The Joel Klatt Show: A College Football Podcast - Heisman Ceremony Snubs & Transfer portal solutions

Episode Date: December 8, 2022

On this episode of The Joel Klatt Show, Joel talks about the four Heisman finalists who were invited to New York: USC QB Caleb Williams, Ohio State QB C.J. Stroud, TCU QB Max Duggan and Georgia QB Stetson Bennett. Joel brings up some other names including Tennessee QB Hendon Hooker and Michigan RB Blake Corum who he believes were snubbed by the Heisman voters. Joel compares their stats with the four finalists, and offers solutions to the Heisman voting process. Lastly, Joel discuses the importance of the transfer portal, how coaches and their staffs can adapt to the transfer portal process, and offers a few changes and regulations he would add to the portal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Now this is how you break on a slant route. Will Johnson read it perfectly. He's one-on-one coverage. Watch how quickly he breaks. Right when he sees the foot in the ground from Purdue, he takes off into the inside and beats the wide receiver of the ball. All Sheffield can do then is become a defensive bat and tackle him. And now that's two interceptions for the young Will Johnson.

What's up everybody? Welcome into the Joel Clat show. I am Joel Clat. This has been a wild week. If you have not listened to the previous two episodes, go back and check that out. Had a full recap of the college football playoff rankings on Monday. And then Bruce and I, Bruce Feldman, chatted about all the new coaches, including Dion Sanders.

You bet you. That happened on Wednesday. So go back and check those ones out. And remember, download the show and follow us everywhere that you want to follow us. Okay, let's get into what I want to chat about today. I want to chat about the Heisman, the Heisman finalist list, and then the Transfer Portal. So both of those issues are obviously, not issues like subjects, have become a hot topic this week for obvious reasons. And we knew that this would happen with the transfer portal.

So I'll get to that in a moment. But I do want to talk about the Heisman, because I still believe in the... Heisman. I believe in what it represents. I believe in the enormity of it, both for the player and his program. And I think that there are some things inherently within the Heisman process that need to be fixed. So let's chat a little bit about the Heisman. So first off, it's four guys that are now Heisman finalist. Stetson Bennett, C.J. Stroud, Caleb Williams, and Max Dougan. Really phenomenal seasons from all of those players and really, really good players. Some of them really great players. I don't have a huge argument with this list of four, to be quite

honest with you. In particular, Stroud Williams and Duggan. Those three, I think all of us had a really good indication or inkling that they were going to be Heisman finalists. I think we all would have been very surprised if Caleb Williams, Max Duggan, or C.J. Stroud weren't Heisman finalists. I do think that the surprise inclusion into that list is Stetson Bennett.

Not that Stetson didn't have a great year. You go back and you look at what Bennett did this year. And it was pretty remarkable. First of all, he's the quarterback of the defending national champion and they went undefeated. And they're back in the same spot,

number one, going into the playoff. So in a large regard, you know, he reminds me of another finalist from a few years ago, which was A.J. McCarron. Remember when A.J. McCarron went and was a finalist. In fact, their numbers are a bit similar when you actually look at it. McCarron, you know, he wasn't set in the world on fire as far as touchdown passes or total touchdowns. But he was on a team that had won championships and obviously they had just come off of that kick six loss. He finished second behind James Winston that year. But when I looked at Bennett and what he did this year, listen, the other guys, again, like you kind of get it, right?

Like, especially Williams. Like, we know Caleb Williams was going to New York. Especially how Max Duggan played in his conference championship game. We knew he was going to New York. C.J. Stroud, same. Like, they have the numbers there. Bennett was a little bit interesting. So what did you have to do? You had to go back to his biggest stages and give credit where credits do.

