The Art Briles Dilemma | Baylor Bears Texas Longhorns

In the wake of Baylor’s 41-12 throttling of Oklahoma to kick off week eleven of the college football season, news emerged that their head coach Art Briles signed a contract that will keep him in Waco for the next ten years. Of course, terms weren’t announced – they never are, not when the school in question is a private institution – but you can bet that it’s not a small offer. It will probably have been the payday to set Briles and his family up for life.

More importantly, it’s job security, which seems to be a less and less common thing in the busy world of college football. Briles is casting his lot in with Baylor at a perfect time: there’s no doubt that the school is on the way up. After Robert Griffin III’s Heisman year in 2011, we’ve seen a groundswell of support and success coming out of Waco.

Years of being the Big XII punching bag seem to be in the rear-view mirror now that Briles, who had similar success at the University of Houston, has players of the ilk of QB Bryce Petty, RB Lache Seastrunk and WR Tevin Reese doing their thing. 

Can you, with a honestly-straight face, look at me and tell me that, top-to-bottom, Baylor isn’t the most exciting team to watch at the moment? Big plays on offense, they’re rolling along nicely on defense – ask Oklahoma about that – and special teams haven’t been too shabby, either. For the first time in perhaps ever, the Bears are nationally relevant, ranked at fourth after another week featuring a few upsets and off to a 9-0 start for the first time in school history, good for tops in the Big XII conference. No wonder Briles got paid.

The dilemma, though, concerns what has happened, what is happening and what may possibly happen in the near future down in Austin, home of the University of Texas, whose Longhorns have had an up-and-down season, which many accustomed to runaway success on the gridiron as pinning on, or at least looking to pin on, veteran coach Mack Brown.

It can’t please some UT folk that, Baylor and Texas A&M, also-rans for so many years compared to the might of Longhorn football, are now making waves far beyond what UT have done recently.  The Aggies have Johnny Manziel and are taking it to the best in the SEC and Baylor are on target to break a stack of records – they’ve already broken some – thanks to a ridiculously prolific and high-scoring offense.

Briles, of course, is the architect of that offense. At Houston, he recruited Case Keenum and started that quarterback on his way to holding basically every NCAA quarterback record worth anything, and has found a similar sort of player in Bryce Petty, after RGIII shined, really spotlighting the rising Baylor program, and Nick Florence had his own share of touchdowns and passing yards last year.

Meanwhile, there’s trouble in Austin. Some there would like to see Mack Brown out the door, and he may well be forced out if Texas don’t somehow manage to get themselves into a good post-season Bowl game. Their 38-13 loss to Oklahoma State last weekend was the worst home loss for the ‘Horns since Brown took over. Just after the coach had quieted his detractors with a string of wins, they’re given fresh voice with a bad loss.

Make no mistake: Texas wants Nick Saban. Of course, they’re not alone. Every college program wants someone of Saban’s skill to head their problem. The difference is, Texas can pay big money to lure the Alabama coach down into Longhorn territory. They have boosters who’ll pay whatever it might take to get a guy like Saban wearing burnt orange.

The popular theory is that if Saban doesn’t want to go and coach in Austin, that Art Briles might be the guy next on the Longhorn radar. It would definitely be a good fall-back option for Texas, but the question is, would it be a good move for Art Briles?

I say, no. Stay where you are, Art, and don’t even think about moving!

Why? Simple. The times are changing. Right now, there is movement afoot in Texas football. It was somewhat evident in the last few years, and really glaringly obvious now: the balance of power is shifting. The Longhorns, on top for so long, are sliding. Into their place comes A&M, Baylor and even a Texas Tech unit resurgent under Kliff Kingsbury. No longer is it a certain thing that the best prospects from the state head straight down to Austin and enrol to be a Longhorn.

We’ve see homesick RB Lache Seastrunk leave Oregon and head for Baylor. A few years ago, he would’ve gone to Texas, but the Bears have turned things around and are getting legitimate athletes going there to play football because they want to, not because no one else will take them. As 5-star recruits come in, more will follow. The groundswell is on. For coaches, Waco is becoming a destination rather than another stop on the road to somewhere bigger and better. It’s a place to be, and Briles is responsible, having built a solid program that figures to only get stronger from here.

