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Texarkana QB stands tallest! WOW

KFDM COOP

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KFDM COOP

KFDM COOP

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Texarkana QB stands tallest

Uncle Rico boasted he could once throw a football a quarter-mile and wanted to bet that he could throw the pigskin over a mountain in the movie Napoleon Dynamite.

No one's come anywhere close to that.

But give Ryan Mallett a few years, and who knows what could happen?

Word of the 6-foot-6, 230-pound junior quarterback from Texarkana Texas High and his incredible arm strength is already wowing college coaches. Throw in that he has all the other tools to be an elite quarterback, and it makes Mallett the top recruit in Texas for the class of 2007.

"That's probably my trademark," Mallett said about his arm strength. "That's what people always ask me about and what they see the first time they see me play. It takes them two or three times of seeing me to notice that I'm not just throwing the ball hard."

Texas High coach Barry Norton joked that Mallett can "throw it from here to Dallas." He hasn't quite reached Dallas, but as a freshman, he was throwing the ball 70 yards in the air at camps and threw one 81 yards last summer.

"It doesn't take much of a brain to figure out that that's pretty special," said Jeremy Crabtree, director of the recruiting Web site Rivals100.com.

The velocity has been dangerous to receivers at times. In the season opener last year, he connected with a teammate on a 16-yard crossing pattern, hitting him right in the palm of the hand. The ball was thrown so hard that it dislocated two of the player's fingers.

"He's probably got as strong an arm as anybody I've ever seen as a junior in high school," said Randy Rodgers, a former recruiting coordinator at Texas and Illinois who now advises more than 50 Division I-A schools.

It's not just his arm strength that has made Mallett the top recruit in the state and the No. 9 recruit in the country, according to Rivals100.com.

He is also very accurate.

"He can throw the ball on line 40-50 yards down the field," Rodgers said. "It makes him an unbelievable prospect if he's in an offense where the receivers run a lot of spot routes."

And he's shown he can handle the most pressure-filled situations.

As a freshman, he played twice in the regular season. He made his next start in the Class 4A Division I state semifinal against North Crowley. Texas High lost 17-13, but Mallett almost rallied his team to victory in the final minute.

"I was looking for some freshman kid to look like a normal freshman," North Crowley coach Mike Papas said. "He walked into the starting lineup and looked like anything but a freshman. He looked like he was in command of the whole thing."

Mallett has improved since then. As a junior, he completed 133 of 221 passes for 2,219 yards with 21 TDs and only six interceptions, leading Texas High to a 9-1 record. The team lost 38-31 to eventual state champion Highland Park, which had Matt Stafford, the top quarterback in the country for 2006.

As the top recruit in the state, he'll probably have his choice of colleges. Mallett said he wants to play for a team with great tradition, and schools such as Texas, Michigan, Arkansas and Nebraska are likely to be in the mix.

Rivals100.com ranks him as the nation's second-best junior quarterback behind Jimmy Clausen from California.

With a strong senior season, he could surpass Clausen. In order to do that, Rodgers feels he'll need to work on reining in Mallett's arm.

"You can't throw the heater on every pass, and he's getting better at that," Rodgers said. "He has a year to work on that."

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