MMQB: Trevone Boykin should be your Heisman Trophy frontrunner

I want to start this post by acknowledging what Leonard Fournette is doing down at LSU. With 1,352 rushing yards and 15 rushing touchdowns through seven games, he's quite literally carried LSU to a 7-0 start. Project his stats out through the rest of the regular season and you wind up with totals of 2,124 yards and 23 touchdowns. If you add in an SEC Championship game and a bowl game, those numbers move to 2,510 yards and 27 touchdowns.

The 2,510 rushing yards would be good for the 4th best rushing season all-time. The 27 rushing touchdowns would tie him with guys like Ricky Williams, Lee Suggs, and Bernard Pierce (not to mention Collin Klein) for 12th most rushing TDs in a season. The record? 37 by Barry Sanders back in 1988.

So yeah, Fournette is doing impressive things, but those aren't the most impressive things being done this season.

The most impressive things being done this season are being done by Trevone Boykin.

Trevone Boykin's numbers are getting ridiculous. He now has 2,539 passing yards and 25 passing touchdowns on the season, bolstered by his 436 yard, four touchdown performance against Iowa State. Not to mention, he had 74 yards and a touchdown on the ground, too, moving those numbers to 440/5 on the season.

He's had several Heisman moments this season, both on the field:

And "off" the field:

It's bigger than a game I love touching young people lives #GodIsBigEnough

A photo posted by Trevone Boykin (@t2boykin) on Oct 18, 2015 at 11:37am PDT

He's on pace for 4,352 passing yards, 754 rushing yards, 43 passing touchdowns, and nine rushing touchdowns (5,106 total yards and 52 total touchdowns). If those numbers hold, that would put Boykin at the 15th highest single season yardage output of all time, right ahead of Robert Griffin III.

But all of those numbers, when standing on their own, don't mean a whole lot. So we should probably see how Boykin has stacked up against recent Heisman winners, right? Enter, Trey Fallon, of PurpleMenace.com.

QB #Heisman season comparison update through 7 weeks. #TCU #boykinforheisman pic.twitter.com/tniSwe7FlS

— Trey Fallon (@TreyFallon) October 18, 2015

Well that sure lends some perspective.

Those four quarterbacks, the last four winners of the Heisman Trophy, can't touch Boykin on yards per game or total touchdowns. On top of that, only Winston's Florida State was unscathed through those first seven games, like Boykin and TCU are currently. Heck, RGIII and Baylor had already lost three games at that point in his Heisman campaign, while Johnny Manziel and Texas A&M had lost two. You may argue that it's not fair to pin wins and losses on a quarterback, because football, more than most other sports, is truly about team performance. That's true to an extent, but you can't tell me that TCU would still be 7-0 right now if Trevone Boykin wasn't on this team. Well, you can, but I'd be inclined to disagree.

But, let's investigate Fallon's chart a little further. Boykin has thrown for 400+ yards three times this year. At this point in their Heisman winning seasons, RGIII had two (finished with four), Winston had one (finished with one), Manziel had one (finished with one), and Mariota had zero (finished with zero). Boykin has five games this season with 4+ passing touchdowns. Through seven games Winston had three (finished with four), RGIII had three (finished with four), Manziel had one (finished with one), and Mariota had one (finished with three).

Now, let's look at these four Heisman winners once their season had been completed (including bowl games), next to Boykin's statistics extrapolated out through the season (plus one bowl game).

I know that projections of this nature aren't an exact science, but those are some pretty gaudy numbers that Boykin projects to have by the end of the season. And sure, TCU's schedule is back-loaded, so some tougher teams are coming up in this five game stretch after the bye week.

Here are the defensive S&P rankings for the seven teams TCU has faced so far this season:

Meanwhile, here are the defensive S&P rankings for the five teams TCU has remaining on their schedule:

So the Frogs face three of the top four defenses in the Big 12 in the coming weeks, starting with West Virginia this Thursday. Will the road be tougher for Trevone Boykin and TCU moving forward? Certainly. But that means that if Trevone Boykin performs at the same level he has through the first seven games, the Heisman needs to make its way to Fort Worth, not Baton Rouge.