So why leave? Briles has everything he could need at Baylor: a chance for a true rags-to-riches story, a line to some serious talent, and the Bears are next year moving into the state-of-the-art Baylor Stadium, which will be amongst the best in America upon completion. Even his defense, a weak link a few years ago, is progressing nicely.

Most importantly, there is a lot more freedom and a lot less pressure on the coach of the Baylor Bears than on the coach of the Texas Longhorns. School administrators at Texas demand instant success, and there’s a giant weight of expectation coming from a rabid fan base, too. Baylor are new to success, so a few speed-bumps along the way aren’t going to provoke so much angst. 

I mean, half of Longhorn nation wanted Mack Brown out after two weeks. He might oversee a 9-win season and they’re thinking about showing him the door. Basically, in Austin, if you’re not winning your conference and challenging for a National Championship every season – okay, maybe they’re allowed a down year every now and again, but not two or three strung together – you’re on the Hot Seat. 

Yes, Texas can throw a heap of money at a coach – but those dollars come with an extraordinary amount of stress, too. On the other hand, in Waco, there’s bound to be a lot less stress. Every school wants to win, but there isn’t a ‘win now or else’ mentality yet.

Who knows what the future may bring? With the uptick of Baylor football, there’s every chance that Texas won’t be the one big-time program in the state. It’s tracking the way of there being a few programs being able to attract the top-end talent that the Lone Star State is famous for. Instead of Texas getting all but the occasional player falling though the recruiting cracks, I have a feeling that the battle between the Longhorns, Bears, Aggies and Red Raiders is going to heat up.

Briles should know by now that he doesn’t need to be in Austin to get the very best talent. He’s proven to himself – and everyone else – that he can attract legitimate five-star recruits to Waco. Why not stay there and continue the work that has already started? Keep building the program up, and you’ll soon be spoken about in the same breath as the Longhorns, the supposed big brother of Texas football: nationally relevant, and a giant television draw. It can be done, and if Briles sticks around, his name will forever be legendary around Waco.

Surely, Art, that’s going to be more rewarding than taking over a program built up by someone else?

What We Learned… NCAA College Football Week 12 | USC Stanford Duke Baylor Texas Jordan Lynch Art Briles Kevin Sumlin Mack Brown

If You Win Big, You Get Paid Big: Baylor’s head coach Art Briles is the latest to understand this, after the Bears gave him a ten-year extension that will keep him in Waco, TX through the 2023 season, fresh off of a nationally-televised beat down of Oklahoma. As a private institution, Baylor isn’t required to release financial details of the new contract – and they haven’t – but you know it’s big. Briles is a hot property, and they’ve locked him away nicely.

The Bears, perennial underachievers in the Big XII for years and years before Briles arrived, have become one of the real national powers in college football over the past few years, ever since a quarterback by the name of Robert Griffin III started wowing people en route to the 2011 Heisman Trophy. Nick Florence last year and Bryce Petty this year have continued the explosion of points and big plays.

Under Briles’ calm tutelage – you ever see the guy anything but ice-cool calm? – Baylor has become a place good players want to go, rather than a backwoods destination for kids who’ve been given no other good scholarship offers. You don’t think homesick-for-Texas RB Lache Seastrunk would’ve chosen Baylor over Texas, Texas A&M and Texas Tech when transferring five years ago? Not a chance. But the improved level of competitiveness the school is showing means they’re going to continue to get blue-chip players coming in.

Averaging 61 points a game, Baylor’s offense is flat-out fun to watch, and their defense is coming along nicely, too. Importantly for the school’s coffers, the team is so good that Floyd Casey Stadium is routinely sold out now, and the famous tarp is coming off because so many people want to watch the game. Briles is the architect of all that and more. He’s single-handedly turned this program’s fortunes around. Yeah, no wonder he got paid.

Northern Illinois QB Jordan Lynch Is A Gun: The Huskies signal caller is the most exciting player I’ve seen on a college field this year outside of Johnny Manziel. I wrote earlier in the week that, in a perfect world, Lynch would be a Heisman Trophy candidate, but, unfortunately, this just isn’t a perfect world. The Huskies play in the Mid-American Conference, and strength of schedule is a real killer, and keeps Lynch from being a serious contender. 

