Obvious coaching hire is obvious

Since Mike Leach got yoinked off the unemployment line by Washington State about 1.6 seconds after Paul Wulff got canned, Kevin Sumlin was THE GUY (all caps) in the world of coaching vacancies for the last two weeks. Women wanted him, men wanted to be him, etc. Unbeaten seasons tend to do that.

ASU nearly had him locked up until the untimely (or timely, maybe) firing of Mike Sherman by Texas A&M made the most obvious hire of the offseason extremely ... umm ... obvious. I wrote this the night of Sherman's pink-slip-by-text-message awkwardness:

I'll be surprised if Sumlin isn't sitting at a podium by Tuesday.

That was last Tuesday; I dunno what took so long. There were rumors that A&M was looking at Chris Petersen (lol no), Mark Richt (intriguing but no) and Charlie Strong (meh), but my guess is is that Sumlin was the back-pocket guy the whole time. It's easy to go for broke when there's a swell fallback plan awaiting the job offer he's allegedly always wanted.

Here's some more from that Sherman post (I could easily copy and paste about 500 Sumlin-related words since I was already totally convinced he was getting the job):

If you're Bill Byrne and you're putting together an ideal resume for an A&M head coach, it probably looks a lot like Sumlin's. A hypothetical choice between a 47-year-old Sumlin and a 57-year-old Sherman would probably be a pretty easy one. That scenario assumes Sumlin wants the A&M job, but that seems like a safe assumption ...

So ... the resume. He has it. Two years as O-coordinator and assistant head coach at A&M in 2001 and '02, two years as Oklahoma co-offensive coordinator (2006 and '07) and a 35-17 record in four years as head coach at Houston (and that number would be even better if not for a 5-7 finish last year after Case Keenum and backup Cotton Turner both suffered season-ending injuries in the third game of the season). Solid. He also worked under Dennis Erickson and then Mike Price at Wazzu, was receivers coach under Joe Tiller at Purdue and then spent five years with Bob Stoops, who's had a pretty ridiculous string of offensive coordinators. It's that assistant-y stuff that should assuage any fears about him being an overrated flash-in-the-crappy-conference-pan coach. Again:

If you're Bill Byrne and you're putting together an ideal resume for an A&M head coach, it probably looks a lot like Sumlin's.

There's also some consistency to that resume in a stylistic sense, by which I mean Sumlin is probably going to throw it a billion times. His seven years as a playcaller have produced the following passing offenses: 79th, 21st, 70th (first year at Oklahoma), 36th, second (first year at Houston), first, fifth, first. In case you were wondering, that first year at Oklahoma was the year Adrian Peterson went ham before breaking his collarbone and Paul Thompson was the starting quarterback because of Rhett Bomar's NCAA shenanigans. That team went to the Fiesta Bowl. A&M's offenses will be fine.

As for the program as a whole ... ummm ... ahh, screw it. Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V time:

There was a poll -- I think it was done by ESPN the Magazine or ESPN Insider or whatever -- last offseason that asked college coaches to rank the most underachieving (or something like that) programs in the country. A&M was the runaway winner. There were a whole bunch of anonymous comments about money and the Texas recruiting base and the fan support and blah blah blah. It's clearly a desirable job when other coaches are gazing longingly and saying, "man, that's a school that should be winning a lot." Also, Dennis Franchione left Alabama to take over at A&M, which shows what's happened to those two programs in the last decade.

I don't see the SEC West being beneficial in that regard; finishing any better than third on a regular basis is gonna be pretty tough. Still, expecting to be significantly better than .500 on a regular basis isn't unreasonable (what's the difference between A&M and Arkansas?). Sherman got four years and couldn't quite do it, although I don't think he was far off. Maybe Sumlin can.

There's really no reason A&M can't win. The only inherent disadvantage is the division, which is gonna be utterly loaded for as long as Nick Saban and Les Miles are alive. But what's the difference between A&M and Arkansas (other than A&M having a more significant recruiting presence in Texas)? That's the upside for Sumlin's A&M: Bobby Petrino's Arkansas. That's a reasonable expectation, especially under a guy with a very Petrino-esque track record who's been mining southeast Texas for the last decade at schools that have been winning a lot more than A&M.

