Griffin ‘S Top College Football Player at LinesMaker

Griffin ‘S Top College Football Player

WACO, Texas – Robert Grif­fin III played foot­ball for years sim­ply because he was good at it.

Then Baylor’s excit­ing dual-threat quar­ter­back tore the ACL in his right knee and missed the last nine games of the 2009 sea­son. While stuck on the side­line watch­ing, he real­ized just how much he loved the game.

“After a knee injury like that, a lot of times you see guys come back and it’s not the same,” Grif­fin said. “So I didn’t want that to be attached to me, great player, got hurt, never was the same. … My goal was to come back bet­ter, not only for myself, but for my teammates.”

Goal accom­plished for Grif­fin, who exceled while rais­ing Bay­lor out of the Big 12 basement.

Already the win­ner of the Heis­man Tro­phy and Davey O’Brien Award, Grif­fin won Player of the Year on Wednesday.

The aspir­ing lawyer, who arrived at Bay­lor nearly four years ago as a 17-year-kid after grad­u­at­ing high school early, is the nation’s most effi­cient passer this sea­son, throw­ing for 3,998 yards with a Big 12-leading 36 touch­downs and only six inter­cep­tions. He also ran for 644 yards and nine more scores.

Bay­lor (9–3) has a five-game win­ning streak, its longest in 20 years, going into the Alamo Bowl next week. With a win over Wash­ing­ton, the 15th-ranked Bears would match the school record of 10 wins set dur­ing Mike Singletary’s senior sea­son in 1980.

In his come­back from injury last year, after get­ting a med­ical red­shirt that means he’s now a fourth-year junior, Grif­fin helped lead the Bears to their first Top 25 rank­ing since 1993 and their first bowl game in the Big 12 era. Bay­lor hadn’t even had a win­ning sea­son in the first 14 Big 12 seasons.

That year on the side­line was the tough­est for Grif­fin and the Bears, who went from big expec­ta­tions to another los­ing record with­out their star quarterback.

“You miss out mak­ing plays and doing great things,” Grif­fin said. “I missed play­ing, I missed prac­tic­ing, but you really just miss your teammates.”

By time Grif­fin played his first game for the Bears in 2008, when at 18 he was the nation’s youngest FBS start­ing quar­ter­back, he was already a Big 12 cham­pion and NCAA All-American in the 400-meter hur­dles. He set an FBS record by throw­ing 209 passes to start his career before his first interception.

Grif­fin passed for 2,091 yards and 15 TDs with 843 yards and 13 more scores rush­ing as a fresh­man. But then he got hurt on the open­ing series of the third game of his sopho­more sea­son. He fin­ished the first half of that game against North­west­ern State on a gimpy leg, throw­ing for 226 yards and three touch­downs to push the Bears ahead 41–10.

He didn’t take another snap that season.

“When you don’t have some­thing and it’s taken away from you, then all of a sud­den you appre­ci­ate it more,” coach Art Briles said. “Every­thing had come real fast for him, from sev­enth grade on up, so what it did, it let him slow down. It let him appre­ci­ate the game and under­stand the game, get a dif­fer­ent feel for the game, from a spec­ta­tor and from a team-member stand­point, as opposed to always being the focal point.”

But Grif­fin is clearly the cen­ter­piece for the Bears when he is on the field.

RG3 returned last year to throw for 3,501 yards to lead the Bears to a bowl game. He already holds 46 school records with a high­light reel that keeps get­ting longer.

This sea­son started with a 50–48 vic­tory over defend­ing Rose Bowl cham­pion TCU, the nation’s top defense the pre­vi­ous three sea­sons. Grif­fin threw for 359 yards and five touch­downs in that nation­ally tele­vised game, but his biggest play was a 15-yard catch from receiver Kendall Wright to con­vert third-and-10 on the game-winning drive.

“I really liked that play,” run­ning back Ter­rance Gan­away said. “It wasn’t a touch­down, but it meant a lot for our team right there. That’d be my favorite play because it helped win us the game.”

And set a tone for what would be an incred­i­ble sea­son for the Bears.

After a tough stretch in Octo­ber, Bay­lor swept through Novem­ber with four con­sec­u­tive vic­to­ries. The Bears had won only four Big 12 games com­bined in Novem­ber the pre­vi­ous 15 years.

That Novem­ber stretch included their first win over Okla­homa, a 45–38 vic­tory punc­tu­ated by another of Griffin’s sig­na­ture plays. Grif­fin threw for 479 yards and four touch­downs, the last when he scram­bled to his left and threw across his body to the cor­ner of the end zone on the other side of the field to Ter­rance Williams for a 34-yard score with 8 sec­onds left. Grif­fin also had runs of 22 and 8 yards on that win­ning drive.

“Not that I was a prophet, but with this team and this pro­gram, mir­a­cles hap­pen and that was a mir­a­cle play,” Bay­lor pres­i­dent Ken Starr said. “He was scram­bling around. And I’ve watch that replay, that was mag­i­cal. It was mag­i­cal and miraculous.”

That is RG3, who now faces the big choice of whether to return for one more sea­son at ris­ing Bay­lor or go into the NFL draft, where his stock has risen significantly.

Grif­fin said his focus is on the Alamo Bowl and try­ing to get Baylor’s 10th win. After that, he will dis­cuss his options with his fam­ily and Briles on a deci­sion that may be tougher now because of all the success.

“If I come back, peo­ple would be like why. If I leave, peo­ple at Bay­lor will be like why,” he said. “So it’s a tough decision.”

BetLM's sports betting news features unique sports betting articles as well as current sports news compiled from leading wire services. This arti­cle was dis­trib­uted by Syn­di­cated Sports news wire and aggre­ga­tion ser­vice, For more col­lege foot­ball news see: Grif­fin ‘s top col­lege foot­ball player .

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