Still, it doesn’t stop Lynch from putting up video game-type numbers and wowing us on a weekly basis – in a similar vein to Johnny Football, the Huskies signal-caller is flat-out fun to watch. He’s the sort of guy that gets the turnstiles clicking over, because he’s guaranteed gridiron entertainment. The sad thing in Lynch’s case is that he’s barely noticed on a national level. He deserves more recognition from ESPN and others. Hopefully Wednesday night’s ESPN2 broadcast will start that.

By anyone’s standards, he’s had a whale of a season, and continued on his merry way on Wednesday night against arguably the best MAC opposition he’s faced all year, Ball State. He was a lazy 26-32 for 345 yards and two touchdowns throwing the football, and backed that up with 123 yards and two more scores on twenty carries in the ground game. NIU will win the MAC at this rate, and are looking good for an at-large BCS Bowl invite. That would raise Lynch’s profile, too.

Winning at Mid-Major Schools Gets Coaches Noticed: Reports out of Los Angeles during the week say that the University of Southern California’s favoured candidate for its vacant head coaching job is Kevin Sumlin, currently in charge of Texas A&M University.

Sumlin, charismatic and a winner – two things that are very much valued in Southern California, where the Trojans have a giant profile die to their history of success and the lack of an NFL franchise in the city – is definitely the sort of guy I could see in charge and having success at USC. He’s proven to be very good at his craft, both at Houston, where his offenses were statistically amongst the best in the nation and definitely amongst the most exciting, and then at College Station, where he has shown an ability to continue to coach his team even as the glare from the Johnny Manziel spotlight continues to shine brightly. The ability to manage big-time players at the same time as building and maintaining a solid football program is undoubtedly what brought Sumlin to the attention of USC’s Athletic Director Pat Haden and the school’s regents.

If you believe another Los Angeles Times report, Sumlin, if he is indeed named as the new USC head coach in December, is going to see a nice bump in his salary, from where it sits at the moment, at a little over $3 million/season, to somewhere in the neighbourhood of $6 million per year. That’s insane money – and that salary will come with an insane pressure to win and win big. Oh, and quickly. USC want to be back winning Pac-12 and National Championships, like, yesterday!

But Sumlin is a proven winner. If anyone can do it, it’s him. He has absolutely the right mentality. This USC fan would love to see him in cardinal and gold next year. Not that the other candidates thrown up in the LA press – Vanderbilt’s James Franklin, Boise State’s Chris Petersen, ESPN’s Jon Gruden and Denver’s Jack Del Rio – would be bad choices.  After the Lane Kiffin debacle, you can bet your bottom dollar that the appointment of the next coach will come only after exhaustive and thorough due diligence.

No Big 10 School Will Beat Ohio State in 2013: That’s almost a guarantee from your humble scribe. Why? Because the Buckeyes are that good. But also because the rest of their conference is that bad.  Urban Meyer’s men carried on their merry way Saturday in Champaign, stacking up sixty points on a hapless Illinois team in a 60-35 victory, thanks largely to RB Carlos Hyde who just went nuts on the Illini, rushing for 247 yards on 24 carries and four touchdowns. QB Braxton Miller ran for a score and passed for two more – one to Hyde. 

It was a slick performance today that should send shockwaves through the Big Ten. Each week, the Buckeyes come out and do what they need to do: score big and look unstoppable. With the weakness of the Big Ten, absolutely stacking on the points and yards is the only way that the voters are going to sit up, take notice and say, “Wow, look at Ohio State! Those guys are really killing it!” If your conference is bad, winning just isn’t enough. You have to thoroughly dominate or you’re penalised regardless of whether you get the W. Right or wrong, that’s the reality of college football in 2013.

Based on that body of work (their defense and offense stacked on points) there simply doesn’t appear to be any hope of seeing the Buckeyes lose before they get to a BCS Bowl. I doubt Michigan will come close, and I don’t know that Michigan State – the Buckeyes’ likely Big Ten Championship Game opponent – will, either. Wouldn’t Stanford vs. Ohio State be an awesome New Years Day Rose Bowl Game match-up?

Mack Brown Will Be Under Pressure Again This Week: 38-13 was the final score in the Oklahoma State vs. Texas game, favouring Mike Gundy’s Cowboys, and it’s the worst home loss that a Mack Brown-coached Longhorn team has suffered in Austin.