I'm not sure exactly what the downside is; Sumlin's floor seems relatively high except for the whole "eek SEC West" thing. He's like the anti-Weis in that there's not a single thing I can point to as an obvious reason the guy shouldn't succeed. Actually doing it is the tricky part.

Jim Mora Jr. probably isn't Pete Carroll

Dan Guerrero kinda backed UCLA into a corner when Rick Neuheisel was fired and he insisted that he'd hire somebody with the resume of Bear Bryant except better and younger. He talked about there being "more resources" because of the Pac-12 TV deal and said UCLA was "in it to get the coach we want" and then offered a ginormous pile of baby-blue cash to Chris Petersen and Al Golden and Kevin Sumlin and possible Steve Sarkisian.

And then he hired Jim Mora Jr. because he was the only plausible guy with head coaching experience (a stated requirement) who actually wanted the job. Since UCLA wants and always has wanted to be USC, the company line is uber obvious: "He's Pete Carroll!" He's a relatively young guy (50) with zero meaningful college experience but some respectable NFL years and the right level of desperation/enthusiasm to try something totally different, so sure. He's Pete Carroll.

The odds of him actually being Pete Carroll are microscopic. A couple things to consider: Jim Mora Jr. hasn't done any recruiting since I was 2 years old (!), hasn't really been visible* as a coach since this year's high school juniors (guys he'll be recruiting) were in sixth grade and has never run/built/hired a college staff. The fact that Pete Carroll was in a similar situation isn't a good thing; correlation does not equal causation. Those are not insignificant obstacles.

This made me laugh:

True, Mora isn’t exactly the splashy, big-name hire many UCLA fans were hoping to land, but there are reasons to believe his hire makes a lot of sense.

First, he has no UCLA ties in his past. Second, he is a defensive-minded coach. Third, he has no noteworthy experience as a college coach.

That bucks the trend of the past three UCLA coaches who are seen as the holy triumvirate of mediocrity. Bob Toledo, Karl Dorrell and Neuheisel were all Bruins assistants at some point before they became head coach; Dorrell and Neuheisel were UCLA players.

Guh. Translation:

I'm pretty sure Neuheisel didn't fail because he was previously a successful head coach, and I'm pretty sure Dorrell didn't fail because he was formerly a UCLA assistant. That doesn't make sense.

As for Mora, let's be realistic here: UCLA isn't USC. USC was down but was still USC when Carroll got there. The players who went 11-2 in '02 were already on campus. UCLA has had extremely sporadic success since about the peak of the Terry Donahue era in the mid-'80s and wasn't exactly a powerhouse before then. The Bob Toledo/Al Borges/Cade McNown teams in '97 and '98 were about the only signs of Pac-whatever relevance in the last 15 years; there's been one eight-plus-win season in that time. Yes, the campus is awesome and the girls are hot and the academics are pretty good and yadda yadda yadda. USC will still get more/better talent and have all the football-related big sticks to swing.

Rick Neuheisel's problem was never recruiting. Just the opposite, actually: His first three classes (eighth, 13th and 14th nationally on Rivals) were regularly waaay better than anything UCLA had seen since people started paying attention to that stuff. Neuheisel's problem was taking those guys and turning them into good players who would actually win games. I mentioned this in my coachpocalypse post, but it's worth repeating here: Neuheisel never had a decent quarterback and didn't have very good coordinators (unless you want to count Norm Chow, who seemed like a good hire but never produced a competent offense since he never had a competent quarterback). His offenses went from terrible to bad to decent while the defenses went from average to bad to terrible. That's how you go eight games under .500 in four years and get fired.

Neuheisel basically blamed UCLA for not ponying up the cash to get a decent staff. I'm not so sure since Chow was getting paid about $550,000 a year. Regardless, having good coordinators is obviously important, especially for a head coach who doesn't call plays (or totally dominate the coaching) on one side of the ball. Mora has been a pretty good D-coordinator, but I have a really hard time envisioning him handling every aspect of the defense while also trying to figure out literally everything about being a college head coach. At the very least, he'll have to find a competent defensive assistant while making a serious upgrade at O-coordinator and finding a whole bunch of good recruiters, preferably with SoCal experience. His NFL connections should help some in that regard, but keep in mind that Carroll's staff was filled with successful college guys and young recruiter types. He had the still-good version of Norm Chow (who'd been at NC State), Lane Kiffin, the barely-out-of-college Steve Sarkisian, Nick Holt, Ed Orgeron and probably some other guys I'm forgetting. Again, college guys. We'll see whether Mora tries to go that route or the Jim Harbaugh-at-Stanford route (Vic Fangio, Greg Roman, et al).