In their biggest games, Georgia's biggest games, Stets and Bennett played outstanding football. Against Oregon in the opener, he threw for 368 yards and two touchdowns. Also ran for a touchdown. Against Tennessee, remember that monster game, you know, was built up as such a huge affair, and rightly so. He threw for 257 and two touchdowns in that game. And the weather wasn't great. if you remember there was some rain in that in that game then against ls u just last weekend 274 yards and four touchdowns so listen i i get it like stetson's a great player i've made the argument all

year by the way that we need to stop viewing stetson as just the game manager walk-on quarterback that's not making mistakes for georgia he was a playmaker he can make plays with his feet like i like his game a lot having said that when you include him as a heisman final and it's just a four-person list, it immediately opens the door to snubs. You see, let me put it a different way. If the Heisman finalist list was just C.J. Stroud, Caleb Williams, and Max Duggan, I don't think there would be a lot of chatter online about who got snubbed or who's not going to New York. Because remember, going to New York is a big deal.

Being a Heisman finalist is a big deal, both for the individual and for the program. More on that in a little bit. So as soon as Bennett's one of the four, then all of a sudden you're like, hold on. What about Hendon Hooker? In his own conference, Hinden Hooker was voted first team all SEC. Hinden Hooker was the offensive player of the year in the SEC. So like, wait, that doesn't make sense. They play the same position.

And then you could also say like Blake Corum. Blake Corum didn't even play in two and a half games. He had 1,400 yards. This guy was a one-man wrecking crew. for a large part of the season on a team that also went undefeated. So if we're just taking like, hey, let's take the best offensive player from the team that just went undefeated, why isn't Blake Corum there either? So, and again, this is not like the Heisman Trust's fault.

This is of a voter issue. And I'll get to that in a moment as well. But I think what we need to start to realize is that you can love Stetson Bennett as a player and think that there's some guys that got snubbed. I think those two things can live equally together. I want to be very clear about that because I don't think Stetson Bennett is bad. If I had to bet my own money,

I would bet that Georgia wins a national championship again in this playoff. Part of the reason is because of Stets and Bennett. So I can think that and also think, hold on a second, there were other guys that deserve to be in New York more so than Bennett this year. Okay. Those two things can be true at the same time because the season that Bennett had was actually an outlier when it comes to Heisman. Okay. And let me roll through it. So I'm not just going to sit here and chatter on and chatter on. I want to tell you guys specifically why it was an outlier and why some of these other guys got snubbed. So Bennett had 20 touchdown passes.

That's 42nd in college football. Okay, that's fine. There have been other Heisman winners, by the way, that weren't even in the top 10 in touchdown passes. Like, for instance, Johnny Mansell was 20th in college football in touchdown passes. He threw 26 touchdown passes. Now, that's six more than Bennett did. Mansell also ran for 20.

21. Okay, that 21 was good for seventh in all of college football. So like there was another element to this. And Bennett, you know, he's got, what is it? 20, what, seven total touchdowns? So again, there's a bit of an outlier. The last Heisman finalist with 20 passing touchdowns and under 10 rushing touchdowns was turn of the century. Josh Heippel, Hendon Hooker's coach. Since 2010, Cam Newton, this is a better indication. since Cam Newton, if you just took it the average Heisman finalists that played the position that we're talking about quarterback here, and there's been a lot of them, then what you would see is that the average season for that quarterback, a Heisman finalist quarterback, is 34 touchdown passes and 42 total touchdowns. And by the way, that's going into the Heisman ceremony. So that's not even including some of their playoff touchdowns where I remember Burrow went off and ended up having 60 touchdowns. So we're not even dragging that number up. That's based on where they were at going into the ceremony. And right now Stetson Bennett has 20 and 27 total touchdowns. That's, again, this is an outlier. This is why there's an open door where you can start talking about snubs.

And this is why the people that start talking about snubs actually have an argument. Because you look at Bennett, he's 15th in the nation and completion percentage. That's his best stat. best stat, 42nd in passing touchdowns, 27th in yards per game. So you can say that he had a great year, you can say that he's a really good player,

you can say that all of those things, and then you can say, hold on a second, what happened to like, let's say, the following individuals? Hendon Hooker, let's just look at him. He was voted first team all SEC. He had 27 touchdowns and two interceptions, and by the way, two fewer games than Stetson Bennett. He only missed one within,

injury, and that was Vandy, by the way. So where would it have been as far as touchdown totals for Hendon Hooker if he would have gotten to play against Vandy? Absolutely turned around a Tennessee program. Remember, that Tennessee program was in the dumpster. And Hypo gets there and Hendon Hooker gets there. And all of a sudden, they're really 60 minutes away from being a playoff team. You know, the inexplicable loss of South Carolina, a game in which that's when Hendon Hooker went down. And by the way, I don't think that an injury should knock you out of the Heisman trophy ceremony or voting block, in particular when it happens late.

