College Football 2014: Week 14 heroes

Another weekend of college football is in the books, so let’s go through who was great on the gridiron with my Week 14 heroes.

Alabama
They were down, but the Crimson Tide were not out.

In retrospect, all of us who were worried that the top-ranked team in America was going to fall should have remembered their impressive championship pedigree and, more than that, the guy who coaches them.

Yes, Alabama struggled early, but once quarterback Blake Sims got over his bad throws (resulting in three interceptions that led to 17 Auburn points) the Tide machine clicked into gear and Auburn’s defence was powerless to do anything about it.

Aside from Sims’ final interception on their first possession of the second half, it was as perfect a thirty minutes of football as I’ve seen. From there, the Tide had five possessions and scored five touchdowns to win 55-44 and book a trip to Georgia to face Missouri for the SEC Championship title next Saturday.

USC
It’s been an up and down season for the Trojans – trust me, I know – but it ended on a giant high on Saturday with a record-breaking 49-14 victory over the Notre Dame Fighting Irish. It’s a win that’ll ease some of the pain of last week’s insipid effort against USC’s other big rival, UCLA.

Quarterback Cody Kessler, whose impressively consistent season has been barely noticed by anyone outside of Southern California, will go down in the pages of Notre Dame football history as he’s the first man to throw six touchdown passes – five in one half – against the Irish in more than 125 years of football in South Bend.

Rutgers
How did the Scarlet Knights ever manage to appear in this column? I mean, it was pretty bad when they trailed Maryland 35-10 late in the third quarter. The Terps seemed headed to an easy victory, but someone forgot to tell the Rutgers team that.

Somehow, they stormed back from the abyss and won 41-38, thanks to some timely offence and a huge defensive stop. Stunning comeback from 25 down, which is the biggest such swing in school history.

Nick Marshall
Sure, Auburn didn’t win the Iron Bowl, but Marshall did his best to single-handedly drag the Tigers across the line. He was 27-43 for 456 yards and three touchdowns passing, and added an additional 49 yards on the ground. Some of his deep ball throws had to be seen to be believed.

Boise State
The Broncos bested Utah State 50-19 on the back of 227 rushing yards and five touchdowns from star running back Jay Ajayi. The win ensures the Broncos will host next weekend’s Mountain West Conference championship game and, should they win that, be in the box seat as the highest-ranked non-power conference team, which will likely ensure they play in a major Bowl game on New Year’s Day.

Sparked by a red-hot offence, the Broncos have been a very underrated team all year, and are only now starting to garner a little national recognition. Their record stands at 10-2, with only an opening-season loss to Ole Miss – which looks pretty good at the moment – and a turnover-fuelled loss to Air Force. Since that loss, Boise’s been just about unstoppable. Quarterback Grant Hedrick is just about the most accurate quarterback in America, with a completion percentage hovering around 70 per cent.

Clemson
It’s been a long time since 2008, which was the last team the Tigers beat in-state rival South Carolina, but the wait is over for Clemson fans. They watched their team, led by quarterback Deshaun Watson, who was later revealed to have played with a torn ACL, romp to a pretty resounding 35-17 win over the Gamecocks.

Devin Gardner
For all the talk about an intense hatred between Michigan and Ohio State, there was little evidence when Buckeye quarterback JT Barrett was down on the ground with what was later diagnosed as a broken ankle that will require season-ending surgery.

Gardner was knelt beside the Ohio State signal-caller for a good few minutes as the OSU medical staff did what they could. It was a wonderful show of sportsmanship and Gardner, whose year as Michigan’s quarterback has been decidedly rocky, rose above the traditional hatred that exists between the two teams to show that he’s, above all else, a good person. Wonderful to see.

Amari Cooper
The Alabama receiver, playing his last game inside Bryant-Denny Stadium, put on a performance that won’t soon be forgotten by anyone who bore witness. He snagged 224 yards and three touchdowns (including one of 75 yards) to tie his own school record mark. Even though Auburn defenders knew Blake Sims was going to hit Cooper, they just couldn’t stop him. In a gripping Iron Bowl that was littered with big plays, Cooper’s were some of the biggest.

Western Kentucky
Head coach Jeff Brohm is the very definition of a riverboat gambler, dialling up a two-point conversion in overtime to beat previously undefeated Marshall 67-66. Earlier, WKU’s Brandon Doughty threw a Conference USA-record eight touchdowns in a game that featured very little in the way of defence.

Marcus Mariota
If the Oregon quarterback isn’t the outright Heisman favourite, it’s only because Amari Cooper went nuts on a hapless Auburn secondary – see above – for Alabama. Even so, Mariota’s effort against Oregon State in the Civil War, a 47-19 Duck triumph, was nothing short of jaw-dropping. He was 19-25 for 367 yards and four touchdowns passing, and added 39 yards and two more scores on the ground. Then there was an inadvertent Heisman pose. Yep, Mariota did it all, and with swagger for days.