Love the Heismanpundit.  Great site and he’s usually dead on.  His predictions today make me a little ill.  He seems to feel the award is Ingram’s to win or will fall back to McCoy.  They’re both great players and I buy Ingram (for the most part).  But McCoy will be another disaster of a winner just like Bradford was last year.  Do these voters actually pay attention to the season or just look at stats lines or (worse yet) just watch the Bristol network for their opinions.  Understand this…Big 12 pass defenses suck.  They’re not just mediocre.  They suck.

Didn’t we learn anything last year?  Bradford and McCoy and Reesing and Harrell all put up Heisman Trophy-like numbers.  Then (some of them) met real defenses in bowl games and got stuffed.  Then people realized that, “hey, maybe we should have thought about the odds of four record breaking quarterbacks all playing in the same conference at the same time against good defenses being statistically improbable (more like impossible).”

Colt McCoy’s numbers this year have come against weak defenses.  The average pass defense he’s played this year was ranked 79th in the country.  Take away the two decent Oklahoma teams and the highest ranked pass defense  Texas has played is UCF.  By the numbers, he had a great day Saturday – against a mediocre and beaten down Kansas team (59th in total defense, 88th in pass defense and probably losing their coach).  AND he stayed in the full game in a 31-point blowout (why does Mack Brown have the rep of being a class act?).

Now we can argue all day whether the stiff arm trophy still has a place as the premiere award in college football.  Nonetheless, the voters will elevate some player to the list of college football’s greats.  Colt McCoy is a fine player who has won a lot of games, but players with eye-popping statistics from the WAC and other conferences seem to be excluded due to the perception of weaker competition.  The average pass defense in the WAC this year is currently ranked 56th nationally.  The Big 12′s is 70th (and is ranked the fifth best conference by Sagarin).

Has McCoy done something special?  Sure.  Has he done it against special competition?  I think we all know the answer to that.

(Note: 9 of the top 25 pass defenses in the country are in the SEC.)