There is no more degrading title than one with “backup” ingrained in its name. To hold a high-profile position like that is to walk around each day with a scarlet “B” on your chest, to be branded with a constant reminder of your inadequacy.
For the most part, our world tends to grace its second-stringers with more dignified labels, ones maybe more politically correct, ones with honor. Undersized scorers on the hardcourt are called “Sixth Men.” The guy who didn’t get the lead role? He’s an “understudy.” Even the Army has “reserves.”
If anything fails to offer such sugar coating, it’s football. Barbaric in nature and ruthlessly competitive, it shouldn’t, if you think about it. Backup quarterbacks are not like backup catchers in baseball, considered more of an asset than a burden. Instead, backup quarterbacks could be considered the least important members of the team, the guys famous enough for you to know their name but not good enough for you to care. The guys living on a prayer. I’m sure whoever instilled the term “backup quarterback” into the vernacular meant for it to motivate. I’m sure they weren’t trying to humiliate their Plan B, but trying to push him, trying to give him some light at the end of his tunnel of toiling.
Corbin Berkstresser is just a redshirt freshman. Many have toiled for much longer. But that doesn’t mean 71,004 Missouri fans weren’t disappointed Saturday when he took the field.
Berkstresser’s situation was a confusing one. How do you perform for your coaches, teammates and fans when deep down those people wish you weren’t there? Even the scoreboard failed to acknowledge his presence early on, flashing video of James Franklin when announcing the starting lineups before kickoff.
“I told Corbin last night that he might have to play,” coach Gary Pinkel told reporters after the win.
Read into those words. “Might” have to go in, like necessary surgery.
Wide receiver T.J. Moe also chimed in on his teammate’s performance late Saturday.
“I thought Corbin did pretty well,” he said.
“Pretty well.” Like, OK, not great, could have been better.
Thus is the psychology of the backup quarterback, the most mentally taxing position in sports. Berkstresser could have been better, if you measure quarterback success in yards or touchdowns or any of the dozens of wacky formulas out there. But the performance of the leader is most accurately measured in wins. It is measured in resiliency. It is measured in results. Berkstresser went out Saturday and won a football game against a good team. He didn’t win it pretty well — he just won.
It can’t be easy spending every game lightly tossing on the sideline in a baseball cap, watching someone whose better than you at throwing touchdowns throw touchdowns. It can’t be easy knowing the celebratory M-I-Z-Z-O-U chant would have echoed with or without you.
That’s why it’s difficult to appreciate what was going through Berkstresser’s head as he stood in the shotgun at the Sun Devil 6 with just less than 7 minutes left in the first half, seconds before he would score his first collegiate touchdown. It’s difficult to quantify the elation that must have resulted as he dragged three defenders over that goal line with him, the relief.
“I was like, ‘I have to get in no matter what,’” Berkstresser told reporters later. “At the time I was like, ‘I have to get in.’”
And he did. He got in the game, he got in the end zone, and eventually, he got in the win column.
Don’t soon forget Saturday, Corbin Berkstresser. Because on that night, when they chanted, it went more like this: M-I-Z-Z-O-YOU. Yes, Corbin. They were cheering for you.