Log on to flavortouchdown.com to enter for a chance to win the Sonic Flavor Touchdown Sweepstakes. You could win a VIP football trip for 6 to the bowl game of your choice, including, 4 days/ 3 nights of luxury accommodations and Roundtrip airfare.
The fine folks at Sonic have asked us to consider a "standout __________". For those of us who are young (I'm including myself) it's hard for me to truthfully speak for the standout season since the inception of Texas Tech football, although I think a majority of folks on DTN would say it's 2008. This may not be much of a real debate. However, no topic garners more interest and discussion like a quarterback discussion and I wanted to focus on the Leach-era. I then thought that there would be quite a few that would automatically vote for both Graham Harrell and Kliff Kingsbury simply because they had the longest careers and the most yards, touchdowns, etc. So I decided that I would narrow the topic to who do you think was the standout one-year-starter at quarterback during the Leach era.
My hunch is that this is still going to be a landslide, but at the very least, we can all appreciate a bit of a distraction at this time.
We've got three candidates: B.J. Symons, Sonny Cumbie and Cody Hodges. Let's get to the stats:
| Year | Player | Games | Comp-Att | Comp % | Yards | YPA | TD | INT | TD:INT |
| 2003 | B.J. Symons | 12 | 429-666 | 64.41% | 5,336 | 8.01 | 48 | 21 | 2.28 |
| 2004 | Sonny Cumbie | 12 | 421-642 | 65.57% | 4,742 | 6.65 | 32 | 18 | 1.77 |
| 2005 | Cody Hodges | 12 | 353-531 | 66.47% | 4,197 | 7.90 | 31 | 12 | 2.58 |
Good times video after the jump.
B.J. Symons
Sonny Cumbie
Cody Hodges
As an aside, sorry for all of the OSU video, it was the longest most complete video I could find.
And this should certainly prove that I can be nostalgic and that I can notice how much the offensive line splits had tightened up from 2003 to 2005. Pretty neat.
For me, it's not much of a debate as Symons had one of the best seasons I've ever seen from a quarterback, not just at Texas Tech, but anywhere. In short, he was amazing, and it was even more amazing that he was able to make such a significant impact in just one season.
I always point out the YPA average and for a spread, or any other quarterback in a more traditional offense (which is slowly but surely disappearing), to average over 8 yards per attempt is nothing short of amazing. Hodges was right behind Symons in terms of YPA average, but Symons also passed for over 1,000 more yards and 17 more touchdowns (everyone ignore the 9 additional interceptions). And were it not for those pesky interceptions, I truly think that Symons 2003 year is on par or even better than Graham Harrell's 2008 year. Symons had the luxury of a Wes Welker, but Harrell had a NFL first-round pick and one of the best receivers, statistically speaking, that college football ever saw.
If you want to do your own comparisons, CFB Stats has some good stats, but they only go back to 2004.
So let's hear from you, who do you think is the standout one-year-starter at Texas Tech during the Leach-era?