Productive System

This isn’t the first time Texas Tech quarterback B.J. Symons has posted impressive numbers.

A 1280 SAT score in high school earned him a call from Harvard, but one could argue then he was “just a product of the system” too, right?

Symons actually took the call from Harvard, listened politely, chuckled at the way the folks all sounded like Kennedys, but no way in Waco was he going to be part of a “Midnight Cowboy” remake.

“The Ivy League isn’t really where I wanted to play football,” Symons said.

Raised in Houston, Symons reasoned he would rather waste away on the bench for four years at a Big 12 Conference school, which, um, is exactly what he did.

After a redshirt season and three years in Lubbock, watching teammate Kliff Kingsbury break school passing records left and right, Symons would have one season of eligibility to make the most of his opportunity.

Few could have imagined Symons might make history, but his seven-game start to the 2003 season has been nothing short of stunning, dizzying and mind boggling.

The senior quarterback has already passed for 3,506 yards and 32 touchdowns -- with possibly seven games remaining if Texas Tech advances to the Big 12 title game and plays in a bowl game.

The NCAA record for single-season yards passing is 5,188 by former Brigham Young star Ty Detmer, meaning Symons needs to average 336.4 yards for his last five regular-season games to break the mark. He has averaged 500.9 yards through his first seven games.

Symons (pronounced Simmons) also has a shot at breaking David Klingler’s season record of 54 touchdown passes.

You figure the only thing that might stop Symons now is some freak injury, such as falling awkwardly on his knee while celebrating one of his touchdown passes with a receiver.

In fact, that happened two weeks ago against Iowa State ... and Symons hasn’t heard the end of it.

“There have been a few B.J. Gramatica jokes going around,” Symons said, a reference to NFL kicker Bill Gramatica, who once tore knee ligaments while celebrating a field goal.

Symons’ knee injury, however, did not prevent him throwing for 552 yards and five touchdowns in a 51-49 loss at Oklahoma State last weekend.

Saturday, Missouri steps into Symons’ firing line.

“They put a remarkable amount of stress on your defense,” Missouri Coach Gary Pinkel said.

Texas Tech, though, also puts pressure on your offense.

“You have to score points if you want to compete with these guys,” Pinkel added. Symons’ season is starting to sound like a broken record.

On Sept. 20, he threw for 586 yards in a loss at North Carolina State.

A week later, he threw for 661 yards and six touchdowns against Mississippi, and followed with a 505-yard, eight-touchdown effort against Texas A&M.;

Symons, at flipper controls, has turned football into pinball.

He is averaging 513 total yards a game, more than any team in the country except his own and Bowling Green.

And Symons is not doing it against Cub Scouts.

“It’s not like there’s a bunch of defenses around that don’t know how to line up, or they’re not sound, or they can’t adjust,” Iowa State Coach Dan McCarney said after his team gave up 487 passing yards to Symons on Oct. 11.

Symons leads the nation in yards passing, yards per game, completions, attempts, touchdown passes and total offense.

He says he’s having too much fun to consider all the possible Heisman Trophy ramifications.

“I’m just happy to be on the field, after sitting on the bench for four years,” he said in a phone interview from Lubbock. “I’m having the time of my life right now, to be honest with you, just being out there on the field and getting a chance to play.”

It hasn’t been all peaches and Peggy Sue, though. Symons and his coach, Mike Leach, are definitely irked at what they perceive as a lack of respect.

Although Symons has led Texas Tech to a 5-2 record, his exploits are seen by many as the product of a gimmicky, pass-happy offense.

In fact, the fighting words in Lubbock are “product of the system.”

College football has been down this road before, probably starting with the gaudy numbers Coach Mouse Davis started putting up with his run-and-shoot offense at Portland State.

In the late 1980s, Houston, under John Jenkins, produced record-shattering numbers with quarterbacks Andre Ware and Klingler. Ware even won the Heisman Trophy, although neither player turned out to be a successful pro quarterback.

And although Leach’s one-back, four receiver, spread-the-field system is definitely fueled with the same high-octane gas, he seethes when people try to diminish the statistics as they relate to his players.

He heard it for three years with Kingsbury, Symons’ predecessor, who passed for 12,429 yards and 45 touchdowns in a career that was largely ignored by the national press.

