Battle of the Marshall QB's

(Oct. 4, 2006) -- They will meet up this weekend, but Jets quarterback Chad Pennington and Jaguars quarterback Byron Leftwich first met up at Marshall in 1998.

Pennington was the junior quarterback, Leftwich the freshman, and they made a friendly little wager they still remember today.

"He bets me he could throw (a football) through the goal posts from the 50-yard line," Pennington recalled. "I'm like, 'You're a true freshman; there's no way.' He made it through it easy."

And Pennington had to dip into his pocket, which hurt a lot more then than it would today.

Chad Pennington passed for 14,036 yards and 123 touchdowns at Marshall.
"He bought me McDonald's," Leftwich recalled. "We went through the drive-through and he bought me the value meal. It had to have been the quarter-pounder value meal because it was the only thing that I would eat."

Pennington fed Leftwich a quarter pounder that day, and knowledge the rest of his time together at Marshall, where both quarterbacks excelled so much that they went on to become first-round draft picks.

"I came into a situation where the best quarterback in college football was Chad Pennington," Leftwich said. "He helped me and showed me how he got there. As a guy coming in as a freshman and new to school, and then here's a guy who is the number one quarterback in the country, who is not selfish, who wanted to make me a better football player from day one. I respect that from the beginning. He showed me how to study, how to prepare, and he showed me the do's and the don'ts of the quarterback position."

Byron Leftwich amassed 11,903 passing yards and 89 TDs for the Thundering Herd.
Now those do's and don'ts could come back to bite Pennington, as his Jets will square off against Leftwich's Jaguars. But the fact that both made it out of Marshall and to the NFL is nothing new these days. In fact, it's one of the hottest trends in the NFL.

On Oct. 8, five former Mid-American Conference (MAC) quarterbacks will start in the NFL, two against each other. Aside from Pennington and Leftwich -- who played for Marshall before it moved to Conference USA -- there's former Akron standout Charlie Frye, who starts for Cleveland; former Miami (Ohio) star Ben Roethlisberger, who starts for Pittsburgh; and former Toledo signal-caller Bruce Gradkowski, who will make his first NFL start for Tampa Bay.

Usually, Michigan or Southern California are the schools that are thought to produce the quarterbacks. Now it's quarterbacks from the MAC who tend to indulge themselves in Big Macs.

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