall" camp. Practice started when he got on campus, which was two weeks before the first game. You'd absolutely have to think he didn't even go into those first couple of games as the backup. Dude was probably getting scout team reps just a couple of weeks before starting.

[stunted]

it is pretty funny though that osu thinks they're getting a dual threat qb

I mean he is. You don't have to run a 4.4 to be a run threat as a QB. He's got 19 rushing touchdowns in essentially 2 and a half seasons of starts. Only Braxton Miller and JT Barrett have more rushing TDs from the QB position at Ohio State. Will has more rushing touchdowns than Terrelle Pryor, of fewer starts.

you know what it's kind of hard to say. he's slow at least when accelerating but it got results. outside of ksu's system though i dunno how effective he would be. he rarely made plays with his feet when passing broke down.

[stunted]

20 likes. just rough ridin' lol

[mocat]

Just for my own understanding, is the entire "Will is soft" narrative based on that one tweet from his TE?

[Trim]

https://twitter.com/TrimGoEMAW/status/1744062395293852158

[MakeItRain]

https://twitter.com/TrimGoEMAW/status/1744062395293852158

Wilbon had it right, sure there's going to be pressure but who gives a crap. The talking point that he didn't have pressure here is so unbelievably stupid and it's only pushed by people who are just pretending that K-State fans are a bunch of bumpkins.

There's a message board post, right there, two posts down, calling him a fat tight end. A rough ridin' big 12 champion. When Sinnott stood up for him, Derek Young said that he knows that Will, players, and their parents get threatening DMs after bad games. Y'all think it matters that more people are going to call him names on social media and message boards? He's dealt with that crap for four years now.  "Will Howard is a fat piece of crap and his bitch mom must have been drinking when she was pregnant with him. He'll never be able to hold up a Ohio State, they're going to be super mean to him."

This whole thing might be one of the dumbest talking points in the K-State sports Internet age and I hate the eff out of it.

[steve dave]

Good post mir


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[DQ12]

My solitary Will Howard take is that if you measured him on a true freshman curve, he was actually very good as a true freshman.

Hell yeah, considering he had to play without the benefit of spring football or "fall" camp. Practice started when he got on campus, which was two weeks before the first game. You'd absolutely have to think he didn't even go into those first couple of games as the backup. Dude was probably getting scout team reps just a couple of weeks before starting.

It was a crummy situation for him, but Will was not good his freshman year.  We asked him to do almost nothing, and he still found astonishing ways to turn the ball over.  Whatever “curve” we’re now grading him on must be unbelievably low.

What’s wild is I think he was worse the following year.  By the end of 2021, I wanted him out.  Gone from the program, off our roster.  Prior to that, I’d been extremely patient regarding him.  But hand up - he eventually lost me (before winning me back against TCU/OSU last year).

He turned out to be pretty darn good for us, which was absolutely incredible.  I’ve never seen any player go from awful to good over the course of his career like Will did.  But this revisionist stuff of “he was actually good” at any time before 2022 is crazy to read now.  We had training wheels on for him in ‘20 and ‘21 and he was still an enormous liability just trying to handle snaps.

[MakeItRain]

Yeah, you're right. I'm not claiming he was good, I just think people should have then and now given him more grace given the situation. The two most frustrated times I've been as a fan were the OSU game his freshman year, when he fumbled the win away, and the UT game his sophomore year when he couldn't put his right foot in front of his left and he and Mess combined to completely bone Deuce and the rest of the offense.

[DQ12]

Yeah, you're right. I'm not claiming he was good, I just think people should have then and now given him more grace given the situation. The two most frustrated times I've been as a fan were the OSU game his freshman year, when he fumbled the win away, and the UT game his sophomore year when he couldn't put his right foot in front of his left and he and Mess combined to completely bone Deuce and the rest of the offense.

I was rereading the early pages of this thread just now, which is fun to do now that we know the whole story.

We were all “hey he’s a little rough but this kid may have something!” up until the WVU game.  Then we all instantly hated him, and hated him more and more pretty much until the 2022 TCU game where he came in and had probably the best performance of his career. 

Again, tough situation for him (especially in 2020 - FAR less so in ‘21), but it’s hard to imagine a curve low enough to say he was “good.”

[chum1]

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.

[DQ12]

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. 

[chum1]

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?

[MakeItRain]

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?

At one time I went back and looked at this and he did have the best numbers of any true freshman who played P5 football in 2020. IIRC, it wasn't really close either, there weren't a lot of true freshmen getting snaps in 2020.

FWIW, I do believe Avery is statically the best true freshman who got playing time this year

[stunted]

i bet if you were to throw all p4 true freshman quarterbacks in that situation, his performance would probably be average or a little below. we just rarely see it happen. i forgot exactly but i think with covid he got even less practice than he normally would?

[wetwillie]

It's a smaller sample size but we saw first hand what TTU's true freshman Jake Strong looked like with 30 attempts against us. He played even worse the next week against BYU.  Combined 2 TD's and 6 INT's and a sub 100 rating each game.

[catastrophe]

I think the remarkable thing about Will is he seemed to show very little improvement until he just went gangbusters in 2022. I’ve said repeatedly that I think his biggest obstacles are mental. He performed way better as a Martinez’s “backup” (even when starting games), and Will started playing better this year when Avery basically became a co-starter for a while.

The great thing for Will is that there’s always a chance those issues get fixed/go away in his final year. If he crushes it at tOSU and gets some Heisman buzz, it wouldn’t be an indictment on KSU at all but just a really amazing story of self improvement.

[wetwillie]

What else happened between 21 and 22? I think that was more critical.

[chum1]

What’s wild is I think he was worse the following year.

I think the remarkable thing about Will is he seemed to show very little improvement until he just went gangbusters in 2022.

I think these criticisms are much more fair and reasonable than saying he wasn't good for a true freshman.

[DQ12]

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." 

[mocat]

Just for my own understanding, is the entire "Will is soft" narrative based on that one tweet from his TE?

['taterblast]

i will never forget his 2022 TCU performance. not just because it was great, but because of how unexpected it was. he changed the entire perception of him as a player in like 100 minutes and that's not an exaggeration.

['taterblast]

Just for my own understanding, is the entire "Will is soft" narrative based on that one tweet from his TE?

was it a tweet or a post game interview? (both?)