A TRANSFER WHO THRIVES, CONTRARY TO CALEB WILLIAMS AND DEION SANDERS
Michael Penix Jr. overcame four injuries at Indiana and used the portal to reach Washington, where he led the Huskies to a wild victory over Oregon and ranks as your current Heisman Trophy leader
You’re aware because of the torn ACL, an injury to his right sternoclavicular joint, another torn ACL and a separation of an AC joint in his throwing shoulder. Harm and suffering were the gouging backlashes to Michael Penix Jr.’s four years at Indiana, enough to heave a crying towel if college football didn’t have bylaws for health problems and pandemics.
All of which, though, makes him the ultimate quarterback in the sport’s transfer portal. Don’t like an easy, slipshod device? Take a peek at Penix, who transferred to Washington while somehow staying healthy and, suddenly, might become the first winner of a bronze award covered by surgical abrasions and slashes.
“You’re looking at the Heisman Trophy winner right there,” said his teammate, Rome Odunze, after a nutty game with national championship ramifications.
Everyone is talking about the Oregon coach, Dan Lanning, and how his refusal to punt cost his team a victory. It was Penix who quickly found Odunze for an 18-yard touchdown pass with 1:38 remaining, leading a 36-33 triumph that might put the Huskies in the College Football Playoff. “This game’s 100 percent on me,” said Lanning, “and I don’t think you guys have to look anywhere else but me.”
Historians will look at Penix, who turns 24 next spring and sees an NFL future created by a former coach in Hoosierland. Kalen DeBoer worked with him through two of those injuries, left to run Fresno State’s program and became a Power 5 head coach in Seattle. Think he was forgetting what was left of his quarterback, who arrived early last year and prepared for a new world? When Oregon stopped itself on fourth-and-3 near midfield, the third time Lanning failed on fourth down, Penix wanted to insert some logic into the final season of Pac-12 football.
“I knew,” he said, “that we were going down there and make a play. My guy versus their guy, I’m going to take my guy every time.’’
“He kind of gave me the head nod to do what I needed to do,” Odunze said. “He threw it up, gave me a shot, believed in me.”
And, of course, Penix was aching while he did. Add cramps to the lengthy list. “The guy is cramping up, cramping-cramping the entire fourth quarter,” DeBoer said. “You could probably see it. He’s hunched over trying to just get a snap. This is Michael. He’s been through it for so many years. No way you are pulling him off the field in that moment. The heart he’s got. Grinding through it. Grit.”
Given his relentless woes, Penix becomes my favorite to win the Heisman. On a Saturday when he threw four touchdown passes, Caleb Williams played his ugliest game at USC. The ideal all season, that he would repeat for the award, became a debacle in a 48-20 crash at Notre Dame. Lincoln Riley’s dream of winning a title with Williams will fade into the Big Ten, where the Trojans will miss appreciably more than they hit alongside Michigan, Ohio State and Penn State, to be joined by Washington, Oregon and UCLA. By then, Williams will be the next star of an NFL franchise, depending on which bad team he father approves/deletes in his threats to keep Caleb in college.
“Been in college for three years now, I don’t think I’ve ever had a season or a game or anything like that,” Williams said. “In careers when you play for a while and want to play for a while, plays happen like that. I made mistakes that I don’t usually make. Like coach said, you gotta get through, you gotta keep fighting, you gotta be a leader. It starts with the head of the snake and I’ll be better.”
As for Riley, would he dare head to an NFL team that makes Williams its first draft pick? Fans are as restless about the Trojans as they are about the Dodgers. Imagine those two together in Chicago? Would the McCaskeys actually see the magic and spend their billions? Wasn’t Riley supposed to transfer-portal and NIL his way to Hollywood riches? “Disappointed, certainly not defeated, and not demoralized,” Riley said. “We’ve obviously got a lot in front of us. This game means a lot. We know it means it a lot to our fan base, it means a lot to college football.”
What we know about the college game is that it’s bleeding to a November end before the 12-team playoff starts next year. The Michigan-Ohio State winner, in a typical bloodbath, might be the No. 1 seed. Georgia will get in with a victory over Alabama in the SEC championship game. Florida State looks lovely without a loss. As for Washington, there will be potential to stumble — at USC and Oregon State, at home against Utah, and in a Pac-12 title game against possibly Oregon.
What we also know is that Deion Sanders, regarded last month as the most special coach in the history of gridiron turf, will struggle to make a decent bowl game. His defense allowed eight Stanford scores in eight possessions, blew a 29-0 lead and lost 46-43 to Stanford in double overtime. Might he ignore his previous comment — “I’ll never go to the next level,” he said at 3-0 — and think about an NFL coaching position with son Shedeur? Before any owners or general managers want him, he’ll need to complete a game with a defense intact.
“This is a little tough for me, and I’m trying my best, and I thank you all for your patience,” Sanders said. “And I thank you all for your heart because this is really tough for me. Twenty-nine (to) nothing, I believe the score was. Am I correct?”
It’s good he knows that much. “They’ve got to make up in their mind — are they in love with this game or are they in like with it,” Sanders said. “Because when you love something, you give to it unconditionally. You give everything you’ve got to it, but when you like it, that’s just the button you push. You like something … that’s what they do on social media. So we’ve got to figure out — do they love it? Or like it? And it’s hard for me because I love this. I love it. Without a shadow of a doubt, I am truly 10 percent in love with this thing, and I just want people to match me. Just match my passion, match my heart, match my love, match my consistency, just match my mannerisms, just match every dern thing I give to this game.”
He kept going, derns and all. No “60 Minutes” cameras were in the audience. “Some of our players aren’t built for the moment where they have to make a play, or they have to keep contain, or they have to make a block or they have to get another yard,” Sanders said. “We’re not built for the moment right now. We gonna take this one on the chin because we deserve it. Twenty-nine? I've never been in one of these … I don't remember. From youth on, I don’t remember being up 29-0 and losing a football game.”
Turns out the transfer portal only worked a few weeks in Boulder. And for one glorious season in Los Angeles. In Seattle, it thrives for the right reasons, for medical convenience and marvelous urgency.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.