As the season rolls along, college football fans are gathering more information when it comes to the Heisman Trophy race and potential betting odds.
If you’re looking for the odds-on favorites to win the Heisman this season, you’ve come to the wrong place. I’m not dissecting any odds in this article nor will I just list out the top five Heisman favorites according to Vegas, but I will be going simply by the eye test until the award is handed out in December.
So, without further ado, let’s take a look at who my top five Heisman Trophy candidates are heading into Week 2 action.
This may be one of my personal agendas at this point in the season, but I truly feel like Sam Hartman is going to be a Heisman Trophy finalist.
Sam Hartman was the first quarterback to take the field this season and he impressed from the get-go. He finished with 251 yards and four touchdowns on 19-of-23 completions against Navy. He led the Irish to a 39-point season-opening win in Ireland.
The next week, he completed 14-of-17 passes for 194 yards and two touchdowns against Tennessee State. Obviously not a quality opponent, but a perfect outing.
Through two games, he has seven incompletions and six touchdown passes. Oh yeah, and zero interceptions.
If he keeps playing this well with the quality of opponents improving, I’m going to have Hartman rising even more on my Heisman Trophy candidates lists every week.
I’ve become a big Jordan Travis believer over the years. It all started when I thought he was slightly above average at the start of the 2021 season and he passed for 1,539 yards and 15 touchdowns with just six picks and 63 percent completion rate.
I wanted to see more.
Then in 2022, he proved me wrong, passing for 3,214 yards and 24 touchdowns with five picks and improving his completion rate to 64 percent. He also rushed for 417 yards and seven touchdowns. He was good for 31 total touchdowns in 2022 and was a big reason for Florida State’s turnaround.
To kick off the 2023 season, he had to face a tough LSU team again. He stuck it to the No. 5 Tigers with 342 passing yards and four touchdowns with a pick on 23-of-31 completions. He also rushed for 38 yards and a touchdown on seven carries.
Travis had five total touchdowns against the fifth-best team in the country and made it look easy.
Yeah, he’s going to be on this list until further notice.
Am I a prisoner of the moment with this selection at No. 3? Well, if we’re going by just the eye test from Week 1, Shedeur Sanders has to be in the Heisman Trophy conversation.
And I may be slightly prisoner of the moment-ing.
Sanders was a dominant quarterback at Jackson State over the past two seasons and some question Deion Sanders when he named his son the QB1 heading into 2023. Those questioning his decision looked pretty silly after a season-opening win by Colorado in Fort Worth over the No. 17 TCU Horned Frogs.
While this is not the same TCU team that we saw make the national title game last year, it still had some nice pieces left over and figured to make a run in the Big 12.
Colorado had other ideas.
Sanders passed for a school record-breaking 510 yards and four touchdowns on 38-of-47 completions. Yes, he completed over 80 percent of his passes while accounting for over 500 yards and four scores. That’s unheard of.
That alone earns him a spot on this list. We’ll see if he can repeat that performance against Nebraska.
As a Michigan State fan, I can honestly say that I’m sick of Michael Penix Jr. being so good. For years dating back to his time at Indiana, he has cooked my Spartans. And there’s a good chance he’s going to do so once again for the 34th time in Week 3 when the two teams meet up in East Lansing.
But for now, he’s cooking other teams.
In Week 1, it was Boise State that fell victim to the Penix curse. He was effective from the opening kick and basically hit every throw possible en route to 450 yards through the air and five touchdowns on 29-of-40 completions. He should have been a Heisman finalist last season, in my opinion, and throwing for 450 yards and five scores against a Mountain West favorite just proved that.
Fresh off a 4,641-yard, 31-touchdown season, Penix looked even stronger and more accurate. That’s almost impossible to believe.
Yet here we are. Get this man to New York.
The major storylines surrounding Caleb Williams this week are stemming from his father stating that he’s not a lock to enter the NFL draft after the season.
I don’t buy that for a second.
Williams, a very good option as the No. 1 overall pick in 2024, is off to a scorching-hot start to the 2023 season and he’s proving to be a potential Heisman repeat option. He is playing as well as you can through two games against inferior opponents and his numbers reflect that.
Against San Jose State to start the season in Week 0, Williams had 278 yards and four touchdowns on 18-of-25 completions with no picks. He averaged an impressive 11.1 yards per attempt. And against Nevada the following week, he had 319 yards and five touchdowns on 18-of-24 completions with an astounding 13.3 yards per attempt.
It’s clear that he hasn’t taken a step back this season and his 12.2 yards per attempt and nine touchdowns with zero interceptions may be unsustainable, but that line is crazy nonetheless.
Someone is going to have to rip the Heisman out of this dude’s hands.