Nick Foles is a Super Bowl QB, years after his unusual college career produced a meme

Now that the Eagles’ Nick Foles is OFFICIALLY a Super Bowl quarterback, it’s important to remember his humble beginnings as a QB who threw for a bajillion yards and countless TDs for the Arizona Wildcats between 2009 and 2011, largely in losing efforts.

In 2011, as co-host of The Solid Verbal, the internet’s most consistently uploaded college football podcast, we always like to look for weird ways to appreciate the sport we love. And since I’m one of approximately 47 die-hard Pac-12 football fans, I began to notice Foles kept having really good games in Arizona’s prolific air raid offense, but the Wildcats would come up *just* short, over and over again.

My co-host, Ty Hildenbrandt, and I decided to celebrate the fact that Foles basically did everything he could to will the Wildcats to a win, but for whatever reason (read: defense, poor coaching), Arizona just couldn’t finish off opponents. So we tagged on “...in a losing effort,” in the way that TV anchors would find a silver lining at the end of a highlight read. Here are some of those losses through the years:

After the way he finished the 2010 regular season (well!), his performances became a fun thing to track at the onset of 2011. We were syndicated on the Grantland Network that season, and producer Dave Jacoby’s only real comment on our show was to not get bogged down with stats, but to keep things light and lean into things like “Nick Foles in a Losing Effort,” which he thought was weird and funny as a non-college football fan. As a senior in 2011, he threw for 4,334 yards, 28 TDs, and 14 INTs, all for a 4-8 team whose coach, Mike Stoops, was fired midseason.

There’s not too much beyond that. We enjoyed following relatively inconsequential Arizona games just so we could review an unlucky QB’s stat line with a goofy little letdown sound effect. In retrospect, it was an exercise that, more than anything, helped us to build a community and language among like-minded college football weirdos.

To this day, whenever he’s playing in an NFL game, we’ll always get some stray tweets about “Nick Foles in a Losing Effort,” a fun reminder of an in-joke that briefly became our own little college football internet thing a few years ago.

As a postscript, I interviewed Foles in 2012 at an NFLPA event in L.A. for SB Nation, asked if he had heard of “Nick Foles in a Losing Effort,” to which he said he had and sort of chuckled. I didn’t push any more with “losing effort” stuff — I figured he was just drafted and it was a cool time in his life, so no need to stay hung up on games he lost — but it was a fun moment of closure. He then went on to have one of the greatest seasons by a QB ever, bounce around the league for a few years, return to Philly, and reach the Super Bowl.

Oh, and to be clear, Foles as a backup QB coming in for an injured Carson Wentz and playing out of his mind in the NFC Championship game is a storyline that completely rules. And we hope he has an enormous game vs. the Patriots ... in a winning effort.