There is a non-zero chance that Mora is somewhere between successful and Pete Carroll II. There's some talent and tradition and a promised increase in money available for assistants, and I can't think of any particular reason why UCLA can't regularly have the eight- and nine-win teams that are getting produced about once or twice a decade right now.

I just don't see what the evidence is that Mora's the guy to do that, probably because there isn't any. All analysis is anecdotal and based on some tenuous similarities to the one guy who won big despite despite having no college experience and looking at the time like a terrible hire. There are infinite not-that-great NFL coaches who just, like, aren't that great and would look like bad hires. Not all of them are Pete Carroll.

UCLA is banking on the duplication of a perfect confluence of events in the perfect place at the perfect time. I'm skeptical. If I'm betting on either the non-zero chance that Mora is Pete Carroll or the way-greater-than-non-zero chance that Mora fails to make UCLA substantially better and leaves as a not-as-easy-to-laugh-at version of Charlie Weis, I'm going with the latter.

*I'm not counting his one 5-11 season with the Seahawks in 2009 before getting fired.

It's RGIII

The projections were accurate:

Robert Griffin III won the 77th Heisman Trophy on Saturday.

The junior quarterback, who led Baylor to a 9-3 record this season, collected 405 first-place votes and 1,687 overall points to beat Stanford quarterback Andrew Luck, who captured 247 first-place votes and 1,407 points.

"We're all amazed when great things happen," Griffin said on ESPN after winning the award. "They might say it couldn't happen at Baylor, but that's why we play college football."

I already said pretty much everything I have to say about RGIII's awesomeness. If I had a vote, it would've gone to Griffin. The guy earned it; he just won the Heisman Trophy (!) while playing for Baylor. Baylor!!!

Good for him.

I'll be there one day

I often refer to Michigan-Ohio State as The Game because ... I mean ... it's The Game. There's nothing like it. I've spent hundreds of dollars to fly across the country just to see it (totally worth it, BTW) and can't even explain to people my level of emotional investment in every edition of it. It's The Game.

There's a little-known requirement that every sports-media entity has to run a "What's the greatest rivalry in sports?" poll every November. It's like the speed-limit law: Adherence is what allows terrible columnists to continue getting paid from a pile of government money that somehow grows with every mind-numbingly stupid comment on the interwebz. Anyway, the choices have to be the following: Michigan-Ohio State, Alabama-Auburn, Army-Navy, North Carolina-Duke and Celtics-Lakers. I always vote for Army-Navy.

I also have a mental bucket list of college football experiences I desperately want to ... umm ... experience. There are some SEC stadiums and Autzen and South Bend on there somewhere. I'm not sure exactly what the order is other than the one at the top: Army-Navy.

I tried to explain the game to my wife once and didn't know how. I still don't. I thought I'd be able to in this paragraph since I can write a lot more coherently than I can talk; that's obviously not happening. The freakin' president is there! It's Army-Navy. I don't know what else to say.

But I think I finally got it. In video-says-1,000-words form:



Beautiful. That's why I wanna be there. /sappiness.

Something about a Carolina-blue hat

Since I foolishly promised myself that I would write something about every major-conference coaching hire this offseason, I will now produce some words about Larry Fedora taking over at North Carolina.

Perception is a funny thing. It really wasn't until Southern Miss kicked the crap out of then-unbeaten Houston in the C-USA title game that people realized (a) Southern Miss is literally three field goals away from being 13-0 this year and (b) Fedora has a track record that's pretty dang similar to (if not better than) Kevin Sumlin's. There's an alternate reality in which Southern Miss gets a couple bounces this year and is playing in a BCS game while Fedora has about a half-dozen major-conference teams fighting over him.

