College Football's Debbie Downer

Once filled with promise, season has failed to sizzle
By Mark Schlabach/ESPN.com

This was supposed to be a college football season to remember.

We were supposed to be witnessing one of the most compelling Heisman Trophy races in history. With quarterbacks Sam Bradford, Colt McCoy and Tim Tebow coming back to school, the trio was supposed to light up scoreboards and jockey for position on Heisman Trophy ballots, while their teams jockeyed for the No. 1 ranking in the Bowl Championship Series standings.

Instead, with six weeks to go in the 2009 regular season, Bradford's college career is over (along with Oklahoma's national championship hopes) because of an injured right shoulder, and McCoy and Tebow have rarely looked like the players who were Heisman Trophy finalists a year ago.

With apologies to Boise State, Cincinnati, Iowa and TCU, the 2009 college football season has been a flop by most accounts.

Rest of column here.


I saw this column by Mark Schlabah this week and I thought it brought up an interesting point about this college football season. Things haven't been what we thought they'd be. This was supposed to be the season of the Heisman frontrunners. For the first time in college football history there were two Heisman winners returning and the Heisman runner up from '08 also returned. Instead, we now have zero definitive Heisman frontrunners. Sure, Jimmy Clasuen and Mark Ingram are getting some love but noone is sure they'll stick around.

Also, despite still having more a few undefeated teams, there is no dominant squad. Alabama is probably the closest thing we have and the Tide came close to losing to unranked Tenneessee last week.

My impression is that you can't really expect anything in college football. There's growing parity in the sport and injuries can change the season in a heartbeat. I guess the biggest disappointment has been the lack of Top 25 teams playing each other at this point in the season. It seems like we're getting 1-2 matchups between Top 25 teams a week when we used to get multiple such games in the past. That may be largely in part to the influx of non-BCS conference teams in the Top 25 or it could just be an anomoly. I'm not sure.

All that said I'm still betting things start to turn around. I think the top teams will start playing better and I think at the end of the year Tebow and McCoy will be on the stage with Clausen at the Downtown Athletic Club. Either way, I'll still be watching.

If nothing else, at least we got to see this last week.