Like he had the numbers necessary to go to New York and he's not going to be there. Blake Corum, that's the other guy that I think a lot of people are upset about. Again, I talked about this already. He was the best offensive player on the other undefeated team. So if that's what we're going to talk about, and we're going to talk about like heart and determination and all these things, well, guess what? Blake Corum's in the exact same mold as Stetson Bennett. So now you've got an argument if you're yelling about Blake Corum.

And he's probably got better numbers when you look at it. Blake Corum had over 1,450 yards, which is 8th in the country. He missed, by the way. That's despite missing two and a half games. And like I said, he was the catalyst to that offense for a huge portion of this season on an undefeated team. a team that, by the way, has rebuilt itself over the last 18 months into the second best team in the country. By record, Michigan, second best team in the country over the last 18 months. There's a couple of other guys that I would just throw out there.

As soon as Bennett's involved, then people in Texas can say like, hey, hold on, Bijon Robinson had the numbers to go there, didn't he? And I would say, yeah, yeah, he absolutely did. Bejohn leads the nation in yards from scrimmage, just under 1,900 yards for scrimmage. Grimmage. He's got his second and total touchdowns with 20, and he carried the longhorns down the stretch, obviously, multiple times with 200-yard games. And in fact, you could make an argument, they lost their most important game to TCU, which would have put them eventually into the Big 12 title because they didn't give the ball to Bejohn Robinson. He only had 12 touches in

that game. How about this one, by the way? And this is a guy that nobody talked about at all. And you know what? I kind of blame myself. I should have brought him up a lot earlier. Michael Pinnix, the quarterback at Washington. Washington had a great year. Why? Their quarterback was sensational. Michael Pinnock led the country in passing, 363 yards per game, a team that went 10 and 2.

They finished 12th in the country after not receiving a vote in the preseason poll. So am I upset that Stetson Bennett is a finalist? No, I'm not. But when he's included, all of a sudden, all these other guys have an argument. All these other guys have an argument. And it really leads me to kind of my next point. We need to fix the Heisman voting process. If we're going to continue, and I think that we should, elevate this ward above all others.

Listen, I firmly believe this. I believe that the Heisman Trophy is the singular most important individual award you can win in American sports. There's no other individual award that comes close. The Heisman Trophy lasts forever. I'm reminded of that

Sandlot line, right? What does it say? Heroes get remembered, but legends never die. Heisman Trophy winners are legends. Legends, forever. And so it matters. Who wins that? And then I would also suggest, because

it's that big, it matters who's a finalist. So here's how I would fix the Heisman process. And I think it could get better. Number one, I think that we need to reduce the number of overall voters that vote for the Heisman trophy. I think that this is actually a really important piece to this. These votes should be highly coveted and rare. I think that they should be protected. And I think that if we vet out who actually got Heisman votes, I think you could weed out some of what I would say is the regionalization of the award. It should be a national award. It should not be voted on like we voted on it in the 1950s and 60s. There is enough technology for a smaller group of voters like 100 and not

900 to get it right. All right. And I think that vetting process really needs to take place. And we should focus on a national group of about 100 people, and those people should be the Heisman voters. Number two, I personally believe that we should not open up the submission date until after conference championship games. Now, some would argue that not everybody gets the opportunity to play a conference championship game, so it's only fair if you put your vote in before the conference

championship game. I disagree. I think the more opportunity to see, these players on the football field, the better. So I would not open up the submission process until after conference championship games. I don't understand why we would allow voters to vote when there's football still to be played. And number three, I would always invite five finalists. I just talk to you about how important I think that this award is.

