Welcome to our weekly column about the Heisman Trophy race. It is horse-themed.
The Heisman Horse Race, Week 6: Can anyone catch Marcus Mariota?
Oregon’s signal-caller is leading the Heisman Trophy watch, just like he did early in 2013. He might not be caught this time.
Joe Robbins
The front-runner
Last Week: Bye
2014 Season: 71-for-96, 1,135 passing yards, 13 TDs, zero INTs; 214 rushing yards, three rushing TDs
Current Odds (via Bovada): 7/4
We begin October, and the part of the college football season that features legitimate Heisman talk, with Oregon's signal-caller right back where he was last season: At the head of the pack. Jameis Winston won the Heisman Trophy last season, to be sure, but Mariota also lost it, with subpar performances in losses to Stanford and Arizona opening the door for Winston to hoist the hardware.
This season, Mariota's off to an even better start — he has four more passing touchdowns and 11 more completions through four games, despite throwing 11 fewer passes, and leads the nation in completion percentage while ranking second in yards per attempt — and has a signature win over Michigan State's rock-ribbed defense to his credit. But his nemesis, if there truly is one, is Arizona: The Wildcats have snagged three of the 10 picks Mariota's tossed in his career, and the 42-16 thumping the Ducks took in Tucson last season was their worst loss since 2008. And the 'Cats come to Autzen tonight off a thrilling, insane win over California two weeks ago, so they don't lack for confidence against long odds.
But the status quo of this Heisman race will be "Mariota leads by significant margin" until or unless he does something to slip from the front. The other quarterbacks of College Football Playoff contenders who could feasibly challenge Mariota's statistical profile are Winston, who will have one fewer game to pad his stats, plus character concerns — real and/or trumped-up — and fatigue to overcome; Baylor's Bryce Petty, who's already missed a game of his own; and a trio of SEC West studs, Alabama's Blake Sims, Mississippi State's Dak Prescott, and Texas A&M's Kenny Hill, who each have the gauntlet of the SEC West to navigate, and will likely knock each other's teams off, and each other out of the race. Todd Gurley and Ameer Abdullah, despite their significance to their teams, are not as important and appealing as quarterbacks are, and Amari Cooper, great though he is, plays a position that hasn't produced a Heisman winner since Desmond Howard.
If Mariota leads the Ducks to an undefeated regular season, I’d be flabbergasted if he doesn’t raise the Heisman.
The chasers
RB Todd Gurley, Georgia Bulldogs
Last Week: 28 carries, 208 yards, two TDs; four catches, 30 yards; defeated Tennessee, 35-32
2014 Season: 69 carries, 610 rushing yards, six TDs; 147 kick return yards, TD
Current Odds: 7/2
RB Ameer Abdullah, Nebraska Cornhuskers
Last Week: 22 carries, 208 yards, three TDs; defeated Illinois, 45-14
2013 Season: 114 carries, 833 rushing yards, eight TDs; 108 receiving yards, two TDs
Current Odds: 9/1
QB Kenny Hill, Texas A&M Aggies
Last Week: 21-for-41, 386 passing yards, four TDs, one INT; 30 rushing yards; defeated Arkansas, 35-28 (OT)
2013 Season: 118-for-180, 1,745 passing yards, 17 TDs, two INTs; 136 rushing yards
Current Odds: 9/1
Gurley and Abdullah have candidacies — call them Wonderful Workhorse candidacies — resting on their importance to their teams and their fantastic stat lines, but that profile pales in comparison to the Thoroughbred Quarterback one. And given that Gurley’s team has already lost to South Carolina and struggled with Tennessee, it’s not going out on a limb to think he’ll be part of another loss; given that Abdullah’s signature moment this season is rescuing Nebraska from ignominious defeat against McNeese State, it seems unlikely that he’ll be able to save the Cornhuskers forever — or even through this weekend’s showdown with Michigan State.
Hill, though, has a chance to sire a foal of Thoroughbred Quarterback and Colt Brennan — a stats-only monster — this season. Through five games, he's ahead of where Johnny Manziel was in 2012, and where Winston was in 2013. And though six of A&M's final seven games are against currently ranked SEC teams, and the Aggies had to come back to beat Arkansas, the only unranked SEC West outfit, last week, Manziel did have a fair bit of success against similarly daunting squads in 2012, when Kevin Sumlin's offense was still just being put through its paces in College Station.