Anyway, Southern Miss finished 11-2 this year. In his three previous seasons, Fedora went 7-6, 7-6 and 8-5. No losing seasons in four years and an 11-2 finish equals "OMG MUST HIRE." But there's one potentially mitigating factor: Southern Miss has been the best program in Conference USA for most of my life. Fedora took over for Jeff Bower, who was head coach for 12 years and didn't have a single losing season before retiring in 2007 with a record of 119-83-1. His last five years: 9-4, 7-5, 7-5, 9-5, 7-6. Fedora's success has to be taken with a grain of salt given what was already in place at Southern Miss, which has been sort of like a C-USA version of '90s Boise State.

There was also a weirdly popular belief after the Houston game that Fedora was some defensive mastermind who totally outcoached Kevin Sumlin and was responsible for Case Keenum's brief suckitude. Negative. Fedora's an offensive guy all the way who wants to spread it out and go at Oregon speed; he just happens to have done a really good job at bringing in effective defensive coordinators. First it was Todd Bradford, who was hired when Fedora took over in '07 and then got the D-coordinator job at Maryland last winter, and then it was Dan Disch, who was co-defensive coordinator at Illinois a couple years ago and made what had been a slightly above-average defense a really good one (by C-USA standards) this year.

Also really good: the offense. That part was definitely Fedora's doing. The numbers: 23rd in rushing, 31st in passing, 13th in total yardage, 14th in scoring. Last year's numbers were almost identical, and the '09 ones were just slightly less impressive. Keep in mind that Fedora came up as O-coordinator at Middle Tennessee, then WRs/RBs coach at Florida, then O-coordinator at Florida (!) under Ron Zook and then O-coordinator at Oklahoma State before Dana Holgorsen. FYI, those Okie State offenses improved from 92nd to 16th to seventh in total yardage; 2004 Florida was 22nd. The guy knows what he's doing on offense. He doesn't go bonkers with the passing game like Holgorsen and Sumlin but does like to throw and definitely likes to do it out of the spread.

Fedora's not the typical "grumble grumble coachspeak toughness fundamentals grumble" guy. He's 49 and made a name for himself by creating good offenses that went at ludicrous speed. His quotes are telling and awesome:

"Instead of waiting to see what might develop, attack constantly, vigorously and viciously. Never let up, never stop, always attack. ...

"You'd better buckle your seat belts and you better hold on," Fedora said, "because it's going to be a wild ride."

Fantastic. I literally cannot imagine Brady Hoke* saying those things. I think there's an inherent game-theory advantage for guys who developed a balls-to-the-wall line of thinking (Chip Kelly, RichRod, et al) through working at places that don't have more talent/money/whatever. It's not a guarantee of success but is definitely a positive.

North Carolina does have some things to work with. Butch Davis pretty obviously had UNC headed toward regular ACC contention before ... ummm ... The Stuff. Butch Davis is also a pretty excellent coach. He took over for the thoroughly mediocre John Bunting and went 28-23 in four years, with the last one looking really promising until The Stuff started and half the team got suspended before the season-opening six-point loss to LSU.

So success is possible. The North Carolina region produces plenty of talent but typically gets mined by Va. Tech and Penn State and Georgia and Florida since those schools have something to offer in terms of football. UNC didn't until Butch Davis started winning; three years later, there were seven NFL-caliber players starting on defense. That's not a coincidence (BTW, the NCAA violations were mostly related to academics, agents and Gary Wichard's shenanigans and not recruiting). Fedora will get some talent and will have some success on offense, which in turn should bring in a little more talent. And there are some options on defense. Everett Withers was D-coordinator under Davis and did a respectable job as interim coach this year to get UNC to 7-5. He's been talked about for the head job at UAB and a few other coordinator jobs (Arkansas, specifically), and I won't be surprised Fedora tries to keep him around. He could also bring in Disch and keep the Southern Miss thing going.

The huge and unavoidable variable: the possibility of boom-goes-UNC penalties. The current damage is pretty insignificant in terms of its impact on Fedora/the future: two years of probation and a reduction of nine scholarships over the next three years (three per year). Meh. But the NCAA still hasn't come back with a final decision and could always pile on with some waaay worse stuff. North Carolina chancellor Holden Thorp actually came out and said he gave Fedora a seven-year deal (instead of five or whatever) because of the probation and the chance of short-term NCAA cratering, which would seriously hinder any on-field progress over the next few years.

