Game Week: Idaho State @ Oregon State

CORVALLIS — When Gevani McCoy stepped in front a throng of cameras and microphones for the first time since earning the Oregon State Beavers starting quarterback job, he wore a sparkling gold chain and large lion pendant around his neck.

“King of the jungle,” McCoy said Tuesday afternoon, flashing a wide smile, as he explained the bling’s significance.

At the very least, he’s the new king of Corvallis.

McCoy won over the Oregon State coaching staff with his dual-threat ability, improvisational skills, arm talent, intelligence and consistency, landing the most prominent job at a program fighting for its Power 4 life in the first year of the post-Pac-12 world.

In some ways, McCoy’s ascent is a long shot. He beat out one player (Ben Gulbranson) who has started nine times and won seven games at Oregon State and another (Gabarri Johnson) with a four-star pedigree. But in other ways, it’s simply another unexpected victory for a player who has been overlooked all his life, even as he’s guided teams to playoff success and earned coveted individual awards.

For those who have followed McCoy’s journey from unheralded high school recruit to FCS star to OSU starter, the last month has felt eerily similar.

It was just two seasons ago, after all, that McCoy found himself in a similar multi-player battle for the starting quarterback job at the University of Idaho, where he began his college career.

When coach Jason Eck arrived in Moscow, Idaho, he looked at the redshirt freshman from California with one eyebrow raised. McCoy stood just 6-feet tall, weighed a measly 173 pounds, coasted in the classroom and hadn’t performed all that well in limited playing time as a true freshman, tossing more interceptions (four) than touchdowns (one) in three games.

“My first impressions weren’t really all that high,” Eck said. “He wasn’t doing great in school. He was scrawny. He didn’t have the ideal package.”

The Idaho coaching staff openly discussed moving McCoy to wide receiver or defensive back.

He defied their expectations in the spring, emerging as the slight favorite in a heated competition that included seven quarterbacks, but it wasn’t enough to ease the staff’s concerns.

“We didn’t feel great,” Eck said. “So we brought in a transfer.”

The transfer? J’Bore Gibbs, a 6-3, 215-pound force who had played 10 games under Eck when he was the offensive coordinator at South Dakota State. McCoy’s chances at landing the starting job were seemingly dead.

Instead, he flourished. McCoy easily won the job in fall camp and had a record-setting freshman season, passing for 2,721 yards, 27 touchdowns and recording a school-record 68.4 completion percentage to win the Jerry Rice Award, given annually to the best freshman in FCS. A year later, after throwing for 2,910 yards and 15 touchdowns, McCoy earned First-Team All-Big-Sky honors and was a finalist for the Walter Payton Award.

All the while, McCoy had a similar renaissance in the classroom, boosting his grade point average more than a point, from roughly 2.0 to better than 3.0.

So while Beavers fans spent August contemplating the steadiness of Gulbranson and imagining the tantalizing potential of Johnson, McCoy quietly leaned on what he learned during his experience at Idaho.

“This isn’t the first time that I’ve been in a QB competition,” he said. “And that helped a whole lot. It was just kind of weird (at Idaho). We went through spring ball and I kind of came out on top and then they brought a guy in. But I just kept my head down and I just stayed at it. And that’s all it wa.

He said he finally felt like the Beavers had become his team after the first scrimmage, when he completed 7 of 9 passes for 65 yards and had a nice opening drive, which featured a 16-yard completion to wide receiver Darrius Clemons and a 25-yard completion to running back Jam Griffin. It was a small taste of how McCoy performed most of camp.

“When you when you talk about consistency, it’s consistency in everything,” OSU offensive coordinator Ryan Gunderson said. “It’s consistency in what we’re asking him to do, consistency in hitting throws. And then, what we really want, consistency as a quarterback speaks to not turning the ball over and not taking sacks. And those are two really big parts of offensive football and staying ahead of the chains. So I think those are kind of the areas that he maybe shined in.”

But McCoy’s win was anything but a landslide. And when Gunderson sat the redshirt junior down last Tuesday to share the news, the Beavers’ first-year offensive coordinator made that abundantly clear.

“You’ve got two talented guys that are pissed off and hungry now, so they’re going to be chasing,” Gunderson told McCoy. “You better up your game, too.”

The man who oversaw a similar battle two seasons ago in Idaho has little doubt McCoy will answer Gunderson’s challenge. After all, he’s experienced the king of the jungle.

“He’s a competitor,” Eck said. “He’s a tough kid. And he competes. I’m not surprised that he would win the QB competition, because I’ve already seen him win one here. He’s a good player who can throw and use his legs — he’s a great scrambler. That’s where he’s at his best. He’s really good off schedule, really good against pressure. Some of that stuff is tough to judge in training camp, when you’re not going live and quarterbacks can’t be hit. So if they liked him enough to give him the job in training camp, they’ll really like him with he faces a live rush and he can escape the sacks.

“I wish him the best. I’m rooting for him.”

— Joe Freeman | jfreeman@oregonian.com