Connor Cook Will Live And Die By The College Football Playoff Narrative

Connor Cook's draft stock should not depend on the outcome of Thursday's playoff game between Michigan State and Alabama.

That disclaimer ought to hold true for everyone on the field during bowl season: a one-game sample should carry minimal weight compared to years of other data. And yet the disclaimer remains necessary, because the lead-up to the draft—which itself is essentially a lead-up to the NFL season—is now a discourse and a business unto itself, a way for the football industry to conjure a year-round entertainment product out of a few months' worth of actual games. Narratives are manufactured to spackle over the content gap; people overreact, because those narratives have seductive power when the alternative is talking about, like, something other than football.

All of this especially applies to Cook, the current non-Robert Nkemdiche benchmark for pre-draft tsk-tsking. Dig through his last month of clips and you'll find the Michigan State quarterback painted as disrespectful, prickly, a poor leader, polarizing. One paragraph of a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel piece featured a scout wondering aloud about "how much does he really like ball?" and "how much is he going to work at it?" as well chiding Cook because "he likes being a celebrity." This one article gets you three-fifths of the way toward a winning card in Hot Take Bingo.

The standard rebuttals are similarly overstated; the whole Connor Cook Conversation is a case of fighting fire with napalm. Cook isn't entitled; he's the underdog who made it to big-time college football out of a small town in Ohio. He's so humble that he gave his Big Ten championship game MVP trophy to his offensive line. He's so selfless that he risked money to come back for his senior year and gritted his way through a result shoulder injury. Cook's physical tools—6'4'' and strong-armed, with some wiggle to him—dovetail with long-held archetypes of the position, something that matters given that he plays in the sport's most nostalgia-prone conference. On the off-chance a stat does make its way into the conversation about Cook, it's usually the 34-4 record he's posted as a starter, which is the best record in Michigan State history.

There is room for nuance, of course, and perhaps someone who bothers to study the film this spring might stumble upon it. But for the time being, Cook mostly exists in binaries—as a winner or a prima donna, a self-made man or an entitled brat, a leader or a liability.

It's exactly the sort of tension that will play big under the floodlights of the Jerry Dome and it's why Cook has more to gain or lose than anyone else on the field. Everyone else of consequence was long ago slotted into designated roles. Nick Saban plays the calloused mentor to Mark Dantonio's dignified protégé; Derrick Henry is the indomitable war horse and Shilique Calhoun is the obligatory Impact Edge Defender; Minkah Fitzpatrick is the exciting future of Alabama's defense just as Aaron Burbridge is the requisite spark plug in the Spartans' passing game. Each one is interesting in their own way, yet perceptions of all of them have mostly been static since at least midseason, if not even earlier.

Cook, by contrast, has fluctuated all year. He entered the season as the best quarterback in the Midwest outside of Columbus, only to fall back to the pack after opening the season with six functional but mostly bland performances against relatively mediocre competition.

The month that followed ranks among the most dominant four-game stretches of 2015: From October 10th (Rutgers) through November 7th (Nebraska), Cook averaged 357 yards passing and a 57 percent completion rate, tossing 11 touchdowns and just two interceptions. He injured his throwing shoulder the very next game, against Maryland, and spent the rest of the regular season as something of a non-factor. Although Cook turned in a solid performance against Penn State, he didn't play at all against Ohio State, and the Spartans spent three-and-a-half quarters of their Big Ten Championship win over Iowa largely succeeding in spite of him.

Of course, that final half-quarter was the reason the Spartans ultimately won, after Cook unspooled a 22-play game-ending touchdown drive that's already qualified for definite article status in East Lansing. Some 15 minutes after that, he became the program's black eye, when he appeared to blow off Ohio State legend Archie Griffin while accepting the game's MVP award. That Griffin has gone out of his way to insist it wasn't a big deal proved to be relatively inconsequential, because that doesn't neatly fold into one of the two ways of thinking about Cook. Instead, the day became a chief conductor for the lightning rod: Depending on when you start the tape, one can watch Cook play the hero or the villain within the same half-hour.

As such, it will be no surprise when the spider cam tracks his every movement Thursday night, while the broadcast crew tries to compartmentalize him once and for all. Turn in a big performance, and Cook could become the prize of this year's muddled quarterback crop, a player with just the right sort of confidence. Play poorly and he may be typecast as the player who cared more about the platform than the performance, validating the carping about how "some [evaluators] will be blindsided by talent and look past the intangibles."

Things should not be nearly this cut-and-dried, of course, but the narratives laid down this week could make or lose Cook money as he graduates to the NFL. That is unfair, reductive, stupid, and even a little dangerous, but it's also how the pre-draft process works. All Cook can do is spin the ball as best he can, and hope that his smiles are not taken as smirks. Even if the outcome works in Cook's favor, this stupid process has him, now, and it's not changing. Not every story is a happy one, but then not every story is true.