A stat like that is about the last thing that the veteran coach, under pressure early in the year after being gashed in two consecutive games before the ‘Horns went on an improbable six-game winning run. Just when things were quieting down, as far as Brown being on the hot seat, it’s bound to reignite this week. Losing badly on the road is one thing. Doing it at home in front of the school’s regents and others…that’s not good.

So, the Texas streak is over, as is the chance that Texas had of being the Big XII Champion and getting to a BCS Bowl. That honour will presumably now be fought out between Oklahoma State and Baylor, and all the Texas focus turns to whether Mack Brown will be around when the Longhorns take the field in 2014. 

Texas actually outgained Oklahoma State 392-381 but, as is so often the case, it was turnovers that killed. The Longhorns had three, including a 43-yard interception return of QB Case McCoy, just a few plays after Texas safety Adrian Phillips missed on an interception in the end zone, which instead went for an Oklahoma State touchdown.

My thought on firing coaches is this: you don’t get rid of a guy like Mack Brown – a legend, no matter how you look at it – without knowing that you’ve got a pretty good guy waiting in the wings. Or, at least, you go and fire your current coach knowing that you can land a good replacement. The popular theory is that Nick Saban would take the job and be very nicely compensated for it. But Saban seems happy at Alabama.

Do you, if you’re Texas, take a massive risk by pulling the trigger on Brown for anything less than an iron-clad guarantee that Saban would come? Is there a better guy out there than Brown, other than Saban? You don’t want to trade down, and how many really good coaches are out there looking to move? Particularly in this environment, with Baylor and, to a lesser extent Texas Tech, snapping up some of those blue-chip recruits that used to go to Texas because the Longhorns were the best team in the state. 

Clearly, the administrators at Texas have some thinking to do.

Duke’s Resurgence Is Complete: Crazy world where Duke is working on a win streak of six wins in football. More than that, they’re on top in the chaotic ACC Coastal Division. David Cutcliffe must surely be in the top three for Coach of the Year. He’s built up a solid program and their signature win of the season came today against the Miami-FL Hurricanes. 

It’s one of the feel-good stories of the season: after many long years in the cellar of the ACC, everything about the Duke program is looking up. Like Art Briles with Baylor, Cutcliffe has made Duke a destination for athletes to come and play football. He’s started right at the bottom and is building a program with the right sort of culture. With every win, people are going to take more and more notice of what’s going on, and the more eyeballs on the program the better. 

Duke’s sudden return to ACC prominence is proof positive that a coach can come in when the program is at rock bottom and steadily build to the point where winning seasons become the norm rather than the exception.

I think it’s also a good lesson for trigger-happy athletic directors who want to fire their coaches too quickly. If your team was bad for years, it’s likely going to take years to recover so firing your coach after one or two seasons pretty much defeats the purpose of hiring them at all. Duke’s administrators have been patient, allowing Cutcliffe to do things his way and on his schedule, and look where it’s got the program.

So Is USC’s: Gutsy win for the Men of Troy tonight at home against Stanford. It’s a win that’s thrown the Pac-12 wide open, and will be making people in Eugene, Oregon absolutely delirious with excitement because the Ducks are back in the hunt for at least a conference championship. 

All because USC’s defense played like men possessed in the last quarter, forcing two turnovers, allowing the offense to make their own share of big plays – I’m looking at you, Marqise Lee and Nelson Agholor – to give kicker Andre Heidari the chance to convert on a 47-yard field goal with 19 seconds left in regulation, which, thankfully, never looked like missing, to give the Trojans a famous and improbable 17-20 win.

It was quite a scene after the final play of the game, with USC fans filling the field, and interim head coach Ed Orgeron walking up into the stands to conduct the Spirit of Troy Marching Band. By far and away, this was the best win of a season that started off horrendously and has gotten better with every passing week of late. The Trojans are on a definite roll at the right time for their annual cross-town matchup against UCLA in two weeks’ time after a trip out to Colorado next Saturday.

If Orgeron wasn’t right amongst the top candidates – Kevin Sumlin is chief amongst them if you believe the rumours – for the vacant USC head coaching role, he certainly will be now. At the very least, he has done more than enough to earn a place on the coaching staff for 2014. 