And whereas Kingsbury ended up only a sixth-round draft pick, with New England, Leach is having none of it when it concerns Symons.

“If B.J. is the product of a system, then that means that he’s not getting any of those touchdown passes and all those yards,” he said. “That would mean our coaching staff is. That would also mean that we could go down to 7-Eleven and get the clerk behind the counter and let him play quarterback, and I don’t really believe that is the case.”

Yet, getting a read on Symons is not easy. Texas Tech’s offense is predicated on spreading the defense thin by attacking the field, from all angles, with an unending array of passes. Four Red Raider pass catchers have 400 yards receiving or more.

And, in truth, the one constant in the system is not Symons but Leach, a self-made coach who began studying offenses while he was a student, not a player, at BYU in the 1980s. Leach borrowed many of his concepts from Cougar Coach LaVell Edwards and built on them as he worked up the coaching ladder. Leach was an assistant under anti-mainstream Hal Mumme at Iowa Wesleyan, Valdosta and later at Kentucky when Tim Couch was quarterback. Leach spent 1999 as Oklahoma’s offensive coordinator before landing the Texas Tech job.

The NFL has always been wary of quarterbacks passed on by “guru” coaches, probably the reason Symons’ name is absent from early draft-board projections.

The Great Blue North Draft Report lists Symons 99th in its list of top 100 prospects and raises the dreaded caveat, “needs to dispel doubts that he’s just a product of the Red Raiders’ wide-open offensive system.”

Symons, who is 6 feet 2 and 215 pounds, doesn’t care much for the critics.

“If it was that easy, everybody would do it,” Symons said of what he’s doing.

He says he uses the talk as motivation. He also says it is not uncommon for opposing defenses to start games with vim and vigor.

“Saying how that stuff’s not going to work today, this and that,” Symons said. “As the game goes along, it sort of gets quiet. The talking is to a minimum throughout the game and toward the second half. The looks on teams we’ve played so far, it’s more like they just want to get off the field.”

Symons never doubted his ability.

As difficult as it was to sit behind Kingsbury, he never considered transferring.

“You don’t expect to go to college and sit on the bench for four years -- anyone tells you that, they’re lying,” Symons said. “Nobody wants to sit on the bench.”

But sitting on the bench allowed Symons to become so immersed in the complex offense it had become second nature by the time he finally hit the field. He also had nine returning players on offense.

“I think what’s helped me most is, the inexperience I had was made up for by the amount of experience I had around me,” said Symons, who had thrown only 103 passes in three seasons before this season.

So, keep telling Symons what he’s doing is a fluke and then listen as the ball whistles by your ear.

Call him a product of a system, but then be prepared to call him after he goes to a bowl game.

“There are still doubters out there and I appreciate that, because that just motivates me and fuels me to continue to get better week to week,” Symons said. “Every time we take the field, we want to score and we want the team that we just played to say, ‘Man, that was the best quarterback I’ve ever seen and that was the best offense I’ve played against.’ ”

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The Longest Yards

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Texas Tech quarterback B.J. Symons is averaging 500.9 passing yards per game through seven games and needs to average 336.4 for his last five regular-season games to break Ty Detmer’s Division I single-season record. List of top passers:

*--* PLAYER SCHOOL YEAR YARDS Ty Detmer BYU 1990 5,188 David Klingler Houston 1990 5,140 Kliff Kingsbury Texas Tech 2002 5,017 Tim Rattay La. Tech 1998 4,943 Andre Ware Houston 1989 4,699 Jim McMahon BYU 1980 4,571

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And the Nominees Are ...

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Symons is one of the seven finalists for the Johnny Unitas Golden Arm Award given to the nation’s top college senior quarterback:

*--* PLAYER SCHOOL ATT COMP YARDS TD INT RATING Jason White Oklahoma 149 221 2,040 22 4 174.2 B.J. Symons Texas Tech 264 397 3,506 32 8 163.3 Philip Rivers N.C. State 215 305 2,539 18 5 156.6 Eli Manning Mississippi 152 243 2,127 17 6 154.2 J.P. Losman Tulane 163 263 2,048 22 8 148.9 Matt Schaub Virginia 126 174 1,291 8 6 143.0 John Navarre Michigan 166 286 2,046 14 7 129.4

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