If nothing gets tacked on, there's some opportunity for success. The Va. Tech/Florida State/Clemson group at the top of the ACC isn't exactly impenetrable. Davis was close but didn't get to see it through. Because of that, Fedora's starting point is a lot easier than Davis' was, which means he doesn't have to be Butch Davis to get UNC from consistent Peach Bowl participant to consistent divisional contender; he just has to keep doing what he's been doing and hope the NCAA has a little mercy.

*Brady Hoke doesn't talk that way but definitely thinks like a guy who worked his way up from the dregs of the MAC, which makes him the antithesis of Lloyd Carr and results in awesome things like (a) fake field goals to go ahead by 21 against Nebraska and (b) going for it at midfield in the first half against Ohio State on a drive that eventually produced a huge touchdown.

The anti-Zooker

The typical downside of hiring a "name" guy is that said guy is usually available for a reason. Proof: Charlie Weis is now working at Kansas. Illinois hired Ron Zook after he took over one of the top five-ish programs in the country and couldn't do better than 8-5. Steve Spurrier won a million games before him and Urban Meyer won a million games after him, which makes a 23-14 record at Florida not so awesome.

There was basically nothing in his track record that indicated Zook would be a particularly good head coach at a place like Illinois. The guy could recruit like a mofo and had a metric ton of noteworthy assistant jobs (assistant head coach at Va. Tech, D-coordinator at Florida, D-coordinator for the Saints, etc.) but had minimal successful head coaching experience, which was borne out in his inexplicable inability to know when to punt or correctly use replay challenges. Obviously, below-average results at Florida =/= doing well* at Illinois (one weird Rose Bowl season notwithstanding).

Tim Beckman has a Wikipedia page that's two paragraphs long despite having the same amount of head coaching experience (three years) as pre-Illinois Zook. The entirety of his meaningful coaching background: five years as D-coordinator at Bowling Green, two years as cornerbacks coach at Ohio State, two years as D-coordinator at Oklahoma State and three years as head coach at Toledo. Getting the Illinois job represents a pretty meteoric rise for a guy who's still only 46 and probably would be unidentifiable to 90 percent of the population of Toledo (let alone any recruit in the state of Illinois). So his resume is about an inch long, his only coaching experience is in the MAC and he may or may not be any good at recruiting. In short, Tim Beckman is most definitely not Ron Zook. Whether that's a good thing probably depends a lot on your opinion of Illinois football and what it is and/or should be.

Going back a little bit, the Okie State job was kind of an odd outlier in terms of geography but was really what got Beckman a head coaching gig (being a MAC coordinator and a cornerbacks coaches won't get you real far). He took a bad defense and made it awful in '07 (101st in yardage, 79th in scoring) and then slightly better in '08 (93rd in yardage, 76th in scoring). Woo. That was apparently enough for Toledo, which probably figured a decent D-I coordinator with gobs of Ohio connections would work out OK. And he did: 5-7, 8-5, 8-4.

Since Toledo is Toledo and you don't pay attention to Toledo, it might interest you to know that Toledo is a pretty good MAC program. The previous three coaches: Nick Saban (yup), Gary Pinkel and Tom Amstutz. I don't feel like looking up their cumulative record at UT, but I guarantee you it's impressive. That said, Amstutz "stepped down" at the end of 2008 because Toledo had gone from consistent division winner to blah. He went 5-7, 5-7 and 3-9 in his last three years (don't worry about who those wins in '08 were against lalalalala) and pretty obviously wasn't on the brink of turning things around. Beckman got there and did it in a hurry.

Here's the part that's kinda hard to figure out: Toledo's defenses weren't very good the last three years. UT finished 76th and 89th this year, 56th and 73rd (not bad) in 2010 and 95th and 116th (!) in 2009. There's obviously been some level of improvement and he's going against MAC offenses and blah blah blah, but man ... I was expecting something slightly more impressive overall. Amstutz's last couple defenses were about equal to the '09 and '11 ones.

There is a pretty significant caveat: Legitimately good offensive teams have absolutely shredded Toledo the past couple years, but the apples-to-apples games have (mostly) gone pretty well. Boise State (65 points), Arizona (41), Northern Illinois (65), Boise State again (40) and Northern Illinois again (63) have definitely skewed the numbers. Outside of those five games, Toledo has given up more than 30 points in regulation just twice in the last two regular seasons. Why Toledo has been giving up 64 points a game to an NIU team that averages about half that number is another question.

