Search Engine Sports

Join the Doc's game day live blog, covering every game, all day long.

California 35, Minnesota 21. It would be an insult to continue insisting Jahvid Best is an "under-the-radar" Heisman candidate, since his name can barely come up without someone asking how he'll stack up against the the holy trinity of clean-cut, aw-shucks quarterbacks. Everybody loves the guy for what he is -- the premiere home-run threat in the country -- but in this relatively pass-happy age, Best plays the wrong position for the wrong team, which only the right performance in the right game (against USC on Oct. 3) can overcome in terms of hardware. But his school-record-tying five touchdown runs today -- two in the first half of the first quarter and two more after Minnesota rallied to tie at 21-21 in the fourth -- on 150 total yards only confirmed his status as the one skill player in whose hands you want the ball more than anyone else's, under pretty much any circumstances. Best ran the gamut today, first on spectacular runs (two 25-plus-yard touchdowns, the first of which should be quickly posterized on highlight reels; see above), as a receiver and decoy who can line up all over the field and finally as a workhorse who ran eight times -- all for short gains -- with a pair of touchdowns on the Bears' icing drives in the fourth. In terms of awards, that may not get him very far; it wasn't even as dominating a performance as I predicted for him this morning. In fact, Cal fans may have left feeling better about Kevin Riley's solid, mistake-free afternoon at quarterback, the 'X-factor' when it comes to their higher Pac-10 and national ambitions. For Best, most of the afternoon was more like just another day at the office, the implications of which hopefully weren't lost on the rare national audience.