And again, I think that this award, the Heisman Trophy, is the most important individual sporting award in American sports. and being a finalist is a huge deal. A huge deal. It's huge for the player. It's enormous for the program and the stage that you put the program on. If your quarterback gets to go and be a Heisman finalist, think of Josh Heppel right now. Josh Heippel would do anything to have Hinden Hooker be in New York so that he can say to a recruit, you come here, you can go to New York, you can be a Heisman finalists and maybe if you play well enough, you can win the Heisman trophy. That's a huge powerful, powerful recruiting tool. So I have no idea why we limit this to like, you know,

three finalists, four finalists, six finalists. It should always just be five. Five, invite the five top vote getters. If you're in the top five in the Heisman trophy voting, you should get to go to New York, period. Period. It's an important process and I think that that should change immediately. Let me move on. I want to go to the transfer portal. because this transfer portal is totally changing college football. We know it, right? We clearly know it. And I think that it's going possibly under the radar

just how impactful the portal has been. And maybe it's not. Maybe it hasn't. I don't know. I mean, but if I were to just start listing off some of the names of the players that not just had good years because it's less about that for me than it is about are you impacting the way that we watch and enjoy the sport. So you've got to go and turn a program into a contender,

whether it's on a conference level or a national level. These are some of the players that I felt like had a direct impact in the way that we watched the college football season from a playoff perspective, the ultimate goal. USC. was in the playoff race late. So all of those transfers from USC, to name a few, Caleb Williams, Jordan Addison, Travis, die, among others, obviously. Those are clearly some of the biggest ones.

Alabama was in the playoff picture. Jemir Gibbs, how big of an impact did he have on Alabama? He was largely outside of Bryce Young, their best offensive player and weapon. Michigan is undefeated. They're better running the football than they were a year ago. They're tougher on the offensive line. Why?

A transfer. Olu Oluwatimi comes in from Virginia. They lost those pass rushers. Guess who stepped up and played pretty well? Yobioki, both of them transfers. You look at Ohio State. They were impacted by transfers as well. Jim Knowles had to put in this new defense.

He comes over from Oklahoma State. And one of the reasons why they were able to grasp and pick up this defense as quickly as they did is because of Tanner McAllister, the transfer safety from Oklahoma State. That was huge. Chip Trainham transfers to Ohio State, and he was getting all the big carriers against Michigan. Look at TCU. TCU. No one talks about TCU. Everyone's like, man, look at what Lincoln did in year one.

And look at what they did in the transfer portal. TCU did almost the same thing with basically like under the radar names. Sonny Dykes in his first year. He brings in their most important transfer, their center, just like Michigan. By the way, both of these guys in the playoff, Alon Ali. He comes in from SMU. They bring him over. Mark Perry, the safety from Colorado on that defense. Johnny Hodges, the linebacker on that defense.

These are just names, by the way, that are like directly impacting the playoff. That's not even considering guys like Michael Pinnock, who led the country in terms of passing at Washington, took them to 10 and 2, their 12th in the country. How about Bo Nix at Oregon? It is littered out there with guys that had a direct and immediate impact on programs in a large way. So what does that tell you?

A long dissertation to basically tell you, this isn't going anywhere and it will continue to impact college football at the highest level more and more and more. So what does that mean? What does that mean? This is really what I wanted to get into because it's not just about acknowledging

what happened during the course of the year with transfers. It's also about thinking about the point in time and history right now that we're at in the sport. Because if you're a head football coach in college right now, if you're an athletic director, this transfer portal is not going anywhere, whether you like it or not. So you will adapt or die. No two ways about it. That's it. adapt or die.

And by the way, I've seen this before. See, right now it's a transfer portal. In 10 years, it'll be something else. You know, and we're probably NIL along with that. But this has happened before. Okay, so early 2000s and really until like the mid-2000s, 10s, 12, you know, 13, 14, there was an arms race in college football. And you were either investing in your program, in both ways, by the way,

in people and your coaching staff and in his support staff and facilities. So you were investing in brick and mortar or you were investing in human capital. And there were some programs that did that better and bigger than anybody else. And they started winning heavily. Clemson and Alabama did this as well as anybody out there. They just, they invested so much into their programs and they started to win. and they started to win at the highest level. And then those two dominated the sport.

And what was interesting to me is that they started dominating these teams who did not adapt. So through this arms race, what happened is that these schools adapted, these coaches adapted, these programs adapted, others didn't and they died.