So ... I have no idea what to make of Beckman. His defenses were pretty decent except when they were awful, and his offenses were generally pretty good (and MAC-tastic in their spreadiness) but definitely weren't coached by him. Relevant note from ESPN:

Beckman said Friday he'll run a spread at Illinois. He added that he'll try to bring Toledo offensive coordinator Matt Campbell to Champaign ...

That seems like a good idea since the Toledo offense was eighth in both scoring and yardage this year. The Illinois offense was good in 2010 and then a total disaster this year minus Mikel Leshoure; Paul Petrino apparently forgot how to coach or something. Based on UT's last couple years, I'm guessing Campbell (or whoever) will have Illinois throwing at least a little more next year. I'm not sure if that's gonna be a good or bad thing for Nate Scheesdfkjlajfkadsfe, but improvement by default is likely.

I can't really say that about the program as a whole. I do think going the "improved a meh team" route is a lot more practical for Illinois than the "won some at a should-be-dominant school" route, but whether Beckman is actually a program builder or just a guy who had a couple solid years in the MAC is unknowable. Also, stuff like this ...

"It's not broken, it isn't," Beckman told reporters after meeting with Illinois' players. "This is a gold mine. You can win at the University of Illinois."

... sounds great but is hard to reconcile with the fact that Illinois has gotten to eight wins just three times in the last 15 years. Michigan and Nebraska aren't going anywhere, and Notre Dame will get the best recruits out of Chicago this year and next year and every year until Chicago falls off the face of the Earth. There are some obvious disadvantages; a gold mine this is not.

It was pointed out that AD Illinois Mike Thomas has a pretty solid hiring history:

The athletic director, answering questions about fans on local talk radio and Internet message boards who said Beckman wasn't a big enough name, said he heard much the same at the University of Cincinnati, where he hired a pair of MAC coaches that produced consistent winners, Brian Kelly, now at Notre Dame, and current Bearcats coach Butch Jones, whose team is 9-3 this season.

"They all said 'Who's Brian Kelly?' They all said 'Who's Butch Jones.'" Thomas said. "I get that."

First of all, Brian Kelly wasn't much of an unknown in the Midwest by the time Cincinnati hired him; he won a bazillion games and a couple national titles at Grand Valley State and then won the MAC at Central Michigan. Butch Jones also had a way better record at CMU than Beckman had at Toledo, which means both of those guys both had better resumes than Beckman's right now. I'd also argue that winning at Cincinnati is actually easier than winning at Illinois because of (a) the depth of recruiting talent in Ohio and (b) the consistently mediocre Big East. In other words, hiring Brian Kelly at Cincinnati is not the same as hiring Tim Beckman at Illinois except in the most superficial way.

Illinois is a decent program that should regularly get to bowl games but is gonna have a really hard time competing for Big Ten championships barring Tim Beckman becoming Urban Meyer. I don't think that's happening. The more reasonable question is whether he's better than Ron Zook, but again, that's pretty much unknowable. Solve for the variables here: Microscopic MAC sample size + middling results as a coordinator + middle-of-the-pack Big Ten program + zero geographic ties = ???

His resume offers nothing of relevance** except for the complete lack of career similarities, and that might be good or bad or none of the above. I mean, The Zooker wasn't awful except for, like, all the in-game stuff. Beckman will be better there; whether he'll actually produce something better than .500 on a fairly regular basis is what matters.

*Fun fact: Illinois became the first team in D-I/FBS history to start a season 6-0 and finish it 6-6. Go team.

**A close loss to this year's crappy version of Ohio State doesn't mean a whole lot.

RGIII will (deservingly) win the Heisman

Way back in August, I wrote some stuff about the Heisman and how it's become a de facto best-back-on-the-best-team award. Upshot:

The Heisman has become the Best Back on the Best Team Award (or occasionally the Most Dominant Player on a Very Good Team Award),

Now that we've got that out of the way, here are the old and outdated criteria that most people think still matter but really don't:

1. Huge, mind-blowing stats (only necessary if playing on a good-but-not-great BCS team)
2. Being a household name at the start of the season

Like I said before, this isn't 1992, and nobody will care if Case Keenum throws for 5,000 yards and 40 touchdowns while Andrew Luck throws for 2,500 and 30 touchdowns. We're not in the Ty Detmer/Andre Ware era anymore.