The Trojans played with an incredible spirit and an exuberance that hasn’t been around since Pete Carroll’s USC squads were beating up people and going to Rose Bowl Games (and winning them) on an almost yearly basis. That same swagger and air of confidence and the belief that they can beat anyone anywhere has made a welcome return to campus. All because Orgeron made football fun again for the Trojans. Look what playing fun football gets you. You get to win big games and alter the course of the Pac-12 and National Championship races. 

Metaphorically, it seems that the program has come out of the tunnel and here’s hoping that there’s long days of bright light ahead.

NCAA Football 2013: Week 12 Foxtel ESPN Game Of The Week - Stanford at USC

Where to Watch: Midday, Sunday (AEDT) – ESPN2/ESPN2-HD
 

Coming in to Saturday night’s showdown at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, these two teams could not be any further apart in terms of pressure and expectation. 

A week after Stanford played it’s best game of the year – perhaps the best game played by anyone this year – to completely stifle Oregon’s dangerous, high-octane offense, the Cardinal suddenly find themselves thrust back into discussion about the BCS National Championship Game in Pasadena in early January. They’re one of those teams lurking, like Baylor and Ohio State, and hoping that Alabama or Florida State will stumble between now and Championship Weekend.

In comparison, USC has no expectation and no pressure whatsoever. This is a team whose season most people wrote off after embarrassing – albeit for different reasons – back-to-back losses against Washington State and Arizona State, which brought about the timely demise of tightly-wound head coach Lane Kiffin. The most polarising figure in college football was replaced by the exuberant Ed Orgeron, and, suddenly, the Trojans have won Pac-12 games and are getting their swagger back. 

Quarterback Cody Kessler looks like a completely different sort of player to the tentative, uncertain one we saw under Kiffin, All-American Wide Receiver Marqise Lee is back healthy, as are so many other players on offense. As a team, they are showing the skill and talent buried beneath so many of Kiffin’s shenanigans.

Look out, USC are dangerous. Stanford would be wise to not overlook a team that is playing with renewed confidence in themselves and in their ability to execute. The Cardinal, leading the Pac-12 North, have the inside track to the Pac-12 Championship Game, which is a nice position to be in, but USC have no such luxury. A win on Saturday night, however, would thrust them right back into a battle for the Pac-12 South that’s a three-way scrap at the moment, between USC, their crosstown rivals UCLA and Arizona State.

A win on Saturday night will put Stanford right there on the brink of another conference championship game appearance – they lead the Pac-12 North by a half game on Oregon, and if results go the right way, the Cardinal may host the championship game. A win on Saturday night will also be the fifth straight win against Southern California, with whom they’ve had quite a rivalry over the years. Remember the words between Harbaugh and Carroll post-game in 2009? That confrontation really stoked the fires between the two teams, and is perhaps what’s propelled the Cardinal to their consecutive string of victories.

Unbelievably, after a loss to Utah earlier in the season, the Cardinal is right back in the hunt for more than just Pac-12 honours. Their defense, so impressive against Oregon last week, will need to back that up with another strong effort, for the Trojans under Ed Orgeron have found their offensive legs, and in the last two weeks have put up nearly a thousand total yards (including 498 yards rushing) in impressive routs of Oregon State and California, both of which came on the road.

The Trojans will be hoping that a return to Los Angeles for Homecoming Weekend, will be just a continuation of the good form that they’ve showed in winning all conference games under Orgeron, whose performance in getting the team back on track has him talked about amongst Texas A&M’s Kevin Sumlin, Boise State’s Chris Petersen and Vanderbilt’s James Franklin as being possibilities to become the next head coach at Southern California. If reports are to be believed, the successful candidate will be known by December.

As good as Southern California has been over the last few weeks, I don’t know that they can beat Stanford – a hard thing for me, a huge USC fan, to write. It will undoubtedly be a close game. Whether they’ve been 3OT thrillers or defensive grinds, recent games between the Cardinal and the Trojans have been close, and Stanford has always been able to draw on a little more to get the win. 

Their offense is accustomed to choking the life out of opposition teams. It’s hard as a defense to stay with this Cardinal team. As much as you know what’s coming, they still get you. QB Kevin Hogan doesn’t dazzle anyone, but he rarely makes mistakes, and RB Tyler Gaffney was the hero of the Oregon game, battering the Ducks for 157 yards on a whopping 45 carries.

