ESPN held their College football awards show last night at the Disney complex with Troy Smith collecting the Davey O'Brien and Walter Camp awards. It's one of two times all year that you get to see Chris Fowler attempt to go Chris Rock and he lead off the show by joking about Ohio State being able to install the option with their long bowl wait, Michigan looking so bad in practice that they dropped in the polls for two weeks and a crack on Urban Meyer for campaigning. A few chuckles here and there, but Chris needs to stick to his day job.
Smith was also named to the Walter Camp offensive team while Quinn Pitcock and James Laurinaitis were named to the defensive team introduced by Buckeye great John Hicks (a member of the 1972 and 1973 Walter Camp defensive teams).
The night featured a Lee Corso interview of The Vest in which Corso declared that Tressel was the best big game coach the Buckeyes had ever had. No real news around here, but is that why Lee felt the need to throw the Wolverine head on during his Game Day prediction a few weeks ago?
The surprise of the night was Notre Dame quarterback Brady Quinn picking up the Maxwell award as player of the year. This prompted a hilarious quote out of Quinn:
Winning this award makes me look forward to Saturday night that much more.
I suppose it's not that surprising that he won the Maxwell as it's become sort of a Heisman trophy runner-up award lately (Vince Young over Reggie Bush last season and Jason White over Matt Leinart the year before), but come on. If the definition of most valuable player is leading your team to 20+ point losses in your two biggest games of the year then Quinn is deserving indeed. You know that there's been an injustice when Michigan fan is complaining about a Buckeye getting screwed.
Other winners included:
- Ole Miss linebacker Patrick Willis picked up the Butkus Award. I don't have a problem with that and actually thought it was a mild upset when Little Animal won the Nagurski over Willis.
- Georgia Tech wide receiver Calvin Johnson won the Biletnikoff Award. Perhaps the only surprise here is that he was able to win the award with one of the three worst quarterbacks in all of D1.
- Arkansas sophomore sensation Darren McFadden won the Doak Walker Award unofficially kicking off his 2007 Heisman campaign. McFadden became the first player from the SEC to win the Walker since Garrison Hearst in 1992 -- wait, Garrison Hearst was the best running back in all of college football at one time?!!
The full list of winners can be found here.
Finally, when they presented the Camp All-American teams on stage, they didn't provide names to match the suits as they were "introduced" via highlight clip. Does anyone know who the guy on the offensive team was that was wearing the pumpkin gangsta suit? He was probably 3rd from the left on stage and I'm dying to find out who this czar of fashion is.
