Tyrone Swoopes’ career could go in so many different directions.

How high can Tyrone Swoopes climb? We take a stab at it. Â© USA TODAY Sports Images

So far, it hasn’t ever seemed to go the direction it was supposed to. Once a can’t-miss five-star prospect, Swoopes went 1-9 in his senior season at Whitewright while completing fewer passes than he didn’t complete. He was set to redshirt behind David Ash and Case McCoy last year, but ended up playing in five of the final seven games.

This year, Swoopes was supposed to be a serviceable backup behind a healthy Ash, but we all know how that worked out. Perceived by some as nothing more than the only thing keeping Jerrod Heard’s redshirt on when he took over, Swoopes has evolved into a decent starter and shown the potential to enjoy a solid career as the Longhorns’ long-term starting quarterback.

But how high is Swoopes’ ceiling? What can be expected from him the rest of this year, and in the years to come — if he is to hold off Heard and any other incoming quarterbacks as the team’s starter?

He’s only attempted a pass in six games, not a huge sample size, but it gives us something to work with, especially with the last three being games he started. Over the past 15 years, a quarterback has attempted at least one pass in a game 33,164 times, according to Sports-Reference.com — a much more substantial sample size.

Combing through that data reveals that 1,410 quarterbacks have thrown a pass in at least six games over the past 15 seasons, including Swoopes. Most of those signal-callers, unlike Swoopes, have thrown a pass in many more than six games. In an effort to get a better idea how the rest of Swoopes’ career will play out, we narrow our data set to just the first six games of these 1,410 careers.

Then, we apply a hierarchical agglomerative clustering method on the narrowed-down data set. (Editor Note: "Gibberish to me," — Trey Scott)

Simply put, this method treats every quarterback as if it were its own group before putting similar “groups” together to form bigger groups. The method determines how similar groups are by measuring the “distance” between them in a multidimensional space, where the dimensions are the various measures of quarterback performance (here, they are completions, attempts, completion percentage, pass touchdowns and interceptions).

The actual groups are not of as much interest to us as those actual (Euclidean) distances. They are captured in a distance matrix that shows how “far” away every quarterback is away from each other. The smaller the number in that matrix, the more similar the corresponding quarterbacks are to each other. Below are the 10 quarterbacks most similar to Swoopes, according to this method:

After six games, Swoopes has some familiar doppelgÃ¤ngers in Connor Cook and Bret Meyer. Â© USA TODAY Sports Images

1) R.J. Anderson, Syracuse (00-03) Distance: 4.009

2) Cody Ednres, Connecticut (08-10) Distance: 4.171

3) Jeff Van Camp, Florida Atlantic (07-10) Distance: 4.405

4) Bradlee Van Pelt, Colorado State (01-03) Distance: 4.423

5) Robert Johnson, Arkansas (04-07) Distance: 4.444

6) Connor Cook, Michigan State (12-) Distance 4.545

7) Bret Meyer, Iowa State (04-07) Distance: 4.553

8) Perry Patterson, Syracuse (03-06) Distance: 4.607

9) Adam Dingwell, San Diego State (11-13) Distance: 4.675

10) Jacoby Brissett, Florida/NC State (11-14) Distance: 4.73

Some mostly nondescript names in the top half of that table, although the guy at the top, R.J. Anderson, did lead Syracuse to a 10-3 record in 2001, capped off by handing Kansas State its worst loss of the year, a 26-3 romping in the Insight.com Bowl. It is the best season the Orange have had over the last 20 years.

The bottom half of this table is a bit more interesting. Connor Cook, the standout Spartans signal-caller, comes in at No. 6. Like Swoopes, he played sparingly as a freshman before taking over as a sophomore last year – when he started an 11-game winning streak as a starter that didn’t end until Oregon beat Michigan State last month. He is 15-2 as the Spartans’ starter.

Also making the cut is Iowa State’s all-time leading passer Bret Meyer and NC State’s Jacoby Brissett, who stepped into the national spotlight last week when he passed for 359 yards and three touchdowns in a 56-41 loss to top-ranked Florida State.

