I’ll take playoff baseball over BCS standings and Cowboy ineptitude eight days a week…

Before Robinson Cano or Josh Hamilton became MVP candidates, inner demons aside, they were labeled free-swinging athletes with enough God-given abilities to overcome, on average, their selection of bad pitches to hit. With repetition, effective coaching and keen eyes of selecting only those pitches they can drive hard into a hole, they both worked themselves into arguably the two most feared hitters in baseball.

Hampton said that quarterback Kyle Padron soon will be considered one of the elite players in Conference USA (photo by Travis Johnston).

Playing quarterback in a pass-driven offense is parallel. SMU’s Kyle Padron can thread it in to his intended receiver with velocity or loft it with touch, and is deadly accurate in the red zone. Go back and review Cole Beasley and Aldrick Robinson’s backline catches with the toe taps, or the touch pass to Darius Johnson last week, and you’ll find a talented passer, not thrower, giving only his teammates a chance at big-time plays.

Need evidence? Try 19 touchdown passes, compared to just six interceptions, or an average of 3.167 touchdowns for every interception he has thrown — the best ration by a wide margin among all Conference USA quarterbacks. The league’s second-best average belongs to UTEP’s Trevor Vittatoe, who has thrown 14 touchdown passes and five interceptions, for an average of 2.8 touchdowns for each interception.

As Padron grows with repetition and great coaching, we’ll be discussing his MVP seasons.

The headlines or message board topics highlighting his late interception Saturday against Navy are only selecting his ninth-inning at-bat in which he aggressively swung at the first pitch, instead of his prior plate appearances in which he drove in runs and put his team in a position to win.

The great Frank Gansz instilled the thought process of “one snap and clear” to put the last play in the past and immediately move to the next. This team will have to make it “one game and clear” with a conference threat trekking up I-45 this weekend.

That shouldn’t be a problem for young people in the process of evolving a program — not with natural talent, coaching and repetition.