Did Blake Shapen's Injury Cause Baylor Bears QB's Difficult Season?
While Baylor Bears quarterback Blake Shapen wasn’t lighting up the college football world the first month of the 2022 season, his year took a turn for the worse after a head injury in the October 13 loss to the West Virginia Mountaineers. Is that injury to blame for Shapen’s struggles over the last two months?
Shapen wasn’t a Heisman candidate or anything, but there was definite progression and trust in the early part of the season, as evidenced by how the offense was operating. Through the first five games, Shapen completed 69% of his passes, threw for 11 touchdowns to just three picks, and had a 162 QBR.
Specifically in the West Virginia game where he got hurt, Shapen was slinging the ball around as he had in the 2021 conference championship game, going 14-22 and 326 yards with two touchdowns and no interceptions before being knocked out of the game in the third quarter.
Two weeks before, Shapen and the Bears had gashed the Iowa State Cyclones, the second-best total defense and top passing defense in the Big 12, for 238 yards and three touchdowns with no interceptions. Baylor’s 31 points in that game in Ames was two scores better than Iowa State’s average points allowed.
Even with an extra two days of rest (the West Virginia game was a Thursday night), I was surprised to see Shapen start the next game against Kansas, especially since the offense looked good at the end of the game in Kyron Drones’ hands. Shapen’s season went downhill from there.
Against the Jayhawks, Shapen threw two picks, one on the goal line, allowing Kansas back in the game. The Jayhawks capitalized on Shapen’s mistakes and the offense stalling en route to a 20-0 run that cut the Bear lead from 28-3 to 28-23 before Baylor pulled out the 35-23 victory.
After the West Virginia loss, having not missed a game with the head injury, Shapen’s numbers nosedived. After the injury, Shapen threw for just five touchdowns to seven interceptions and only completed 60% of his passes. The trust dissipated too, partially evidenced by his 10 yards per completion the final seven games of the year.
The Bears were 3-3 after the loss to the Mountaineers, but their long-term success may have actually taken a hit when Shapen went out of that game. With his decline in production, Bears fans are wondering whether he is the long-term solution to lead the offense. Drones, on the other hand, entered his name into the transfer portal and the scholarship quarterback depth chart could be down to Shapen and true freshman Austin Novosad.
After the hit, Shapen became all the things he wasn't before Dave Aranda named him the starter. Leading up to the hit, Shapen was a composed quarterback with as much moxie as he had accuracy who was confident and a legitimate dual threat. After the hit, Shapen turned the ball over at an alarming clip, seemed to lack confidence in the pocket, was done in by poor decision making (see Ben Sims on the final offensive play against TCU) and apprehensiveness to run.
The Bears let Gerry Bohanon transfer in the offseason not because he was bad, but because he was limited, and Shapen didn't have those same deficiencies. Bohanon got more turnover prone as the 2021 season went on and the Bears found it really tough to move the football through the air with him in the pocket during the last month of the season. Suddenly, after the West Virginia loss, those are the exact deficiencies the Bears have with Shapen.
Maybe he was just itching to get back in the starting lineup after the first threat of someone stealing his job, but Shapen is still a young quarterback with plenty of upside who his teammates trusted, they have said it time and time again in the offseason and during his struggles to end the year.
For the first time since the hit, Shapen will have more than six days to prepare for a game, something he and the coaching staff desperately need. That kind of break could prove a lot to fans and coaches to see what they have going into next season, but there is no timetable for head injuries and no amount of sweat and want-to can just get you back to 100 percent.
Shapen still has a high ceiling. He didn't take the major step forward a lot of people thought he would, and I wonder just how much the hit from Andrew Wilson-Lamp affected Baylor's season and Shapen's rise to stardom.
Follow Cameron Stuart on Twitter
Want the latest in breaking and insider news for the Baylor Bears? Click Here
Follow Inside the Bears on Twitter and Facebook
Make sure to subscribe to our daily podcast @LockedOnBaylor today! Click here To Listen.
Want even more Baylor Bears News? Check out the SI.com team page here
Covering Baylor for Inside The Bears and the Locked on Baylor podcast. You can follow me for more Baylor content at @realcamstuart on Twitter. Originally from Rockland, Massachusetts and a Baylor alum, so I might mix the occasional bias and/or Boston sports tweet in there every once in a while.