Playing in the Coliseum – which will be sold out for the first time in 2013 – doesn’t seem to worry Stanford, either. Aside from winning four straight meetings in this series, they’ve also won three straight in Los Angeles, including the famous 2007 victory. In that game, the Cardinal were 41-point underdogs,  yet beat a stacked USC team featuring QB John David Booty and TE Fred Davis amongst others, by a point, 24-23 with backup QB Tavita Pritchard making his first ever college start. It’s a day that still lives in infamy for USC fans, and one of the greatest moments in Stanford history.

If Stanford can shut down the USC running game, which has been prolific over the last few weeks, I think they win by a couple of touchdowns. It’s been the Javorious ‘Buck’ Allen show on the ground of late. In the last two weeks, he’s scored five touchdowns and run for 268 yards on twenty two carries, as well as made an impact in the passing game. The other USC RB, Penn State transfer Silas Redd, will not play. 

Stanford’s defense isn’t going to let the Trojans march down the field like they’ve done against Cal and Oregon State lately, and it’s – unfortunately – unlikely that Buck Allen and the other USC backs are going to enjoy the same sort of ground game production against a Stanford defense that’s incredibly good in the trenches, allowing less than a hundred rushing yards a game. They held Oregon to less than seventy. They grind on you in a similar manner to their offense. 

That leaves Trojan QB Cody Kessler. He’s been good over the last few weeks, with crisp passing and few turnovers. On Saturday, he’ll need to do more than just protect the football. He’ll need to make big plays to the lethal wide receiver combination of All-American Marqise Lee and standout Nelson Agholor (who starred on special teams last week against Cal) if USC are going to have any chance. Stanford’s defense, as we know from last week, are expects at preventing the big play. I fear it’ll be tough sledding.

Prediction: The game will be decided late…Stanford by two touchdowns.

NCAA College Football 2013: Week 12 Foxtel ESPN Australian TV Guide

The twelfth weekend of regular season action rolls around after the last few weekends have given the BCS rankings a bit of a shake-up, to the point where it seems likely that Alabama will play Florida State in the BCS National Championship Game should both teams win out. Of course, there's no guarantee of that, and with teams like Ohio State and Stanford nipping at their heels, plenty can still happen between now and that title game in Pasadena in early January. 

The Cardinal and the Buckeyes are both featured on Foxtel ESPN games this weekend. GameDay is live from Los Angeles for the Cardinal against a resurgent USC outfit. That's where Brent and Herbie are, too. 

All times AEDT

Friday 15 November

College Football Live (11.00am; ESPN2/ESPN2-HD)
Georgia Tech vs. Clemson (11.30am; ESPN2/ESPN2-HD)

Sunday 17 November

College GameDay - Los Angeles, California (1.00am; ESPN/ESPN-HD)
Ohio State vs. Illinois (4.00am; ESPN/ESPN-HD)
Indiana vs. Wisconsin (4.00am; ESPN2/ESPN2-HD)
Syracuse vs. Florida State (7.30am; ESPN2/ESPN2-HD)
Stanford vs. USC (12.00pm; ESPN2/ESPN2-HD)
Boise State vs. Wyoming (2.15pm; ESPN/ESPN-HD)

Why Johnny Manziel Should Win The 2013 Heisman Trophy…But Won’t

The most prestigious individual award in college football, the Heisman Memorial Trophy Award, has been awarded for more than seven decades, to the most outstanding player in the game. Nowhere in the classic text describing what the award stands for is there a stipulation that the winner of this award must come from an undefeated team. 
 

Yet, that seems to be almost a sub-category for those in the media who vote on this award. Basically, there’s a message being sent to players that you must be on a winning team. Of course, football is a team game, in which contributions from the offense, defense and special teams are needed for a win. Therefore, basing a player’s Heisman candidacy on what an entire team does over sixty minutes a game around twelve times a season, is effectively turning the award into a team one, rather than an individual one.

I have a problem with this – a massive problem. Look into the world of college football at the moment, and pinpoint the most outstanding player in the game. Chances are, you’re going to point right at Johnny Manziel, the reigning Heisman Trophy winner. The kid we know as Johnny Football, a polarising figure to be sure, is most assuredly a walking, talking highlight reel – both on and off the field – and he’s one of few players whom you watch every snap with bated breath, because you know that there’s a good chance that something amazing is going to happen. 