Because I remember when Florida State was the cream of the crop. I remember when Miami was great. I remember when Texas was great. remember when USC was great. And for about a decade, they all went away. You know why? They didn't adapt to the arms race. They didn't invest in their program nearly like those other programs did. You know who else did? They kind of saw the handwriting on the wall. Ohio State. Went out and got Urban Meyer, got the staff, did everything they needed to do to do what, compete. And they won a national championship because of it. Guess who else did it? LSU. Guess who else did it?

Georgia. These are the teams that went out there and invested in a big way. They adapted. Others didn't and they died. So now here we are in the smack dab in the middle of the transfer portal era. It's here and it's not going anywhere. And it's going to impact us all the way to the playoff and beyond for years to come. So you better adapt or die. How do you adapt? Let's talk through how you adapt because it's not enough for me to just scream and yell about, hey, you got to do this, you got to do this. Okay, what do you have to do? Well, first and foremost, you have to realize that your head coach cannot be the end-all be-all in your program anymore. It's far too big. It's way too big now. You can't be the fundraiser and the head coach and the recruiter

and now the GM. You can't do that. It's a job that is far too big for one man. So I believe that every program in the country that is serious about playing at the highest level should have not just a personnel department, but someone in a general manager's type role, a GM, a GM. Because every single year, almost every roster in the country is going to be rebuilt. In order to do that, you better have a guy who has a department under him that is evaluating, that understands your culture that can help your head coach build your roster on an annual basis.

The head coach can't do that. Transfer portal ends, or excuse me, opens the day after the conference championship games. So if you're really good, you got 24 hours to dig in there? Come on. You can't do that. Adapt or die.

Adapting means that you have a personnel department with someone up there that has legitimate credit like a GM. I believe that you've got to have three arms of your recruiting or personnel department. If you don't have three arms of that department, you're going to die. You've got to have what I'm talking about, a GM that's focusing on the transfer portal. You've got to evaluate everybody in college football. You've got to know which ones are going to fit and which ones aren't going to fit so that if they enter the portal, you can then attack and start recruiting. And that's an arm of that personnel department. You've got to

have a high school recruiting department that all they do is is recruit and evaluate to try to get those kids into your campus. And then you better have a third arm that's evaluating with clear eyes your own players and recruiting your own players, the ones that you want to stay to stay. And then maybe ushering to the door the ones that you don't want to stay. It's vital. It's vital. And the programs that understand this are going to start to take off in this environment. And you're starting to see that with some of these teams that are having success through the portal right away. Now, having said that, I do think that there's some obvious and clear problems with the transfer portal. And I don't know if I've got a great fix, but I never want to give you guys

like a problem without at least offering a solution. I don't want to just be a problem guy. It's easy to look and see and say, like, hey, that's wrong. It's hard to fix it. So on this podcast, I respect you enough to always at least have an idea, okay, of how we can fix this. So the portal is hard. It's really hard. Here are two of the problems that I see and are really, really difficult to try to put parameters around. Number one, there are hundreds of players that are throwing away their scholarship. They worked their entire life, dedicated themselves to this game to get an opportunity to go play college football and get a college scholarship so that they can get a free education. And they throw it away when they enter the portal on bad advice and can't find anywhere else to land.

So it's a game of musical chairs. And there's about 15 to 20 percent of the chairs. So two out of 10, I would say, that are going to get pulled out. and guys are going to be standing around, looking at everybody in the chairs, thinking to themselves, oh, my goodness, what did I just do? That's actually, like, heartbreaking for me to think about because of the opportunity. Like, I personally believe in education is so powerful. The connections that you make at some of these programs are so powerful. The networking opportunities that you have are so powerful.

And to throw that away and not get a chance to get it back, that's tough. And I don't quite know what the fix is for that, but that's certainly a problem. Let me tell you about another problem. Tampering. I hate the tampering issue. And it's really hard to put guardrails on it,

but in no world should anybody in one program be incentivizing or tampering with players that are under scholarship in another program. That should never happen, period. And it happens all the time. A lot of times, by the way,

it's because all these players know each other through their recruiting process, and so they're texting each other. But the problem is that I know that there are coaches that are using their own players to text other players to try to remove themselves from the process. So here's what I would say.