I don’t think Kenny Trill can chase down Mariota unless he’s just scintillating on a week-by-week basis for the Aggies, and I doubt he’ll be able to be that because of how rugged the SEC West seems to be, but no other player seems to me to have as much upside down the backstretch.
Dark horses
QB Jameis Winston, Florida St. Seminoles
Last Week: 26-for-38, 365 yards, four TDs, two INTs; defeated N.C. State, 56-41
2014 Season: 73-for-105, 991 passing yards, seven TDs, four INTs
Current Odds: 22/1
Winston is well ahead of his own pace from last season through three games, but he barely played in two of those three games last year, blowouts of Nevada and Bethune-Cookman. This year, he’s had to play the full 60 minutes against both Oklahoma State and N.C. State, and stayed in until the late stages against The Citadel.
He’s also not going to win the Heisman unless every other feasible candidate falls well behind him: I suspect very, very few people feel like rewarding him for play on the field at the moment, and though that may change, the sentiment for punishing him for churlishness off the field largely won’t.
QB Bryce Petty, Baylor Bears
Last Week: 30-for-44, 336 passing yards, one TD, one INT; nine carries, 47 yards, two TDs; defeated Iowa State, 49-28
2014 Season: 66-for-101, 913 passing yards, seven TDs, one INT; 79 rushing yards, three rushing TDs
Current Odds: 25/1
Petty’s plight is like Winston’s, in that he’s already missed a game, but Petty missed his due to a back injury, not the latest in a long string of brain cramps. He’s not likely to make up those numbers, and even if Baylor’s the king of the Big 12 when all is said and done, that will hurt a guy seen as the latest — and, unlike Mariota, not the greatest — cog in an unstoppable machine.
After all, if we rolled all of Baylor’s QBs into one person — Brysethris Petrusson — that guy would be 103 for 162 through the air for 1605 yards, 14 touchdowns, and two interceptions on the year.
WR Amari Cooper, Alabama Crimson Tide
Last Week: Bye
2014 Season: 43 catches, 655 yards, five TDs
Current Odds: 25/1
The three Heisman-winning receivers in the modern era — Johnny Rodgers, Tim Brown, and Desmond Howard — each supplemented their fine play as pass-catchers with work as electric returners, and it seems highly unlikely that Cooper will add that duty to his regimen. So I don’t have high hopes for Cooper winning the Heisman.
Extrapolate his current line to 13 games, though, and you get a player who would have about 140 catches for over 2,100 yards and 15 or 16 touchdowns with six games against SEC West teams. If he does that, somehow, he’s going to New York for sure.
The long shot
QB Blake Sims, Alabama Crimson Tide
Last Week: Bye
2014 Season: 71-for-97, 1,091 passing yards, eight TDs, two INTs; 141 rushing yards, two TDs
Current Odds: Not listed
Scroll back up to Mariota’s season line. Then back down here. I’ll wait.
(hums “La Marseillaise”)
Can Sims keep that up against the SEC West? Probably not. But he’s been eerily akin to the presumptive Heisman front-runner from a statistical standpoint so far — and Bovada doesn’t even have him on the board. That’s worth a flier.
The FBS Steed(s) of the Week
QB Jared Goff, California Golden Bears
The Line: 23-for-41, 449 yards, seven TDs, one INT
QB Sefo Liufau, Colorado Buffaloes
The Line: 46-for-67, 449 yards, seven TDs, one INT; 10 carries, 72 yards
Cal is gonna play a lot of stupid games this year, given its papier-mache defense and Sonny Dykes’s Air Raid offense, but while it was going to be hard to top losing on a Hail Mary after never trailing for a second of play, it’s going to be incredibly hard to top the 59-56 double overtime shootout that produced the above lines. Liufau threw or ran the ball on 77 plays; Cal ran 72 plays.
The FCS Steed of the Week
RB Tyler Varga, Yale
The Line: 28 carries, 185 yards, five TDs
All Varga did against Army, in the Bulldogs’ 49-43 win over the Black Knights — their first over the team from West Point since 1955 — was score three game-tying touchdowns, including one with 1:42 to play in the fourth quarter, and the game-winning touchdown in overtime.
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