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Remember when Alex Smith beat Alabama in college (he didn't)? Colin Cowherd remembers
I have a secret: I watch "The Herd." I'm not proud of it. But when you work from alone home multiple days a week, you quickly find out that you need some sort of background banter. As a sports fan, that's where Colin Cowherd's show from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. comes in.
Another secret: Cowherd is not that bad, especially during the NFL season. When that ends though, it gets ugly, which is true of literally any sports talk show in the country. Post Super Bowl is the dead period of all dead periods, and in order to fill that up Cowherd usually just goes on for hours about whether or not Dak Prescott is the future in Dallas, or he drools over another 30-point night from LeBron James that nobody watched.
But now that it's officially #DraftSZN, Colin has more NFL material to work with, which is what he's best at. What he is NOT good at is discussing college football, which, judging by some of his past gaffes, he does not follow closely. The tiny problem with #DraftSZN is that you have to have some college football knowledge if you're going to start spouting off about the Utah State quarterback everyone just discovered last week. This is where Colin gets into trouble.
The Utah State quarterback I'm referring to is of course Jordan Love, who, in addition to having gigantic hands, had an impressive performance at the combine. One NFL coach called him "a poor man's Patrick Mahomes," a description that may appear derogatory but is actually a compliment. You know how many teams would take a poor man's Patrick Mahomes right now? I can think of about 15.
Naturally, Cowherd latched onto this quote for a segment on Tuesday, which somehow led to him discussing former No. 1 pick Alex Smith's time at Utah under Urban Meyer. Let's see how that went for Colin:
The common defense of guys like Cowherd is "if you were on radio all day, you'd screw up too!' That's both fair and 100 percent correct, but sometimes you screw up a take so bad that that defense no longer holds up. This is one of those times. A very quick fact check (or a halfway decent memory) would reveal that Alex Smith was the No. 1 overall pick in 2005, meaning his final college season was the 2004-2005 season. Another quick fact check would reveal that Nick Saban did not arrive at Alabama until 2007, meaning ... yep, you guessed it, Alex Smith never played or beat Alabama, with or without Nick Saban.
The game Cowherd is thinking of actually occurred in 2009, when the 11-0 Utes beat Alabama 31-17 in the Sugar Bowl as a double-digit underdog. Urban Meyer was just completing his fifth season at the University of Florida, while Smith had just finished off his fourth season as a member of the San Francisco 49ers. Utah's coach was its current coach, Kyle Whittingham, while its quarterback was Brian Johnson, whose impressive senior season earned him a spot on the NCAA Football cover in 2010. We doubt Colin remembers that.