As for No. 2, neither of the past two winners was even on the radar at the start of the season -- Cam Newton wasn't even on the freakin' Davey O'Brien watch list, which is comprised of pretty much every quarterback anybody thinks might be capable of being good. If your team is elite and you're the star quarterback/running back, you can win the Heisman.

Woo self-promoting blockquote. Anyway, I then listed a whole bunch of guys who could fall into that last category; Robert Griffin wasn't one of them. At no point did I seriously consider the possibility that (a) Griffin would be good enough to offset Baylor's mediocrity or (b) Griffin would be so good that Baylor would also be pretty good.

Robert Griffin is probably going to win the Heisman tomorrow, as he should. I saw about half of Baylor's games this year and would describe Baylor as a slightly less talented version of 2010 Michigan playing in the best top-to-bottom conference in the country this year. And that team went 9-3. The reason: RGIII.

The numbers are totally and utterly ridiculous in every way for a guy playing in an actual conference. Here, have a poorly formatted chart:

	Pct	TD	Int	Yds	YPA	Rating
Robert Griffin III	72.36	36	6	3998	10.83	192.31
Andrew Luck	69.97	35	9	3170	8.5	167.5

Griffin could play his worst game of the year in the Alamo Bowl and still break the all-time single-season pass-efficiency record of 186.0. Ridonkulous. I should probably mention that he also has 644 rushing yards and nine touchdowns, which would make him a decent starting D-I running back if he were solely a running back.

Going back to Baylor being 2010 Michigan, consider this: RGIII accounted for 67.9 percent of the offense for a team that went 9-3 despite finishing 106th (!) in scoring defense and 114th (!!!) in total defense. In their three losses, they gave up 36, 55 and 59 points. They won games in which they gave up 48, 31, 39, 38 and 42 points. Griffin accounted for at least two touchdowns in every game this year and had more touchdown passes than incompletions (lol) until late in the fourth game of the year. His pass efficiency at that point was something absurd like 221; the dip to 192 isn't that significant considering the absurdity of what he was doing in September.

I was asked about two weeks ago who I'd vote for if I had a ballot. My response: I'd take RGIII but could justifiably vote for Andrew Luck, Trent Richardson or even Tyrann Mathieu. Luck and Richardson are probably the two most talented players in the country, and Mathieu has zero chance of actually winning but has been basically the defensive/special teams version of RGIII. I honestly don't know which of those guys I'd leave off my ballot; probably Mathieu since he went ham on punt returns at super-convenient times but was also the second-best corner on his own team. He's the one guy who's not totally vital to his team's awesomeness (whether that's fair or not is irrelevant at hair-splitting time).

StiffArmyTrophy published this yesterday:

By now, this won't be a surprise to anyone: Baylor's Robert Griffin III is going to win the Heisman Trophy.

By our reckoning, he's going to get approximately 2000 points - 71% of a perfect unanimous #1 vote. (This year, 2781 points is perfect.)

That actually would be a surprise if I weren't an obsessive sicko who'd been kinda-sorta keeping up with the straw polls. HeismanPundit's "final projection" was as follows:

1. Robert Griffin, 32 (8)
2. Andrew Luck, 23 (4)
3. Trent Richardson, 10 (1)

And the StiffArmTrophy numbers aren't even close:

1. Robert Griffin, 482 (133)
2. Andrew Luck, 282 (41)
3. Trent Richardson, 164 (22)

FYI, those are both compilations of ACTUAL votes. The latter one includes only about a third of the total ballots but gives Griffin such a huge lead that the rest won't matter.

So Robert Griffin III is probably gonna win the Heisman. This has nothing to do with SEC hatred (hahahahaha* stop) or Luck being anything other than Mr. Awesome At Everything and has everything to do with RGIII scorching the earth while playing for freakin' Baylor. Hooray for that.

*This is from Paul Finebaum: "Much heat leaving RG3 off my Heisman ballot. SEC defenses would have eaten him alive. Haters get a clue." Mmmkay.

Obvious SEC troll is obvious.