Colin Cowherd Pratfalls Through The Laziest Possible Segment Of Football Analysis

4:25 PM EDT on August 8, 2023

Colin Cowherd blathers on about quarterbacks on his FS1 show. — Screenshot: The Herd

Tuesday on Colin Cowherd's breathtakingly dismal three-hour Fox Sports 1 show, The Herd, the washed-up provocateur host did a segment where he rated quarterbacks picked in the first round of the NFL draft since 2013. This is standard ultra-bored late-summer time-killer crap for the too-many professional shouters who are severely out of their depth during the parts of the sports calendar when football is off the air. Cowherd does what he can to sell this tedious junk, throwing out the phrase "big sample size" to juice it up and twinkling his otherwise dead-glazed eyes with feigned excitement as he informs his listeners that exactly 30 quarterbacks were taken in the first round of the NFL draft over that time. These blue-chip signal-callers, says Cowherd, can be broken down into three categories: stars, high-end starters, and then guys who Cowherd says categorically cannot win a Super Bowl.

This exercise is obviously an insanely stupid waste of time, but here again I must remind you that Cowherd has three whole entire hours of space to fill on this godforsaken sports-talk show. I feel physically bad engaging with the substance of this segment, even to point out that you're not saying much if you're saying that Johnny Manziel, who has been out of the league altogether since 2015, doesn't have the juice to lead a team to a Super Bowl, or to point out that since the turn of the millennium the NFL has seen Super Bowls won by Nick Foles, Joe Flacco, Eli Manning, Brad Johnson, and Trent Dilfer, none of whom could very often have been described as "High-End Starting QBs."

But you are really not saying much, in 2023, if you are asserting that your big powerful football brain has ruled out Dwayne Haskins, specifically, as a player that can lead a team to a Super Bowl victory:

As pointed out by essential Twitter follow @BackAftaThis, Cowherd specifically calls out Haskins despite the fact that Haskins was killed in a highway accident in Fort Lauderdale in April 2022. Cowherd may or may not have forgotten this, and this is not to say that Haskins should not be included on a list of the last 30 quarterbacks selected in the first round of the NFL draft. But probably if Cowherd and his producers had this segment to do over again they might've chosen not to pick Haskins out by name. In the very most generous interpretation of this segment, Cowherd is cherry-picking a case study in a player whose career and life were cut short after just three professional seasons.

A source told me long ago that Colin "doesn't do death" on his show. Not a word when Don Shula passed. Not a word when Franco Harris passed. Not a word..... when Dwayne Haskins passed.

When you don't care that someone died, you won't remember that someone died.
— Funhouse (@BackAftaThis) August 8, 2023

Cowherd and his producers might also have chosen to fix the typo in the on-screen graphic, which mistakenly refers to the third group of players as "QBs That Can Win Super Bowls." There's the usual off-season slop, and then there's this sleepy last-minute mess, which shows all the careful research and original analysis of Bart Simpson's Treasure Island book report. Someone at The Herd evidently caught onto the sheer quarter-assedness of this segment, and the third category of quarterbacks was edited clean out of the monologue's third-hour re-airing, as well as the clip posted on the show's YouTube channel. Cowherd's "analysis" is left largely intact: Sometimes quarterbacks are selected in the first round of the draft, but beware! Sometimes those quarterbacks may not become superstars. That's another day of essential sports content, down in the books. Onward!