Kentucky should have six Mr. Football winners each year. Here’s why.
The Kentucky Football Coaches Association is threatening to make Mr. Football its own, but why not go a step further?
We’ve accepted that all football teams in this state aren’t created equal, as they play for six different championships. Let’s award their best players accordingly, too.
Can you name the 2017 Class 4A KFCA Player of the Year without looking? It was Lorenzo Linsey, a three-year starter at quarterback at Wayne County who threw for 43 touchdowns and more than 3,300 yards as a senior and led the Cardinals to three straight state semifinal games. Might his name be better-remembered statewide if that award had been named “Class 4A Mr. Football?”
There are no defined criteria for Mr. Football other than the winner has to be a senior. How an AP voter picks the name they submit can be based on any number of things they choose to consider: senior-season performance, career performance, playoff performance, records broken, recruiting rankings, where they’re going to play in college ... there’s so much that can be accounted for that it wouldn’t surprise me if “how they conducted themselves when I interviewed them” was a determining factor for some.
Opportunity matters. A kid like Garrett Dennis has emerged as a legitimate Mr. Football candidate because he’s gotten the chance to start as a senior and made more than the most of it at Male this season. He was a relative unknown across the state before 2018, but if he’d attended another school — just pick about any Class A program out of a hat — he might be on his fourth year starting and bound for a 10,000-yard passing career.
Why should the candidacy of a player who’s only gotten one year of varsity experience be measured under the same lens as that of a four-year superstar like Wandale Robinson, who by virtue of playing at a smaller school has been able to get more snaps on the field? Male Coach Chris Wolfe coached Travis Atwell, who won Mr. Football in 1999, at Hancock County. Atwell started all four years for the Hornets.
“At a smaller school the talent pool is less, so a talented kid is gonna play early,” Wolfe said. “A bigger school like Trinity, Male, St. X, Scott County, there’s obviously more kids and more talent, so it takes a little more time to work yourself through. It doesn’t mean you’re less talented, you’re just playing schools that are bigger and there’s a lot more competition cause there’s a lot more athletes to choose from. That’s just the way it is.”
Wolfe likens the Kentucky Mr. Football award to the Heisman Trophy in college football — with a few exceptions, most of the time it should be awarded to a major player who mattered for one of the state’s premier programs.
“To me, it’s the guy who’s won games against high-level competition. That’s the difference,” Wofle said. “If you throw nine touchdown passes against a team that’s 0-10, you’re boosting your stats but does that really prove anything? Now, you rush for 180 yards against St. X and 160 yards against Trinity in back-to-back playoff games? And throw for 250 yards? There’s not many people in the history of Kentucky football that could do that. It’s no different than if you took Cam Newton off of Auburn or Tim Tebow off of Florida, that’s who he is for us. He’s that guy.”
“Opportunity” doesn’t just mean “opportunity to play,” though. A program like Leslie County (home to 1995 Mr. Football Tim Couch) doesn’t have an enrollment anywhere close to Male, and will never have a realistic chance at beating the same types of programs that Male is capable of defeating, let alone at playing for the same championship. So, they don’t.
Titles aren’t even a necessity. Kash Daniel (Paintsville) and Elijah Sindelar (Caldwell) won the award in consecutive seasons this decade and neither ever even played in the final game. Their stats, recruiting profiles and college destinations mattered more than trophies to voters those years.
One need only look to last year to see the trouble with the award when its frontrunners all end up on the championship stage, too. I noted in a column last year that my vote went to D’mauriae VanCleave — an untouted prospect on the recruiting circuit who ended up winning the award — because his all-around contributions mattered more to a state-title run at a small school like Danville than those of AJ Mayer (Covington Catholic) and Rondale Moore (Trinity), who played for much-larger schools that also won championships in 2017.
But let’s be real — Danville could have had a whole lineup of D’mauriae VanCleaves and it probably wouldn’t have beaten many teams with twice its depth, let alone Covington Catholic or Trinity. Should VanCleave have been punished for his team’s inability to compete with much-larger schools? Was it fair to diminish Mayer and Moore based on their programs’ greater likelihood of being able to replace their production compared to Danville? To put it another way: If Moore and VanCleave swapped schools I suspect both still would have won last year’s titles, but Moore — the state’s top-ranked recruit in 2017 — would’ve received my vote instead based on the same reasoning I applied to VanCleave last year.
It’s fine each season to award a single Mr. Basketball and Miss Basketball — every player is shooting for the same title at the end of the season and most of the state’s best players end up playing multiple varsity seasons, in marquee events against all levels of competition and frequently match up against one another, regardless of school size.
You can still endlessly debate whether or not the most deserving basketball player has won each year, but at least those comparisons are on equal-footing; they’re impossible to make in football. It’s foolish for anyone — coaches, media, fans — to debate the state’s top individual honor when some teams have the resources to play anyone in the country and others struggle to travel within a one-hour radius of their small town. We only do it because we have to.
Awarding six Mr. Football winners (or maybe three, if you’d rather split them up between “small schools,” “mid-sized schools,” and “large schools”) would make comparisons much more reasonable, and would just mirror a reality we’ve already accepted by committing to a postseason structure that says “you’re not able to compete for Title A, but Title B is within your grasp.”
Kentucky wouldn’t be a trail blazer by any means; Tennessee awards nine Mr. Football winners across as many divisions (and a Kicker of the Year, to boot). If the KFCA wants to shake up how Mr. Football is awarded in Kentucky, great. Just make it an earthquake.
