An Excerpt From Cougar Sports Weekly
Despite the stylistic differences, the results for each guy this year are virtually identical – your preference for QB really is just a matter of which brand of bad QB play you prefer. Tuel’s completion percentage is a lot higher, but Halliday’s yards per attempt far exceeds Tuel’s, despite the plethora of incompletions; Tuel’s interception rate is much lower, but Halliday’s touchdown rate is much higher. Do you feel better if your QB isn’t giving the ball away? Are you willing to put up with interceptions if it means more TDs?
You can argue all you want about which guy has been better, but really … it’s just splitting hairs.
Besides, I think this sort of argument misses the bigger, more important question. The one I posed at the beginning. What if Tuel’s performance can’t simply be explained away by a porous offensive line? What if Halliday is just interception prone and can’t be taught how to make better decisions?
What if this is what Halliday is? What if Halliday’s 494-yard, 4-touchdown, 0-interception day against ASU is just an extreme outlier? What if the 1:1 touchdown to interception ratio is just what we can expect from him in the remainder of his career?
Answering “yes” to any of that is a pretty freaky thought. And, quite frankly, we need to know the answer to those questions, because if this really is who he is, that changes a lot of things heading forward. I think that’s probably as good of a reason as any to continue starting Halliday the rest of this season.
