Case Keenum is having a monster year for the No. 18 Houston Cougars, but if you use the Worldwide Leader in Sports (ESPN) to get your college football info, you may not even have a clue who Case Keenum is, let alone how good he is.I am growing so tired of hearing week after week that the preseason usual suspects like Tim Tebow and Colt McCoy are still the top contenders for the 2009 Heisman Trophy...
I mainly blame ESPN, especially for the Tebow hype.
I guess when you have a three billion dollar television deal with the SEC, it's in your own best interest to do whatever you can to keep players from said conference in the mix, even when they don't belong.
Conflict of interest anyone? I digress.
Don't get me wrong—Tebow has been a great player over his four years at Florida, but this year, he has been anything but a Heisman Trophy front-runner—yet, last I knew, ESPN had him listed as one of the top two players for the award.
Although he is having a much better year than Tebow, the same thing can be said for McCoy. If the Heisman were awarded right now, Keenum would be my winner, and here's why.
First of all, it is an individual award for the best player in the country—Not the best known player who happens to play on one of the highest ranked teams.
Houston (7-1) has played three teams from the consensus top two BCS conferences—Oklahoma State and Texas Tech from the Big 12, and Mississippi State from the SEC—and they have defeated them all.
Their only loss was a conference road game at UTEP and while it was a bad loss, Houston's poor defensive effort was solely to blame. Keenum went 51/76 for 536 yards and tossed five touchdown passes.
It makes no sense to me that team wins and losses are somehow part of the equation that determines who could or should win an award meant for the best individual player in college football.
Now if Keenum had only thrown for 80 yards and had thrown five interceptions in the UTEP loss, then it would make more sense to hold that against him, but as I noted above, he had a huge game statistically.
As far as strength of schedule, to this point in the season, I don't believe that Florida or Texas have played a schedule much better than Houston's, so that isn't a factor at all for me.
So basically, it comes down to the individual stats and that is where, right now, Keenum rises to the top over Tebow, McCoy, and everyone else.
The only player who is close to Keenum statistically is Notre Dame QB Jimmy Clausen, but even his overall numbers aren't as good, and like the others, Notre Dame hasn't exactly played tough schedule either.
As you can see above, Keenum clearly has been the best quarterback in the nation. To be fair, I must also mention Alabama's Mark Ingram and Oregon State's JacQuizz Rodgers as contenders for this years Heisman, as they both are in the running.
Unfortunately for them, they are running backs, and the Heisman has almost exclusively become an award for quarterbacks, so I'm not sure either of them have a real shot, but they are definitely worth noting.
I don't know if Case Keenum will ultimately win because I don't have a say in that matter, and ESPN sure seems to have their agenda and propaganda machine running on all cylinders for Tebow...
But if I did have a say, Keenum would be in New York this December, and depending on how he plays in the final four games, he could end up as Houston's second Heisman Trophy winner.
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