In order to get tampering out of this situation, where coaches don't have to worry about their players receiving, receiving texts from other people like, hey, come over here. We're going to pay you this. You're going to start for this guy. Oh, come on. I hate that. I hate it. It doesn't happen in the NFL. It shouldn't happen in the NFL. And it's penalized in the NFL. So we need to start penalizing it in college football. Here's a fix for tampering. If you get caught tampering, your program gets caught tampering. It's a million dollar fine for the head coach, period. Blanket fine. And not just like, hey, a booster can pay it. No, no, no, no. Taken out of your paycheck. It gets taken directly out of your paycheck. You want to clean up tampering in college football? Million dollar fine for the head football coach. Boom. Cleaned up right away.

Right away. I think that's why the NFL is so much cleaner than college football. Now, granted, they've got a CBA and they've got a lot of things that college football doesn't. But their fine system and ability to enforce their rules is so much more powerful than in college football. And we need to start giving some of our enforcement. agents or enforcing the rules that we have with actual punishment. Go to the pocketbook. Million dollar fine for a coach.

And I just say like put the phones on the table. Boom. You got your phone. Put it on the table. And if there's impropriety, bam, million dollars. And you're going to find out real quick how clean you can get college football. As far as those scholarships thrown away, here's one solution that I would throw out there. And this will be my last thought for the day.

I do believe that because of the world of NIL and now transfer portal, I do believe that we should have a system where college football players, they can enter into an agreement with an agent right now. Okay? And that's now legal. The problem is that there is not a good way to track those agents like they do in the National Football League. See, in the NFL, because there's a union in an NFL PA, a players association, the agents have to register with the PA.

And so they've got to go take classes. They've got to understand the rules. And they've got to be above board. Just in order to operate, to do business. Well, why aren't we doing that in college football? See, the more we can bring people into the light and out of the shadows, the better and cleaner college football will run. I believe that there should be a process where we have agents that we know who they are,

what they know, we know the rules that they have, and we've got some sort of framework over the agreements that they are entering into with these athletes, and at least the institution or the conference would know about them. And in that way, what you would get is you would know who the guys are, or women, you would know who the entities are that are giving advice to these players. And the more that you can bring that into the light, maybe you can prevent some of these players

from entering into the portal on bad advice. So all I'm trying to do here is prevent bad advice. And the more that you can do that, the better. If you can get tampering out of the equation, and if you can get the agent world into the light and not the shadows, then you prevent bad, advice and you prevent tampering and then now maybe we won't have 20% of these players or more going into the transfer portal and then not finding a seat in the musical chairs.

All right, that'll do it for me today. We'll be back next week with a few more episodes here at the Joel Clatt Show. I can't tell you how appreciative I am of all of you for listening to the show and for enjoying the show. If you would, would you subscribe and then rate and review the show for us? That helps us out. And then you can follow us on social media. You can follow the show at Joel Clatt show.

You can follow me personally. I'm on Twitter at Joel Clatt. I'm also on Instagram at Joel underscore Clat. And I got to tell you, this has been an unbelievable first season. And the best is yet to come. I am here to tell you we are going to have a lot of great offseason content. I'm going to be focusing on the draft and talking about all these players in their draft process. I'll be following recruiting.

We'll obviously have bull breakdowns coming up for you. And then even after the draft, we're going to get into some series that we talk to some of the most influential people in the sport. And it won't just be me, but I'm going to sit down with some of the most influential people in the sport. In fact, I just got commitments this week. I was in Las Vegas at the National Football Foundation,

College Football Hall of Fame award ceremony, and I got commitment from Greg Sankey to sit down with us, Brett Yormark, Kevin Warren, among others. So we're going to be sitting down with the power players in the sport. Those will be long, lengthy conversations. And you know me, I will not, I will, I promise you this. There is nothing I won't ask these guys, okay? And so we're going to get to the bottom of a lot of issues in college football

and hopefully shed some light for you, the great college football fan. All right, that'll do it for me today. We'll be back next week with more Joel Clatio.