If you were to run into senior K.J. Costello in a coffeeshop in Prague, it would take you about five minutes to figure out that he's not just a quarterback, but a good one. Standing a legit six-foot-five, Costello is a commanding presence, whether he's staring at ten men in his huddle or relaxing over lunch with a table of reporters. It's hard to say what makes him so confident and comfortable. Perhaps it stems from 2018 and the success of his first full season as Stanford's starter, a campaign which saw him produce one of the best single seasons in the history of school rich with quarterbacks, or maybe it's the memory of a record-setting prep career at Santa Margarita High School.
Or it could be something completely different. In between those two leading roles, Costello spent a year and half as an understudy. After three years at the helm of one of the top high school football programs in Southern California, Costello willingly slipped into the anonymity of being a freshman quarterback at Stanford University. While there are other programs out there whose offenses are similar to the ones we all ran in the street when we were kids -- "everyone go deep, but you break right at the fire hydrant" -- the Stanford playbook is a bit different. While more and more offensive coordinators are asking their quarterbacks to learn the football equivalent of Dr. Seuss, Cardinal quarterbacks are reading Chaucer in the original Middle English. It can be challenging.
I asked Costello about this last week, and he acknowledged that he had had other tempting options, places with simpler play books and shorter paths to the field. He admitted that he'd love to play in an offense like Washington State and throw the ball forty or fifty times a game, but when he was considering his college path, he knew that the résumé he'd build at Stanford would trump any gaudy statistics he might compile elsewhere. His goal was to become an NFL quarterback, and he knew there was only one place where he could properly prepare.
Costello made his collegiate debut with some mop-up duty in the 2017 season opener against Rice, but his true arrival came four weeks later against UCLA in a game that exemplified the positive and negative aspects of Stanford's quarterback philosophy under head coach David Shaw. Three years earlier Josh Rosen had been one of the top quarterback prospects in America, and he had publicly stated that Stanford was his dream school. Theories abound as to why Shaw never offered him a scholarship, but Rosen ended up lighting the world on fire as a true freshman (and for two years after that) at UCLA while the Cardinal struggled to find a replacement for Kevin Hogan. A huge faction of the Stanford fanbase pointed to Rosen and his early success with the Bruins as proof that Shaw and his system needed to change. If Rosen could show up in Westwood and throw for 350 yards and three touchdowns in his debut, some argued, why did Stanford quarterbacks have to serve a two-year apprenticeship before seeing the field?
As this particular game progressed, with Rosen marching the Bruins up and down the field as Stanford's Keller Chryst struggled, it seemed that UCLA would end its long losing streak against the Cardinal, and David Shaw would face questions about his quarterbacks. But an injury to Chryst forced Costello in as his replacement, and everything changed. When I brought up this game with Costello, his eyes lit up. His performance on the field that day was nice -- he threw for two touchdowns and ran for another -- but what I really wanted to discuss was a comment he made afterwards about having zero practice reps during the week leading up to the game. What did that exactly mean?
"It means zero reps," he explained. The backup quarterbacks are reduced to taking mental reps during practice, something Costello explained as being invaluable. "You have to know the terminology, the sentences for each play." When I asked him to give me an example he rattled off a serious of nouns, verbs, and numbers that would only make sense either in a football huddle or a Russian spy novel; when I asked him to translate it into English, it made only slightly more sense. In that moment it struck me that Costello was no different than any other Stanford senior. If I had asked a computer science major or a pre-med student to explain her senior project, I surely would've been just as confused. Stanford is never the easiest path, regardless of which path you're walking.
Knowing the play book is obviously only half the battle. The quarterback has to be able to execute all those plays as well, and that can be difficult when all the practice time is given to the starter. Costello was grateful for all the hours he was able to spend with Stanford's virtual reality training system, but he also needed to put in time with an actual ball in his hands, which meant finding empty corners of the practice field or convincing a receiver or two to work late after practice. When I told him that it reminded me of something Shaw had said about J.J. Arcega-Whiteside, explaining that the receiver's breakout performance against UCLA in 2016 had a been a result of all the time he had spent after practice, Costello jumped in excitedly and said, "That was me! J.J. and I used to work after practice all the time."
So perhaps it's all of those lonely hours working in the shadows that gave Costello the confidence to take over a desperate team that afternoon against UCLA and lead it to a 58-34 victory, and perhaps that's how he was able to have such a successful season in 2018. He completed 65.1% of his passes while throwing for 3,540 yards and 29 touchdowns. How good is that? No Stanford quarterback -- not Luck, not Elway, not Plunkett, not Hogan -- has ever matched all three of those numbers in a single season.
Those statistics are largely the result of two things, one directly attributable to the quarterback and the other not. Costello improved his completion percentage from 58.8% in 2017 to 65.1% in 2019, a substantial bump. For comparison's sake, take a look at how his predecessors did:
- Andrew Luck: 56.3 -- 70.7 -- 71.3
- Kevin Hogan: 71.7 -- 61.0 -- 65.9 -- 67.8
- Keller Chryst: 56.6 -- 54.2
Disregarding the supernatural Andrew Luck, we can see that Costello's improvement while playing in the same offense as the previous three quarterbacks is certainly significant -- except for the second thing. For most of last season, Costello wasn't playing in the same offense as Luck, Hogan, and Chryst. Four games into the fall, once David Shaw determined that the running game was no longer working, the offense tilted towards the passing game more than at any point in Shaw's tenure. Costello ended up throwing the ball 413 times, the fourth-highest total in school history. Luck's busiest year was 404 passes in 2011, and Hogan topped out at 352 in 2014. Given that opposing defenses knew that Costello was the Cardinal's only true weapon on offense, that completion percentage becomes all the more impressive.
So what can we expect this season? In addition to enjoying a more aggressive offensive approach, Costello has also benefitted from the deepest corps of wide receivers in this current era. He loses the explosiveness of J.J. Arcega-Whiteside and the consistency of Trenton Irwin, but there will be no shortage of talent out wide with Connor Wedington returning, and emerging talents like Osiris St. Brown and Simi Fehoko. Costello will miss his former roommate, tight end Kaden Smith, but Colby Parkinson will be one of the top tight ends in the country this fall. If Costello can maintain or even slightly improve his completion percentage, which is one of the key vectors Shaw looks at in measuring offensive efficiency, he should have another great season.
Beyond Costello, the position appears to be set for the foreseeable future. Costello's immediate backup is junior Davis Mills, once the consensus top quarterback in the nation who drew comparisons to Andrew Luck during the recruiting process. While it's expected that Stanford quarterbacks will spend some time honing their craft, Mills has had to overcome more obstacles than most, beginning with a knee injury during his senior year of high school, and two more severe injuries at Stanford. He's only appeared in one game, throwing two incompletions and rushing for five yards against UC-Davis last season, but he seems finally to be healthy. As Costello said last week, "You really gotta feel for the kid, but right now he looks better than I've ever seen him." Assuming every thing goes as planned, Mills would take over as the starter in 2020 after Costello graduates and leaves for the NFL.
Also in the room are senior Jack Richardson and sophomore Jack West. West arrived as a highly-touted prep out of Alabama, so his future is bright. While there is no quarterback in the recently arrived recruiting class, there is another great one on the way. Tanner McKee will arrive next summer at the conclusion of his religious mission to begin his apprenticeship. He'll struggle with the play book, he'll spend time working in virtual reality, and he'll be the one throwing passes on a lonely practice field long after the sun has dipped behind the buildings. He'll be anonymous, but only for a year or two.
