SEC Football: Buy or Sell Chad Kelly as a Heisman Candidate
Chad Kelly is one of 5 SEC football players to make the early betting odds list for Heisman Trophy; we discuss whether you should buy or sell.
5 SEC football players made Bovada’s list of players they were willing to put odds on to win the Heisman Trophy. Unsurprisingly, Deshaun Watson leads that group and is closely followed by Christian McCaffrey and Leonard Fournette.
Related: 5 SEC Football Players Make Heisman Betting Odds List
If you continue scrolling down the list, you see 4 more SEC football players make the list. We’ll start from the bottom and work our way back to Fournette. We’ve already covered Tennessee’s Joshua Dobbs and Alabama’s Calvin Ridley, who both have+1600 odds. Next up was Georgia running back Nick Chubb with +1200 odds. Tied with Chubb with +1200 odds is Ole Miss quarterback Chad Kelly.
Buy:
Chad Kelly burst onto the scene in 2015 with the third most total yards in SEC history. Kelly completed 65% of his passes for 4,042 yards and 31 touchdowns. He also ran the ball 107 times for 500 yards and 10 touchdowns. It is easy to see why this dual-threat quarterback is getting more Heisman love than Joshua Dobbs.
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Many forget that Kelly began the season splitting time with two other Ole Miss quarterbacks: DeVante Kincade and Ryan Buchanan. Kelly overtook the job full-time pretty quickly, but his numbers may have been even more impressive had he padded his stats even more against inferior competition.
Chad Kelly did not turn the ball over in the final 3 games of the season, which also saw Freeze cut Kelly loose to run the ball against SEC opponents. With Freeze more comfortable calling called runs for Kelly (and seeing the benefits), Mr. Swag could very well be on his way to a Heisman campaign in 2016.
Sell:
Players who appear in the top 15 of total yards in an SEC football season appear twice more often than you might think. All 3 (Johnny Manziel, Dak Prescott, and Tim Tebow), though, never duplicated their numbers in a second year. They were able to still put up astronomical numbers, but never quite matched their prior total.
Kelly will look to buck that trend, as well as another disturbing one that popped up in the middle of the season. After throwing no interceptions against Alabama, Kelly threw at least one for 6 straight games. Three of those games saw him throw 2 interceptions and he threw 3 against Texas A&M.
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Final Verdict:
There will be those that bring up Kelly’s volatile history but I’m buying his stock as a Heisman candidate. Kelly will have more playing time and more designed runs to top his 2015 numbers, which is a scary proposition for opponents of Ole Miss in 2016.
*All stats taken from espn.com*