We have noticed a trend.
It’s probably a meaningless confluence of circumstances. Sometimes trends are meaningful statistics, sometimes they are fun facts, and sometimes they are just huge coincidences. This is almost certainly the latter, but it is something to bear in mind as we look ahead to Michigan State’s playoff game against Alabama in the Cotton Bowl.
In the biggest wins of his career, while trying to avoid a sack, Connor Cook has made a disastrous mistake. This has happened consistently. Sometimes the consequences were worse than others, but this is something Cook has done — not once, not twice, but in the biggest game of each of the last three seasons.
Another common trend behind these plays is that Cook always comes back from them stronger. He, and Michigan State as a team, have rallied around these plays and made them inconsequential in the long run. Again, these are mistakes Cook has made in his biggest wins, not merely his biggest games. The losses to Oregon and Ohio State last season included some mistakes. No player is perfect. However, neither of those games, arguably Cook’s two biggest losses, included mistakes such as these:
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2014 Rose Bowl: Michigan State 24, Stanford 20
Connor Cook’s victory over Ohio State in 2013 isn’t on this list because he avoided the major blunder. His real first mistake under pressure came in this game. Late in the first half, Michigan State had just cut its deficit against Stanford to three points, and had a chance to tie or take the lead before halftime. At least, they did until this happened (the play is at the 45-second mark):
What can we see about this play? There is nothing particularly special set up about it on either side of the ball. Stanford brought pressure and had a player come free to the quarterback. No one was immediately open, so instead of eating the sack, Cook just floated the ball in the air in the middle of the field, where Kevin Anderson easily intercepted it and returned it for the walk-in touchdown. Cook panicked under pressure and probably hoped he’d get away with an incompletion. He didn’t.
2015 Cotton Bowl: Michigan State 42, Baylor 41
Barring something insane happening in this year’s playoffs, this will go down as the biggest (and best) comeback of Connor Cook’s career. It might even be the best comeback in Michigan State’s football history. Because Michigan State won, we sometimes forget how Connor Cook almost threw the game away. However, for a minute in the fourth quarter, when all of the momentum seemed to have shifted towards the Spartans, Cook’s blunder seemed to have sealed a Baylor victory.
Michigan State had just scored a touchdown to cut its deficit to 13 and then followed it up by recovering an onside kick. After a long completion, Michigan State was set up inside the Baylor 15 and appeared poised to score. On the next play, Connor Cook did this (the play starts at 2:10:00; I apologize for the audio being about 10 seconds off on this play — this was the only video I could find of it which allowed embedding):
We see something very similar here. No one was open and Cook got pressured. He didn’t just throw it up for grabs, either. He was trying to throw it towards the sideline as he was on his way down. It was not as horrible a mistake as the one against Stanford, but the outcome was almost more disastrous. A block in the back penalty removed the touchdown on the return, and Baylor proceeded to turn the ball over on downs after a short drive. No real harm done, but that was mostly luck. Cook tried to avoid a sack and almost cost his team the game.
2015 Big Ten Championship Game: Michigan State 16, Iowa 13
This is possibly Cook’s biggest win to date. It is the only one that put Michigan State in a championship situation, though Mark Dantonio campaigned for his team to get into the 2014 BCS title game. With this win, the Spartans punched their ticket to the second College Football Playoff, where they will meet Alabama in the 2015 Cotton Bowl (part two). However, it all could have been lost early on. If you thought Connor Cook learned from his mistakes in the previous years and no longer threw balls up for grabs while under pressure, you would be mistaken.
In such a strong defensive game, a mistake like this could have been disastrous. Fortunately for the Spartans, they held Iowa to a field goal and kept the game within one score until they put together their final, epic, 22-play drive. If Josey Jewell hadn’t been immediately taken down by a lineman, this would have been an easy pick-six that would have been very difficult for Michigan State to overcome.
Three games. Three of Connor Cook’s biggest wins of his career. Three huge blunders. This is both to Cook’s detriment and his credit. A quarterback of his caliber should not make these blunders in the first place, but at least whenever he did, he came back stronger and worked to overcome them.
Last season, Ohio State overcame early mistakes to come back and beat Alabama after trailing by 15 points. Something tells me that if Michigan State falls behind early, it will have a much tougher time coming back. All in all, Connor Cook’s trend of making huge errors but managing to come back from them does not seem like one that he will be able to continue, especially against Alabama.
He might commit an early error, but it will be hard for him to compensate against Alabama’s defense.
