The Eye of the Storm

The Eye of the Storm

by Derek SchutjerStaff Writer

It’s that time of the year again, college football fans. With the end of the season in sight, it is time for the Heisman watch to heat up. A few of this season’s stallions are starting to pull their way ahead of the pack.

As Heisman considerations are being tossed out into the light, some seem to be out of place amongst the race of college football’s current greats. There is always the same deliberation over who should win the Heisman, just as who should go to a bowl game. The teams and players that don’t play in the major conferences seem to always get the short end of the stick. Even with extreme amounts of defense, this subject will never be settled.

Sure, it is great to see a player leading his-average to sub-par-team out onto the field every week. But ,if his stats are being posted against teams like Maine, Iowa State and Florida International do they even count?

This may be the case for Shonn Greene. Greene is still a great running back for an otherwise poor Iowa team, offensively, but a candidate for Heisman? Oh boy.

There is a lot of work to be done by Greene and the Iowa football team before that mission could ever be accomplished. It would have to be nothing short of him rushing for over 100 yards each of the closing games of the season. It would probably require Ricky Stanzi to take a load off Greene’s back by completing a few extra passes in order to win the remaining games of the season. Though effort is great, sometimes it isn’t quite enough. Each of this year’s contenders is from a major conference. The last individual to win the Heisman that wasn’t from a major conference was Ty Detmer of BYU in the Mountain West Conference back in 1990.

Even though front-runners like Colt McCoy, Graham Harrell, Sam Bradford, Tim Tebow and Knowshon Moreno may be in contention just because they are winning teams, they are the ones leading their teams to victory. Week in and week out, they have to defend themselves against the chance of losing not just the game, but their team’s hopes of going to a national championship – a type of pressure that Greene doesn’t exactly have to deal with.

There is no official description of the Heisman so in-depth that it makes it easy to pick the winner. It is probably left vague enough just to spark conversation and heat arguments; otherwise there would be no excitement in the Heisman chase at all.