The third installment of LRM’s fantastic retrospectives hit SFN on Friday and can be seen by clicking here. The piece focused on one of the best college football quarterbacks of all-time – Philip Rivers.
Statistically, Philip’s status as the ACC’s greatest quarterback is indisputable. He ranks first in total starts (51), passing yards (13,484), total offense (13,582), touchdown passes (95), completions (1,087), touchdowns in a season (34), 300-yard passing games (18), 400-yard passing games (7), total touchdowns (112), and total plays (1,963). He was the ACC’s 2000 Rookie of the Year and then 2003 Player of the Year, and was a four-time bowl MVP (2000 MicronPC, 2003 Gator, 2003 Tangerine, 2004 Senior Bowl; and offensive MVP of the 2001 Tangerine Bowl in a loss to Pittsburgh).
Those statistics look even more impressive when you consider that Rivers played for three different offensive co-ordinators during his four years in Raleigh. As LRM opined…
What if Norm Chow – who, as a BYU assistant, had coached Robbie Bosco (1984 National Champion), Steve Young (1983 Davey O’Brien recipient, Super Bowl Champion, NFL Hall of Famer), and Ty Detmer (1990 & 1991 Davey O’Brien winner) – had stayed at State for Philip’s entire career? Would Philip have won two Heisman Trophies and then left for the NFL after the ACC Championship and possible National Championship in 2002?
Well, PR is now in the NFL and we try to do a respectable job of keeping up with him as well as with other NC State alums who play on Sunday. (You can click on our Tags of Philip Rivers to peruse a large portion of his archive). There have been a couple of pretty major Rivers-centric items hit the press recently that we did not want to ignore.
The first was a‘Conversation with Philip Rivers’ from The Sporting News. That hotlink is only the abridged version of the conversation as the piece took up five or six of the magazine’s pages and included a huge two page picture of Philip. It was fantastic.
The second major story was national news a couple of weeks ago when a high school quarterback beat Philip in a skills competition at PR’s camp. You can see the video and read all about it by clicking here.
As a parting shot, Shutdown Corner is talking highly about the PR and the Chargers.
Quick, tell me which quarterback led the league last year in quarterback rating? Peyton Manning(notes)? Kurt Warner(notes)? Drew Brees(notes)? Incorrect on all three. It was Philip Rivers(notes), who posted a 105.5 rating, while no one else reached 98.
Why do I mention this? Because teams with quarterbacks that good tend to also be pretty good teams. And Rivers is young enough — last year was just his third year as a starter — that he’s probably still improving. The nearly complete lack of roster turnover can’t do anything but help him, either. Continuity is good.
