Another College Football Season Finished, but Not Without Controversy

I'm sure that anyone with an interest in college football probably took the time to watch last night's BCS National Title Championship Game Sponsored by FedEx between Florida and Oklahoma University. It was perhaps not a pretty game, owing to the layoff between conference championship games and the last game of the BCS bowl season. Still, the game was interesting for many different reasons.

The first example is that last night's game pitted the past two Heisman Trophy (the award that annually goes to the player voters deem to be the best overall player in all of college football) winners, Tim Tebow of Florida (the 2007 Heisman winner) and Sam Bradford of OU (the 2008 Heisman winner). There have been many players who won the Heisman as underclassmen, certainly. I would venture that last night's game was the first to have two Heisman winners opposing each other* in a game with national title implications on the line.

* When Matt Leinart and Reggie Bush were playing Texas in the BCS Title game after the 2005 season (Leinart being the 2004 Heisman winner, and Bush being the 2005 Heisman winner), they were on the same side of the ball.

The announcers also made a comment that I took to be a real, "Well, duh!" statement during the game. They made sure to point out how Bradford was also named to the AP First Team All-American roster.* If a person has been voted as the best all-around player in all of college football, why wouldn't he be named to the First Team All-American squad?

* Tebow, by the way, was only named to the Third Team All-American list, with UT QB Colt McCoy being named to the Second Team list. Forget that he was the 2007 Heisman winner, and that he outplayed Bradford by a large margin in the BCS Title game itself.

Which then got me to thinking about whether there had been times in the past where the Heisman Trophy winner has not been voted First Team All-American. I know that the voters for each award are different, but as I started to do some research on the topic, I was blown away just at the sheer number of All-American lists put out every year. I'm not even going to touch on all the other awards out there in big-time college football, such as the Bronco Nagurski (awarded annually to the best defender), Chuck Bednarik (ditto), Dick Butkus (best LB), Outland Trophy (best lineman), Doak Walker (best RB), Lou Groza (best K), Ray Guy (best P), etc. etc.

In terms of All-American rosters alone, there are 12 different entities that annually select a team of All-American players, to wit: the Associated Press, the Football Writers Association of America, the American Football Coaches Association, the Walter Camp Foundation, the Sporting News, Sports Illustrated, Pro Football Weekly, ESPN, CBS Sports, College Football News, Rivals.com, and Scout.com. Whew! I'm tired from typing all of that! Trying to choose just one All-American team to compare against the list of Heisman Trophy winners, I wanted to go with just the best known of all rosters, the annual AP list of All-Americans.

While it was easy to pull up a comprehensive list of Heisman Trophy winners from the www.heisman.com website, I had a much harder time finding resources on the Internet for the history of AP All-American teams. Finding historical records for AP All-Americans might be one of those traditional trek-to-the-library-and-pore-over-microfiche tasks. Normally, putting more search terms into a Google search helps to limit the results somewhat. When I googled for "first team ap all-american history", I received 102,000 hits. When I added the word "records" to the search string, that narrowed down the list somewhat, but only to 74,800 hits. Unfortunately, whenever a writer pens a story about someone from his or her school being named to the AP All-American team, he almost always includes the word "history" or "records" in the story itself. The end result was I couldn't find historical records of AP All-American teams, not even on the AP's own website.

Which brought me back to using the ol' standby, Wikipedia. I actually really like and generally trust the information I find available on Wikipedia, even though I know it is ripe for abuse by people who push a singular point of view. On balance (or should I say "by and large," in honor of Wall-E [2008]?), I feel the people behind Wikipedia do a very good job of moderating revisions to the point where it is no less accurate than any other encyclopedia out there. It's a reference, and any information on it should be treated like it's coming from any other reference: Trust but verify.

Sadly, on the Wikipedia page for College Football All-American Teams, they have data basically covering the modern Internet plus a few scattered years in history (1998-2008, plus 1970, 1931, 1925, and 1910). For comparison's sake with the list of Heisman winners, only those years since 1935 are relevant. Here are the Heisman winners for the years on which we do have AP All-American roster data:

• 1970 - Jim Plunkett, QB, Stanford
• 1998 - Ricky Williams, RB, Texas
• 1999 - Ron Dayne, RB, Wisconsin
• 2000 - Chris Weinke, QB, Florida State
• 2001 - Eric Crouch, QB, Nebraska
• 2002 - Carson Palmer, QB, USC
• 2003 - Jason White, QB, Oklahoma
• 2004 - Matt Leinart, QB, USC
• 2005 - Reggie Bush, RB, USC
• 2006 - Troy Smith, QB, Ohio State
• 2007 - Tim Tebow, QB, Florida
• 2008 - Sam Bradford, QB, OU

That's it, that's the list! Going through all the current years (1998-2008), it certainly appears that every single Heisman Trophy winner was named to the AP First Team All-American roster. In 2000, only AP named Chris Weinke to its list of All-Americans; all the other rating entities chose Josh Heupel, QB, OU over Weinke, which is interesting in and of itself.

Going back to 1970 reveals something different, however. Jim Plunkett, voted as the best player in all of college football that year, was named only to the AP Second Team of All-Americans. None other than Joe Theisman, QB, Notre Dame beat out Plunkett for First Team honors. Which meant the AP voters didn't think Plunkett was the best QB in college football, much less the best overall player that year. As Spock would say, "Fascinating!"

All of this gets right back to what's wrong with Big Time College Football and the BCS, naturally! Too many opinions are thrown around, and you know what they say about people's rear ends and opinions. Voters chose to elevate undefeated Utah up to the #2 spot in the final AP poll of the season, and 16 of those voters selected Utah as the #1 team in the country.

Utah head coach Kyle Whittingham even broke ranks on the USA Today coaches' poll, voting his own team #1 even though coaches are typically bound to vote for the winner of the BCS National Title Championship Game. As of yet, there is no word whether Whittingham will be disciplined for his action by the American Football Coaches Association, but the better question may be why only 61 coaches vote in the USA Today coaches' poll when there are 120 universities playing Division 1-A football?

In my own humble opinion, no one who is a fan of college football would lose interest in early- or mid-season games if the NCAA were to switch to a playoff system. No one would talk around the water cooler any less, and sportswriters still would provide their opinions at the same rate if we had a true champion in college football. Last time I checked, everyone LOVES March Madness, with the only gripes coming just after the Selection Show. People still love to debate who got dissed and/or who should be in the NCAA Tournament, and in that format, 65 teams earn the right to play for a national title in mens' college basketball. At least the outcome of the season is decided on the court, with every team having a chance to win. In Big Time (Division 1-A, or Bowl Subdivision) College Football, everything is subject to opinion. This year, many of the voters never saw Utah play a game until they destroyed Alabama in the Sugar Bowl.

I think I'll go back to supporting my second alma mater, the College of William & Mary, who plays big time (albeit Division 1-AA, or Championship Subdivision) football. When they made the playoffs in 2004, it was terribly exciting going to the playoff game between the Tribe and James Madison, the eventual champ. Even as a grad student, I thoroughly enjoyed the playoff atmosphere. The Division 1-A guys could learn from that.