Football is a quarterback-driven sport. In the NFL quarterbacks are a precious commodity that teams will spend millions of dollars, and give up valuable assets to put themselves in a position to draft one. Quarterback contracts are by far the largest in the NFL; out of the top fifteen contracts for guaranteed money, quarterbacks have twelve of them. College Football is the same way. From 2000 the Heisman trophy (College Football’s most prestigious award) quarterbacks have won seventeen out of twenty. Obtaining a quarterback works a little different as teams recruit instead of draft. Recruiting the right quarterback is winning half the battle and another half of the battle is keeping them. Former Texas A&M head coach Kevin Sumlin recruited five-star quarterbacks like no other (Kenny Hill, Kyle Allen, Kyler Murray, and Kellen Mond). To note two of the four (Allen and Murray are starting NFL quarterbacks) and only one of four had a career at A&M (Mond).  Transfer quarterbacks defined the College Football offseason this year and as many as ten teams in the Power Five have new quarterbacks due to transfers. Transfer quarterbacks Jalen Hurts and Justin Fields, for example, are at the helm of undefeated teams atop of the polls. Point being quarterbacks are the most important position on the football field, so who is the greatest college quarterback of the 21st century?
Criteria:
- NFL Careers don’t matter for this exercise. This is a College Football article; not an NFL one. Let’s call this the Tim Tebow rule
- Stats matter to a point: The beauty of College Football is the various offense that each team runs. Teams win by running the option and not completing a pass (Georgia Southern vs. Florida 2013) others run the Air Raid throw eighty-eight times for 734 yards. (Oklahoma vs. Texas Tech 2016. Please note that Texas Tech lost this game, but the stat line is absurd). Let’s call this the Patrick Mahomes rule.
- Awards matter to a point: In 2001 Eric Crouch won the Heisman Trophy (27% first-place votes by the way) and only threw for a whopping seven touchdowns on the season. He got absolutely crushed by Colorado in a game they needed to win to secure the Big 12 North division and somehow got into the National Championship game against Miami and got steamrolled. I should mention that the 2001 Miami team is the greatest collegiate team ever assembled and had more NFL players drafted from that team than most teams in a five year period. Â The Eric Crouch rule.
- Wins matter to a point: From 2008-2009 Quarterback A went 34-3 in three years as a starter including an undefeated season that included a Rose Bowl victory. The three losses during his career were to top ten programs (Oklahoma, Utah, and Boise State). At the time he left for the NFL he was the all-time wins leader in program history. Quarterback A is Andy Dalton of TCU. The Andy Dalton rule is self-explanatory.
- Longevity does not matter to a point: Landry Jones was a four-year starter at Oklahoma from 2009-2012 and put up impressive numbers throughout his career. His career totals were over sixteen thousand yards passing, one hundred twenty-three touchdowns, and over sixty percent completion percentage. Jones is third in all-time passing yards and 7th in passing touchdowns in college football history. He is also Oklahoma’s all-time leader in passing yards and touchdowns. Even with all those stats, he doesn’t even crack the top five in best quarterbacks in Oklahoma history. For the record Baker Mayfield, Sam Bradford, Jason White, Josh Heupel, Kyler Murray are all better. At the pace that Jalen Hurts is going, he will join the list of Oklahoma quarterbacks better than Jones. Hence the Laundry Jones rule.
- Playing only one season counts: Cam Newton and Kyler Murray both only played one full season of College Football, and to say they were not the best players in the sport during that year is absurd. This is the Cam Newton Rule.
- Surrounding Talent Matters to a point: In 2013 Jameis Winston won the Heisman Trophy and led Florida State to the BCS National Championship. This marked one of the few times in history where the Heisman Trophy winner won the National Championship (Five times since 2000). Winston threw for over four thousand yards, forty touchdowns, eleven and a half yards per attempt with a mind-boggling sixty seven percent completion percentage. So isn’t Winston regarded has one of the best? The talent surrounding him was littered with NFL prospects. Ten offensive players from that team were drafted into the NFL; eight more signed NFL contracts. This is the Jameis Winston rule.
*No matter what rules apply this argument, and how hard I try to be objective this is a purely subjective exercise.
Now that we got the rules out of the way we can look at how to break it down. To take the last twenty years of college football and try to determine if a winner is impossible. The next few articles will look at the 2000-2005 era, 2006-2010, 2011-2015 and 2015-current.
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