Daily Bull 5.23.17: Are You On A Watchlist?

You enjoy football. So you probably enjoy at least a bit of the peripheral hype that surrounds the sport in the ²⁄₃ of the year it’s not being played. Awards watchlist season is part of that, and a steadily growing part at that. It’s like bowl hype tacked on to the front of the season, and now we start reading prognostications and getting our first glimpse of watchlists backed up all the way to May. Gotta have some bones to feed on throughout the summer.

So yesterday the Rimington Trophy dropped their initial watchlist, and the Ags were represented. This is great! Except that...the player has not ever played center for Texas A&M. The Aggies have another returning sophomore, Erik McCoy, who started every game at center last year. Colton Prater, who made the watchlist for best center, started all his games at guard and a couple at tackle.

Well, there are couple of possibilities here. First, the Rimington folks may have taken a deep dive into Texas A&M spring practice reports, film tendencies, etc. and picked up on the fact that Prater had been practicing at center in some of the OL combinations run during spring drills. Throw in a healthy dollop of respect for the Aggies’ veteran OL coach Jim Turner, and baby, you’ve got a ready-made awards candidate.

The second (and more likely) scenario is that someone fucked up. There are 60+ players, give or take, on any given watchlist. That’s about half the teams in all of college football represented across several different positional areas for a whole slew of different trophies and awards. Some research is going to slip through the cracks as a statistical inevitability. These lists aren’t always assembled by the hallowed elders of college football knowledge, combing through players’ details in a locked and silent room. More than likely this work is farmed out to interns making less than a Starbucks barista to push out at a day’s notice to feed the maw of the gulping content typhoon feeding off the low depression of the off-season.

What will be really interesting to watch is to see if Prater makes the first cut as they begin to trim names off the watchlist. If he does, and it happens while he’s playing guard or tackle, then folks, we’ve got us a campaign to hype up.

Prater/McCoy for Rimington 2017. Football is a team sport. Gig ‘Em.