Big 12 Football: Top 20 quarterbacks since 2000
By Andrew Tineo
Career Stats: 69.5% completions, 9,260 passing yards, 75 touchdowns, 27 interceptions
The most unique story that has come from the Big 12 quarterbacks has been the success that came from a quarterback that got his first start at the age of 26.
Brandon Weeden pursued a baseball career from age 22-26. Once he decided to hang those cleats up, he exchanged them for another pair, to play on the gridiron.
He got his first start at Colorado in 2009, where he threw for two touchdowns in the fourth quarter and lead the Cowboys to a win.
Heading into his junior year at Oklahoma State, questions swirled around the ceiling of a 27-year-old quarterback and how much he could provide at the college level as a full-time starter.
Weeden hushed the critics with an 11-win season and throwing for over 4,000 yards. After consecutive nine wins seasons, Oklahoma State was close to breaking the pixy glass, that was double-digit wins. Oklahoma State got out to a 10-1 record and was ranked as high as No. 10 in the country.
The Cowboys had a chance at a Big 12 Championship appearance, with Bedlam on the horizon. However, Landry Jones had different ideas, as Oklahoma had just enough offense to outlast the Cowboys. The teams in the fourth quarter combined for 40 of the games 88 points.
And 2011 was quite possibly the pinnacle of Oklahoma State football, with being a double overtime loss to Iowa State away from a National Championship. Weeden ran through the entire slate of the Big 12, behind the second-best scoring offense in the country at 48.7 points per game.
The lowest output the Cowboys had on the season was 31 in Ames, while every other team had been blitzed. Even a good Oklahoma team was taken to the woodshed 44-10. Weeden threw for a pedestrian 217 yards but gave the Cowboys a chance at the national title.
Due to the old BCS system and computers making decisions, Oklahoma State was left out for an LSU-Alabama rematch. Instead, the Cowboys played Stanford in the Fiesta Bowl. A game where Weeden outdueled Andrew Luck and threw for three touchdowns on almost 400 yards.
A Quinn Sharp field goal in overtime capped off a historic career for Weeden. At 28 years old, he was finishing his college career, and one Oklahoma State fans will never forget.