Top 10 Quarterbacks in the 2020 NFL Draft: No. 5 Anthony Gordon

History

Gordon started his college football career as a zero-star recruit. Seriously. This kid was so under the radar, 247 Sports didn’t even bother doing a high school recruiting profile on him.

Brought to the Pacific Northwest in 2016 from City College of San Francisco, Gordon was mostly an unknown entity outside of the  Cougars fanbase that year. He did not play any games in 2016 or 2017 and served as backup to Gardner Minshew in 2018, having lost the quarterback competition that offseason. Coming into the 2019 season, Gordon would get his chance to lead in Mike Leach’s Air Raid offense.

When in San Francisco, Gordon threw for 3,864 yards and 37 touchdowns in just one season, per CCCAA Sports.com. Those numbers explain why Leach would recruit him to the Cougars in 2016.

Minshew had a similar road to stardom, as he started his college career for Northwest Mississippi Community College, where he threw for 3,228 yards in his first season. The next year, Minshew would transfer to East Carolina, where he continued to show success before coming to Wazzu.

Leach is always looking for a quarterback who is willing to throw the ball down the field and has brought on little-known transfer quarterbacks wherever he has gone, along with graduate transfer quarterbacks.

Minshew eventually went on to be drafted by the Jacksonville Jaguars, where he started a majority of the 2019 season, in lieu of an injured Nick Foles.

After Minshew went 11-2 in 2018, winning a bowl game and bringing the Cougars into the AP Top 25 by the end of the season, Gordon was going to have big shoes to replace.

The season didn’t go well for the Cougars, as they finished 2019 with a losing record and did not beat a single team with a winning record. This can only be seen as a massive failure for the Washington State Cougars football program, as they entered the 2019 season on many top 25 lists and were expected to compete for the Pac-12 Championship.

Judging Gordon’s quarterback abilities in the 2020 NFL Draft based on this record would be unwise though, as the Cougars had multiple issues coming into the season. The defense sputtered throughout the season, as several star players graduated after 2018 and declared for the draft. The team’s star safety Jalen Thompson left for the NFL unexpectedly, and the defense was never able to recover from its losses.

The team ended up losing four games where the defense gave up 37 or more points and lost three games against Pac-12 opponents by a touchdown or less. Against the Oregon Ducks last year, Gordon was able to throw a goal-line touchdown, on fourth down, with one minute remaining on the clock. But the defense gave up a field goal in the last minute, ultimately leading to a Cougars loss.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1188336120670519297

In Week 5, Cougars defensive coordinator Tracy Claeys resigned after losing against the lowly UCLA Bruins at home.

Despite these losses, Gordon continued to put up exceptional quarterbacking numbers in 2019, including 5 games where the offense scored 49 or more points. Despite all the problems this team had, Gordon threw for 48 touchdowns in 2019, second-best in the NCAA according to ESPN.

Against UCLA, Gordon threw a record-breaking nine touchdowns in a LOSS.

Gordon finished the 2019 season with a 71.1 completion percentage. Passing accounted for 5,683 yards of the Cougars total offense while the run game accounted for a mere 885 yards in 2019, according to Sports-Reference.com.

Some fans may dismiss Gordon as an illegitimate prospect in the 2020 NFL Draft, considering the teams losing record. But a quarterback who can throw nine touchdowns in his fourth game starting is worth a closer look.