It's time we start taking Will Rogers seriously
Jake Wimberly
Labels and stigmas are a part of sports. Happens all the time, and sometimes they are justified and sometimes they are not.
Player “X” is a possession receiver; team “Y” is a developmental program; Bo Nix is “God Made” for Gus Malzahn and Texas is always back. You can only win with tall quarterbacks, and they ain’t played nobody - just look at the schedule!
I could go on and on, but you get the drift. Mississippi State quarterback Will Rogers has been unjustly cast with a label or labels for far to long and it’s time we take Rogers serious.
Turn on any Mississippi sports talk show, “mine included”, or read social media and it’s always the same. “Will is a system guy, a check down guy, has a weak arm, doesn’t throw the deep ball, most his yards are YAC”. Again I could go on, but these are the labels Will Rogers has gotten by many and it’s so far from the truth it’s not even funny.
Rogers, a junior from Brandon, MS has done nothing but put up numbers his entire life and that started back as a young man at Brandon High School in Brandon, MS. Coming off the heels, a few years after the Gardner Minshew era at Brandon, Will took over his 10th grade year in high school and never looked back.
For his high school career, which included double hand full of wins, he threw for 9,093 yards, 79 touchdowns and only threw 22 interceptions in three years in Mississippi’s biggest classification - 6A football.
Rogers was recruited by several schools, but ultimately chose Miss. State when Joe Moorhead was there, and stook by his commitment once Mike Leach was hired.
Since taking over for KJ Costello his freshman year, during the 2020 Covid year, Rogers has thrown for 8,825 yards, 69 touchdowns and 19 interceptions.
That’s just over five miles of football air yardage the junior signal caller has produced, in the toughest conference in the country. A conference, the SEC where people said when Mike Leach was hired, “You can’t bring that there AIR RAID down here Mike!! This ain’t the PAC 12 or BIG 12; cause it just MEANS MORE.” Again, another label on an offense that is working just fine in the good ole SEC.
And a huge part of that success falls on the shoulders of ole Check Down Will (Rogers).
To put things in perspective a bit; Rogers was the 24th ranked pro style quarterback in the class of 2020, courtesy of 247sports.com. Clemson’s DJ Uiagaleiei was the number one rated pro style quarterback that year, followed by CJ Stroud of Ohio State. Until a rebirth of sorts, DJU has been average at best at Clemson.
Stroud is another animal all together and we will get back to that in a bit.
Other guys ranked higher than Rogers in his class include number 3, Harrison Bailey at Tennessee and he’s not even playing. Number 4 Ethan Garbers at Washington and Number 5 Jay Butterfield at Oregon - both programs who reached into the transfer portal this year to find their starters.
Number 9 Carson Beck at Georgia, who is still behind Stetson Bennett, number 10 Max Johnson who signed with LSU, and is now at Texas A&M and out for the season, and number 19 TJ Finley, who left LSU for Auburn and has lost his job.
Rogers has not only outplayed most all of his entire 2020 class, he has destroyed them.
In just his junior year, Rogers has already broken the SEC record for career completions and he could leave a mark that may never be broken if he keeps going.
“But he should break it! All they do is throw the bawl in the AIR RAID!” Let me guess what’s next - anyone can do it in that offense.
Rogers is only behind Ohio State’s CJ Stroud, another class of 2020 quarterback for total touchdowns so far this year. And he is doing it in a conference that has the most talent in the land.
Yet still - some people do not believe. Take our friends at On3.com, who puts out great content, but their recent top ten quarterbacks in the country didn’t even mention Rogers, not a peep.
With all due respect to On3, on this site we do nothing but analytics as well, as it pertains to college football and I personally ran my quarterback performance metrics on this list, plus Rogers and the results are below. These metric numbers are simply an identifier, based on, on the field performance this year and several variables that feed into the formula.
After running the numbers, and it makes sense, only CJ Stroud has a better metric value than Will Rogers so far this year in the entire country. I reranked the On3 list and honestly, guys like Will Levis, Stetson Bennett and Quinn Ewers shouldn’t even be on this top ten list if we are being honest.
But again, lot’s of these lists aren’t totally based on data. Levis is the 2023 love child of the NFL Draft, Bennett plays for the defending national champion and Ewers is arguably the biggest hype machine we’ve seen in recent memory - who could end up being really good, but it’s all on a limited sample size.
What we do know is Rogers completes passes and at a high rate, doesn’t turn the ball over much at all and gets the ball in the endzone.
After all, that’s the name of this game right? Stop teams from scoring and score.
Yet still, Rogers is still not on the big boy quarterback lists, the Heisman Trophy watch list and more. He wasn’t highly recruited and he plays for the father of the air raid. But if Will Rogers keeps slamming down touchdowns, wins and numbers, people will have to take notice and give him his due.
Outside of Will’s father and a few more, not very many sets of eyes have watched this quarterback play as much as these eyes have. These eyes have always said yes to Will Rogers, since he was a young young man and do so still today.
Will Rogers is one of the best quarterbacks in the country and it’s not even close. It’s time we recognize that and give the young man his due.
NOTE: Images courtesy of Jared Thomas Media