For the simple fact that the extraordinary seems to happen more often than not when the guy has the football in hand, Manziel should be a long way out in front of everyone else in the race for the 2013 Heisman. Not just because he’s the clear leader in touchdowns accounted for (37, at last count) despite obviously being hobbled by injury at times, but because he is the most outstanding player on a football field this season.

No one can take over a game like Manziel can – and frequently does. He’s the guy you tune in to watch every week. Not Marcus Mariota in Eugene or AJ McCarron at Tuscaloosa or even Jameis Winston in Tallahassee, though the scintillating Florida State freshman quarterback certainly comes the closest, and looks the most likely to steal Manziel’s mantle when the Aggie quarterback makes a move to the pros. Yet, for the moment, Johnny Football is the undisputed King of Wow in college football. 

Wowing people is what should win you a Heisman.

But not, it seems, in the current climate.

What the Heisman voters are doing now, in determining the winner of the award for the single most outstanding player in the game, is effectively making it into a team contest. If a star player plays well but his team loses, that appears to be that as far as his chances of winning the award go.

Voters are penalising Manziel because Texas A&M’s defense is so porous that it’s shredded week-in-week-out by teams who aren’t exactly what you would normally call offensively prolific. Manziel isn’t a linebacker or a safety or a defensive tackle. He’s not out there stopping the other offense. He’s forced to sit on the bench and watch a poor defense erode the good work he’s done on the field. And, worse, he’s losing his Heisman because of it. 

If anything, it should be the other way around. It’s certainly not a stretch to put forward the argument that, had it not been for Manziel’s freakish ability to generate big plays with regularity – and, particularly, big plays out of ones that seem to be going nowhere – the Aggies would be mired in the middle of the SEC, with more losses than they currently have.

When are the Heisman voters and the trust which controls the award going to return to the old days? The dynamics of the award have changed recently, and I think it diminishes the heritage and prestige. It should not have been turned into a  be a contest fought out only by the best players on a team that’s run the table undefeated or who’s only lost to one very good team. It should be a contest fought out between the best, most electric and most outstanding – there’s that word again – players in America.

And Johnny Football leads that list. Regardless, the sad reality is that because Texas A&M’s 2013 season has ultimately been a disappointing one, due mostly to its defense’s inability to stop anyone, Manziel is, at best, sitting in third or fourth in line in most people’s ballot cards as we enter the final weeks of the season. If Oregon’s Marcus Mariota hadn’t played so badly on Thursday night in Oregon’s loss to Stanford, Manziel might’ve been ranked even lower.

Talk of strength of schedule comes into consideration, which is why you won’t see me write an article about how Northern Illinois QB Jordan Lynch, himself putting up stupid offensive numbers, deserves a Heisman. Same, to a lesser degree, with Baylor’s QB Bryce Petty or RB Lache Seastrunk – as much as I’d love to see all three of those guys in New York City.

You can’t argue with a straight face that Manziel isn’t running and passing rings around underwhelming defensive opposition. No, this is the Southeastern Conference we’re talking about, home to some of the best and most elite talent in America. I mean, Manziel, two years running, has made Alabama’s defense look downright silly, and look what they’ve done to just about every other team they’ve played in that duration.

Certainly numerically, and in terms of the sheer number of big-time plays he made, I thought Manziel’s performance against Alabama this year was superior to last year, which is truly saying something. He shredded them, but lost. He came back from an injury to nearly lead. Yes, he’s turned the football over a little more this year, but the sheer fact of the matter is that his defense digs him a hole, and it’s taking speculative throws that, last year, with a better defense he simply wouldn’t have been called upon to make. Therein is the difference between a good defense and a bad one. A&M’s bad defense is penalising it’s star quarterback.

That’s why Johnny Manziel should be favourite to collect the Heisman Trophy in a couple of weeks, and make history with back-to-back wins of college football’s most prestigious individual honour. Sadly, barring a cataclysmic series of upsets between now and Championship Weekend, he’ll be lucky to make it to New York City as a finalist.

Ironic, isn’t it, that Texas A&M’s defense, a collective unit, is going to mostly be held accountable for their quarterback not winning an individual honour that, by rights, the Aggie players not named Manziel, J. should have nothing to do with. Ironic and pretty unfair, too.

Footnote: Based on the apparent criteria for the Heisman, I have a pretty strong feeling Florida State’s Jameis Winston will win the Trophy.