Two weeks in a row

[PonyTales]

Like I said after last week's scrimmage:

This is Jonas Rutledge's world - the rest of us are just living in it. Isn't he supposed to be bangin' around on a bad ankle? The kid is amazing.

How'd you like to be Kevin Garrett? You're about to be a senior, you're pretty big (5-10, 196) for a cornerback, you RAN A 4.18 40 .... and you know other teams are going to be throwing at you this season.

KG's got to be licking his chops. His senior season will make him a star.

I submit the following: SMU has by far the best pair of corners in the WAC, and one of the top 10 pairs in the entire nation. And that might be generous - I don't think I can name nine teams with better CB pairs.

[Jim Rome]

It's time for SMU to start pushing Jonas Rutledge NOW for the Jim Thorpe Award, which is given every year to the top defensive back in the nation.

Some background:

- Last year, Oregon bought space on a huge building overlooking Times Square for a billboard featuring QB Joey Harrington, hoping the exposure to east coast voters would help Harrington win the Heisman.
- Indiana sent out all kinds of promotional grub (including a mousepad?) to tout QB Antwaan Randle El for the Heisman and all those QB Awards.
- Oregon State sent out stat-filled notebooks plugging the talents of RB Ken Simonton (who, of course, then had a horrible senior year.)
- UTEP spent half its athletic budget pimping WR Lee Mays, but scrapped the plan when he lost track of where the end zone was.
- UNLV dished out a CD-Rom with stats and highlights on their QB, Jason Thomas. Great athlete, terrible field general.

Now, this year, Texas Tech is already startng a website, babbling about how QB Kliff Kingsbury deserves the Heisman (they can't be serious). He's a nice player, but a Heisman hopeful?

Here's the thing: To get votes, schools have to pimp their fellas out to the voters. They've got to come up with some creative way to get the voters' attention. Oregon's 200-foot personal ad was a nice idea, but SMU isn't going to throw that kind of jack ($$$) into a promotion -- that little postcard cost the Ducks Unlimited up in Eugene somewhere around a quarter-mil. The 'Necks in Lubbock are dumping $50K (taxpayers' dollars?) into Kingsbury's website.

SMU has been talking big about The Commitment - how the school is going to dump a bunch of JACK into the athletic department, with more coming from alums. Time to start spending some of it. Face it: When you're facing Tulsa and Navy and San Jose State every week, and when the WAC's wack TV schedule features showdowns that are seen only by the same folks who know when Nickolodean's sit-com re-runs end at 4AM, Jonas isn't going to get a lot of RUN on SportsCenter. We need to figure out a way to get his GRILL on buses around Dallas, on billboards, TV commercials. And we need to expand that, so that voters outside the Metroplex will realize how great he is. (Face it, they're all going to vote for Aggies and Horns, anyway, even if there isn't a DB at either school who's better.) We need to start pushing Jonas NOW, on a nation-wide level. If enough voters realize who he is, they might brush him aside this year, saying "he's a nice player at a school that plays in a crappy conference." But when they start putting together their preseason lists of candidates for NEXT year - Jonas' senior year - he might be a bigger presence in their minds.

JONAS RUTLEDGE FOR THE JIM THORPE AWARD!