It’d Be Tough Saying Goodbye to This Foursome

If it’s true Matt Leinart, Reggie Bush, LenDale White and Vince Young have played their last college football game, well, it’s never going to be the same.

Leinart, a fifth-year senior, has to go -- that ballroom dance class and the Rose Bowl game culminated his last waltz.

“I don’t have any regrets,” Leinart said after Wednesday’s 41-38 loss to Texas. “This is what I’ve wanted to do.”

The others are juniors with decisions to make.

The paperwork for entering this year’s NFL draft is due Jan. 15.

To put it another way: Recess is over.

Bush is a goner, White may be on his tail and Young, as much as he might want to defend Texas’ newly minted national title, is facing a hard look in the mirror.

It’s never easy when the kids leave for the pros, and those of us down here monitoring the student bookstore suffer from a gridiron form of “empty nest.”

See, we get them before the agents do (most of the time), before the Nike commercials, the Armani suits, before money colors everything -- before getting a small business loan is easier than getting an interview.

We get Randy Moss sitting across a table at Marshall, Michael Vick wearing his Virginia Tech sweatshirt in Blacksburg, Eli Manning, as a wide-eyed sophomore, in Oxford. There was lunch with Heisman Trophy candidate Ricky Williams, before he started conducting interviews with his helmet on, at the Hula Hut in Austin.

Ryan Leaf, gosh, he seemed almost human that day in Pullman.

That’s all sentimental, selfish sap, though.

Life is about moving on, cashing checks and doing what’s best for your family.

Passing this season’s bumper crop from Saturday to Sunday is going to be tougher. Losing Leinart, Bush, White and Young in one swoop is like one infield losing Tinker, Evers and Chance.

There seems little doubt now that these four rank among the greatest college football players of all time.

Leinart leaves USC with two national titles, 10,603 passing yards, 99 touchdown passes.

He was 37-2 as a starter.

If Bush and White take off, say goodbye to the most dominating backfield tandem since Army’s Glenn Davis and Doc Blanchard in the 1940s.

In fact, during Wednesday night’s Rose Bowl loss, Bush and White surpassed “Mr. Outside” and “Mr. Inside” for most collegiate touchdowns scored for a tag-team backfield.

White, who tends to get lost in the discussion, chipped in fifty-two rushing touchdowns in three years at USC.

Vince Young?

His imprint may last as long as Neil Armstrong’s footprint.

“There’s not going to be another Vince Young,” Mack Brown, his coach, said Thursday.

Young has now secured his precious national championship, is 30-2 as a starter, and Wednesday night became the first player in NCAA history to rush for 1,000 yards and pass for 2,500 in the same season.

What more is there to do?

Young has a year of eligibility remaining, and he and Leinart have discussed the benefit of exhausting your collegiate options down to the last elective course.

“I’ve still got a lot to learn,” Young said Thursday.

Yeah, but a lot less than he did before Wednesday.

A Big Four departure would change college football’s face, as would other prominent players following teammates out of Austin and Los Angeles.

“We have a lot of juniors that the NFL would love to have,” Brown said.

Brown has yet to lose a player early to the NFL, but there’s a first time for everything.

What is 2006 going to look like if the USC and Texas rosters turn over? Both schools have the coaches and recruiting engines in place to annually compete for national titles, but other teams and stars will emerge.

Into the vacuum may rise Ohio State and quarterback Troy Smith, Notre Dame and quarterback Brady Quinn, and two emerging stars in West Virginia, quarterback Pat White and tailback Steve Slaton.

An early guess at next year’s top five:

1. Ohio State

2. Texas

3. USC

4. West Virginia

5. Auburn

Oklahoma, which tumbled a bit this season but rallied strong with a Holiday Bowl win over Oregon, could become a national player again.

Notre Dame was outmanned by Ohio State in the Fiesta Bowl, but the Irish offense will be potent again and the defense, presumably, will be better.

Playing Penn State to three overtimes gave Florida State Coach Bobby Bowden hope that his five-loss Seminoles might have one more title push.

Some schools may need to re-think and/or re-tinker.

Penn State, which finished 11-1 and No. 3, will need to work double time if it expects to make a splash for Joe Paterno’s 80th birthday party next December.

Georgia loses a lot.

Next season marks more than a changing of guards and tackles.

There will be a fifth BCS game added to the rotation. ABC keeps the Rose Bowl, but Fox takes over the other three majors: Fiesta, Orange, Sugar.

The Fiesta gets first shot at the new “double-host” model, in which it will stage the Fiesta Bowl and then, a week later, the BCS title game.

The fifth game opens two more access spots for the “non-BCS” teams. A team from outside the six major conferences will earn a major bowl bid if it finishes in the top 12, instead of the top six. A non-BCS school would get in with a top-16 finish if a major conference champion is rated 17th or worse.

A playoff is not in the forecast, but the “double host” format could absorb a “plus-one” model -- an extra game after the BCS bowls are played -- if college presidents ever get the constitution to go that direction.

Things, of course, never stay as they are.

Dynasties end -- USC found that out; players come and go.

When you consider what college football is about to lose, and what beckons, next season may be different from most.