Derrick Henry’s big game made the Heisman race an actual race again

Welcome to the Heisman of the Week, a totally serious column in which we dissect the performances of literally thousands of college football players to tell you which ones deserve the Heisman Trophy most based on just this one week of competition ... and which players are actually setting themselves up for contention for the thing. (They’re not always the same.)

After all, while it’s Alabama’s defense that came out of Saturday night looking truly terrifying, LSU’s is quite good. The Tigers are still No. 16 nationally against the run after giving up 250 rushing yards to the Tide. And Henry ran for 50 more yards himself than any team had put up on LSU this year.

The best Heisman-related question prompted by that game is the obvious one: Is Henry’s “head-to-head” victory over Fournette enough to close what had become a wide gap? CBS analyst Gary Danielson speculated that Henry was the new Heisman front-runner late in Saturday night’s game.

I don’t agree.

Tweets like this one about Henry’s performance against Power Five competition have crossed my timeline more than a few times since Saturday.

And, hey, that’s great. Perhaps you saw Bruce Feldman’s similar piece, which also makes note of Henry’s running against ranked teams? The point of that line of logic is that Henry has performed very well this year, and wonderfully against great competition.

But the implicit comparison to Fournette doesn’t actually favor Henry. Fournette has run for 1,383 yards and 16 TDs through eight games. He has also run for 1,000 yards and 12 TDs in six games vs. Power Five teams. It doesn’t take Wolfram Alpha to figure out that those averages are better than Henry’s, though not dramatically so.

What Henry’s game against LSU did, I think, is give him a tie-breaker. If he and Fournette finish the regular season with similar stats -- very much possible, especially given that Fournette will likely have played 11 games to Henry’s 13 by the time the Heisman is awarded -- then voters can look to a night when Henry was almost inarguably better, and cast their lot with him.

Fournette’s game against Alabama made this race a race again. If he’d run for 200 yards on that Alabama defense, he would’ve been as far ahead of the pack as Secretariat at the Belmont. Now, Henry and others -- Florida State’s Dalvin Cook, Clemson’s Deshaun Watson, maybe even Baylor’s Corey Coleman -- have some hope of chasing him down.

Completing 70 percent of one’s passes over a full season is somewhat rare. Since the 2011 season produced eight passers who did so, the last three full seasons have netted just eight combined. Passing for 5,000 yards in a season is very rare, only done 13 times in FBS history.

Falk and Johnson are both on pace to do both in 2015, which would make this season the first with two 5,000-yard QBs who completed 70 percent of their throws in FBS history. Oh, and both guys have 33 touchdowns on the year, with Johnson throwing 20 of them in his last four games, five in each.

Johnson was really close to putting together four straight games of at least 400 passing yards and five touchdowns, too. He finished Saturday’s demolition of Ohio with 399 yards through the air.

On Saturday, Lewis set the Michigan record for passes defensed -- passes intercepted plus passes broken up -- in a year. Again, he plays at Michigan, which produced the last defensive back to win the Heisman.

He obviously won’t win the Heisman like Charles Woodson did, given his lack of offensive and special teams contributions. But Lewis is arguably having a better season on defense than Woodson did back in 1997.