Hard-Headed Fans Rip McCoy as Soft

His eyes were red, brimmed with sadness as he stared off into the what-might-have-been. A right arm that, in a four-year career had thrown for more miles than a Hummer can get on a gallon of gas, hung limply by his side. He still wore his shoulder pads over his bright white jersey, though the only thing he needed to be protected from ever again in a Longhorn uniform were a few farewell pats on the back.

He swallowed a lump the size of a football and began to speak. And Colt McCoy sounded like a man picking the right words for his own eulogy.

"I love this game, I have a passion for this game, I've done everything I can, I've done everything I can to contribute to this team," he told ABC's Lisa Salters in the moments after Alabama's 37-21 win over Texas. "It's unfortunate I didn't get to play. I'd given everything I have to be out there with my team"

His soft Southern accent couldn't mask how hard those words really were.

Three hours earlier and five plays into a game he'd so long dreamt about, he had taken a blow from Alabama's Marcell Dareus that knocked the feeling out of his arm -- "like I'd slept on it," he said -- and knocked him out of the game.

And so, on a night of dreams, McCoy was the lone insomniac.

Yet he faced the loss with aplomb and grace, one foot in front of the other.

"I never question why things happen they way they do."

If only the same could've been said about most everyone else.

Three hours earlier, he'd taken a single shot. In the hours to come, he would take thousands of them. From the moment he ran off the field, message boards and talk radio erupted with rips on McCoy, calling him soft, calling him a quitter, many of them supposed Texas fans.

McCoy likely didn't know that. And it might not have mattered. Men that looked like Colt McCoy looked in the moments after that loss don't feel worse, they just feel more of the same.

McCoy Gone Soft overtook Girls Gone Wild on the Internet for the better part of the night and into the morning, and it was as unforgivably ridiculous as it was overblown.

"He has played so tough and so hard all year, and he was trying at halftime to get back in there," said Texas coach Mack Brown. "I knew he wasn't healthy, and he wanted to play and he shouldn't have. But that's how tough he is."

McCoy had always been tough, even for Texas, a state so full of machismo it shaves twice a day and lights matches off the stubble.

When he was a freshman, he suffered a shoulder stinger running the ball in for a touchdown against Kansas State. One week later, he re-aggravated the injury so badly he had to be carted off the field. Three weeks later, he returned for Texas' bowl game and set the freshman mark for touchdown passes in a season.

His sophomore year, against Kansas State again, he suffered a concussion but kept playing.

"We didn't see Colt at halftime because he was in with the trainers, so we prepared for the second half like we weren't going to have him," offensive coordinator Greg Davis told the Dallas Morning News in 2007. "And then when I got back up to the coaches' box for the third quarter, he came out on the field."

He played the next week, too.

His junior year, he made up for Texas' abysmal running game by taking all the blows of a tailback, leading Texas in rushing while carrying the ball 136 times, roughly 10 carries per game plus the hits he absorbed in the regular course of quarterbacking.

In his previous game, he was sacked 4.5 times by Ndamukong Suh alone, a monster defensive tackle that's buried more men under football stadiums than the mafia, and still kept coming back.

And against Alabama, he did what was likely most painful of all. He stood and watched as someone else took his Longhorns on the field.

Soft? Yeah, like a sledgehammer.

Yet McCoy still seemed to want to come back in the national championship game. Don't take his word for it. Take his body language. McCoy stood on the sideline through the second half still in shoulder pads. You don't need your college lit professor to explain that symbolism. Then again, if you're ripping McCoy, you probably need a lot of help for a lot of things.

His latest injury will likely turn out to be another stinger, a nerve injury which causes weakness and numbness in the affected area. I'm not a doctor and I don't think I've been to one yet this century (Hold on, duodenum!), but the way McCoy was hurt and his admission that he couldn't feel his arm are symptoms of the injury. Hardly the thing Y.A. Tittle could've rubbed dirt on or walked off.

If it were severe enough, which it likely was, McCoy may not have been able to grip or throw the ball, let alone be able to rifle strikes to Jordan Shipley better than his backup.

For the record, Redskins Pro Bowler Chris Samuels suffered a stinger in Week 5 of the NFL season this season and didn't return. Rookie linebacker Aaron Curry suffered a stinger and missed the Seahawks' last two and half games of the season. Put a couple of dresses on those two, huh?

When Seattle coach Jim Mora was asked why Curry didn't return to the Week 15 game in which he suffered the injury, Mora said it was because he couldn't get strength in his arm. Curry, as you know, doesn't even have to throw the ball for a living. Nor is Curry worried about his NFL future, as Brent Musburger repeatedly speculated of McCoy.

Did the hit look devastating? Perhaps not, but then again I've never been hit by a man that weighs as much as a furnace to know, exactly.

If you insist on being mad at someone, be mad at Brown, whose idiotic shovel pass at the end of the first half may have been the single most costly and ridiculous call in BCS title game history.

But don't be angry at McCoy. Or at least give him the benefit of the doubt. Heck, maybe we'll find out the injury was a splinter and you can rip him to bits. Maybe you'll find out he was worried he might bruise a few zeros on his signing bonus. And maybe I'll find a Swedish model in my bedroom when I head home, too. None of those should be regarded as particularly likely.

After all, in four years, Colt McCoy's been plenty of things for the Longhorns. Winner. Loser. Champion. Goat. Small-town hero, big-time star.

But what he's never been is a quitter.

Unfortunately, as Thursday night's championship loss proved, the same can't be said for many of his fans.

FanHouse senior writer Jim Henry contributed to this story in Pasadena, Calif.