Flock Talk: No Surrender

 

The best quarterback coaches are not always former quarterbacks, and the loudest criticism of Koa Ka’ai says more about football gatekeeping than football truth.

There is a certain kind of football opinion that sounds authoritative right up until you look at it for more than 10 seconds.

Oregon got one of those this week when former Southern Illinois quarterback Josh Straughan took a shot at the promotion of Koa Ka’ai to quarterbacks coach by asking, “Who in their right mind would hire a former D-lineman as their QB coach??”

That is the kind of line built to travel. It is quick. It is dismissive. It sounds like somebody speaking from the mountaintop of quarterback purity.

It is also wrong in more than one way.

Start with the most basic problem. Koa Ka’ai is not accurately described as some random “former D-lineman” Oregon dragged into the quarterback room. Yes, he spent time on the defensive line early in his Ducks career. But anybody who actually covered him knows that is not the full picture, or even the most relevant one. Ka’ai played tight end at Oregon. I know that because I interviewed him as a recruit and covered his career. If you are going to publicly question whether somebody belongs in a role, getting the first line of the bio right feels like a reasonable place to begin.

But the deeper issue is not the factual sloppiness. It is the assumption hiding underneath it.

Too many people still talk about quarterback coaching as if it is a private club for former quarterbacks. As if playing the position is the credential that matters most, and anything else is somehow a football crime. That has always been an easy line to sell because it sounds intuitive. Who better to coach a quarterback than a former quarterback?

Sometimes that is true. Sometimes it is not.

Coaching quarterbacks is not nostalgia. It is not a reunion tour. It is teaching. It is communication. It is understanding coverage, timing, rhythm, protection, footwork, structure and how to deliver all of that to one player carrying more mental weight than anyone else on the field. Plenty of former quarterbacks never become good quarterback coaches because what came naturally to them is hard to explain. Plenty of coaches from other positions become excellent quarterback developers because they learned how to teach the whole board instead of just one square.

Football history is full of examples. Andy Reid was not a quarterback. Dan Mullen was not a quarterback. Kevin Sumlin was not a quarterback. Sean McVay was not a quarterback. Mike McDaniel was not a quarterback. None of that stopped them from building offenses, developing passers and earning the trust of the most important room on the roster.

That is why the shot at Ka’ai misses the point so badly.

Oregon did not wake up one morning, panic after Will Stein’s departure and decide to hand the quarterback room to a guy because of sentimentality. Ka’ai has worked on the offensive side of the ball as a college coach. He has coached running backs. He has coached wide receivers. He spent last season as the assistant quarterbacks coach, already working in that room and already involved with Dante Moore. This promotion is not some wild experiment. It is the next step in a progression Oregon has already been watching up close.

That is the part people on the outside always miss. They see an old roster label. The people inside the building see the actual work.

And in this case, the irony gets even thicker the longer you sit with it.

Straughan has also criticized teams that rely heavily on transfer quarterbacks and portal movement. Oregon fans know the obvious answer to that line. The last true homegrown star quarterback Oregon recruited, developed and rode to the finish line was Justin Herbert, who walked off after the 2019 season with a Rose Bowl win over Wisconsin. If the challenge is to name Oregon’s last fully developed in-house quarterback success story, the answer is Herbert. Easy.

But there is also a contradiction tucked inside Straughan’s own posture here. His public bio language creates the impression of a successful Division I and professional quarterback career, and to be clear, he did have a respectable football journey. That part is not in dispute. But the wording matters.

He was a preseason All-American at Stillman College, which was Division II, not Division I. He later transferred to Southern Illinois and had a strong season there. He signed with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, which is an accomplishment in itself, but he never saw game action and was released in 2018. None of that is meant as a cheap shot. There is no shame in any of it. Most players would love to have had those opportunities.

But if you are going to use your résumé as a platform from which to question somebody else’s football legitimacy, your own résumé should probably be described with the same precision you are refusing to extend to the target. And if you are going to sneer at transfer dependence as some kind of philosophical weakness, it is worth acknowledging that your own Division I opportunity came through a transfer.

That does not invalidate his opinion. It just strips away the self-appointed authority behind it.

And that is really what this comes down to.

This was never actually about whether Koa Ka’ai can coach quarterbacks. It was about whether some people are willing to grant legitimacy to anyone whose path does not match the stereotype they are comfortable with. Football does this all the time. It romanticizes development until development produces a coach, player or decision that does not fit the old script. Then suddenly the conversation gets narrowed to labels, as if the job is won by biography instead of by teaching.

Oregon is betting on teaching.

It is betting on trust.

It is betting on the work Ka’ai has already done inside that program and inside that room.

And frankly, that should count for more than a tweet from somebody who could not even be bothered to get the first description right.

Because this is the irony at the center of all of it. The people mocking Oregon’s choice are framing the hire like some unserious gamble, when the reality is almost the opposite. Oregon promoted somebody it knows. Somebody it has watched. Somebody whose path through running backs, wide receivers and assistant quarterback work gave him a broader understanding of offensive football than the shallow critics want to admit.

The loud take says a former defensive lineman should never coach quarterbacks.

The better answer is that Koa Ka’ai was never just that in the first place.

And even if he had been, football has never worked as neatly as the gatekeepers pretend.

The best quarterback coach is not always the guy who used to throw the passes.

Sometimes it is the guy who knows how to teach them.

And sometimes the people most offended by that idea are just telling on themselves.