Who’s taking home the hardware?

Matt Beaudin

September 7, 2009

schedule 2 min read

With the beginning of the college football season there is always time to speculate as to who will be touting the hardware come December. The race for the Heisman and the track meet to the national championship will be hotly contested until the final weeks of the season.

The battle for the Heisman has three clear-cut contenders: Tim Tebow, the all-everything quarterback from Florida, Colt McCoy from Texas and last year’s trophy winner Sam Bradford from OU. Two of the three already have a Heisman Trophy on their resumes, while McCoy has yet to have his name called at the Downtown Athletic Club in New York City.

While Tim Tebow, who won in 2007, seems to be the popular pick to win again, that appears to be a tall order even for the football tossing, national championship-winning, Evangelical missionary from Jacksonville. Only one player in history, Archie Griffen, has captured the Heisman twice in a career, and while Tebow will most assuredly have the numbers to be a two-time winner, I believe the voters will be looking elsewhere come December.

Sam Bradford also has a Heisman with his name on it. Although he will have the gaudy stats to solicit another trophy, I think a tough loss late in the season will make it rough for him to be the second all-time repeat winner.

That leaves the Texas signal caller as the front-runner. From the first game to the last it will be McCoy’s trophy to lose. As long as he puts up numbers comparable to his counterparts, and can put Texas in the national championship picture late in the season, the trophy should be his.

As in last season’s BCS National Championship Game, the Heisman-Trophy winner Sam Bradford and his Oklahoma Sooners fell to the speedy spread offense of the Florida Gators. It will be no different this season as the BCS title game will pit this season’s Heisman Trophy winner Colt McCoy and the Texas Longhorns against that same Gator spread attack and, unfortunately for Texas fans and the rest of us, Tebow will again be king of the college football world.