Some other notable names that appear a little further down the list are shown in the table below:

30. Trevone Boykin, TCU. Distance: 5.45

45. Colin Kaepernick, Nevada. Distance: 5.624

67. Collin Klein, Kansas State. Distance: 5.905

71. Taylor Martinez, Nebraska. Distance: 5.940

72. Vince Young, Texas. Distance: 5.947

513. David Ash, Texas. Distance: 7.526

1091. Teddy Bridgewater, Louisville. Distance: 9.122

1253. Colt McCoy, Texas. Distance: 10.050

Obviously the name that sticks out here is Vince Young. The former Longhorns and national champion who went 30-2 over three scintillating seasons as Texas’ starting quarterback is one of many intriguing dual-threats here, including Colin Kaepernick, Taylor Martinez and Collin Klein. Conversely, it’s worth noting that Teddy Bridgewater – who had so much success under Charlie Strong at Louisville – and Colt McCoy had among the least similar starts to their college football careers to Swoopes’ start.

Using the results of this distance matrix, produced by using hierarchical agglomerative clustering, which employs Ward’s method to determine how to group various observations, we can project Swoopes’ career stats. Those projections are shown below.

Tyrone Swoopes played against TCU, but did not attempt a pass, so the game didn't start his clock. Â© USA TODAY Sports Images

Initial: 25 games, 246-for-439 (56.15) for 3,037 yards, 19 TDs and 13 INTs.

Adjusted: 40 games, 398-for-710 (56.15) for 4,931 yards, 31 TDs and 22 INTs.

Final: 40 games, 719-for-1,2800 (56.15) for 8,861 yards, 56 TDs and 39 INTs.Season Avg: 13 games, 234-for-416 (56.15) for 2,880 yards, 18 TDs and 13 INTs.

A quick explanation here: The initial projection is based on the weighted career stats of the 100 quarterbacks who had the most similar starts to their careers as Swoopes did. The first adjustment is based on an arbitrary assumption – that Swoopes remains the Longhorns’ starter throughout the rest of his career and stays healthy through the end of his senior season.

If he starts the final eight regular season games of this year – not assuming Texas plays in a bowl game this year – Swoopes will have played in 14 games. If he plays in 13 apiece his junior and senior seasons (now assuming the Longhorns reach a bowl game those years), that brings his total to 40 games.

The final career projection makes another, likely safer assumption – that Swoopes will throw it more than the first two estimates say he will. Those projections have Swoopes averaging just 17.75 passes per game despite the fact that he’s thrown more than 30 passes in each of his first three career starts.

If we’re assuming that he’s the guy for the rest of his career (probably not a safe assumption, but we’re making it for hypothetical purposes), then we’re likely assuming he’s throwing it closer to 35 times a game than 17.75. So we go with 32 – the average number of passes Swoopes has made in his three starts this year.

Since Swoopes isn’t running the ball much and only averaging one yard per carry this year when he does, his rushing stats aren’t considered here. We’re making another assumption here – that Swoopes’ contribution to the running game will be somewhat negligible over the next 2.5 seasons – but it’s probably not a bad one considering the weight he’s put on since coming to Texas.

That gives us a final career passing line of 8,861 yards, 56 TD, 39 INT, with Swoopes completing 56.15 percent of his throws and a TD-to-INT ratio close to 1.5. To put that in perspective, that comes out to a 13-game season average of 2,880 yards, 18 TD and 13 INT. Not superstar-level numbers, but respectable.

Back to the original question: how high is Swoopes’ ceiling? As unremarkable as the stats in these projections are, Swoopes’ ceiling could be fairly high. There was a lot of variance in the data we used. As one can imagine, when all you have to look at is a guy’s first six career games, the rest of his career can go a lot of different directions. And that was the case for the other 1,409 quarterbacks in this data set.

Below is a breakdown of the distribution of passing stats among the 100 most similar quarterbacks used for this analysis. As indicated by the large standard deviations, these careers did indeed go many different directions.

Average: 25 games, 238-for-for-424 (55.7) for 2,944 yards, 19 TDs and 13 INTs.

Minimum: 7 games, 26-for-47 (44.92) for 268 yards, 0 TDs and 1 INT.

Maximum: 51 games, 820-for-1473 (69.74) for 10,098 yards, 82 TDs and 43 INTs.

What is still unclear is which direction Swoopes’ career – which has already made many detours – will go. But, as these projections prove, the best guess as to which direction it will go is a relatively encouraging one.