Briscoe Named Walter Payton Award Finalist
11/29/2016 2:37:00 PM | Football
HUNTSVILLE, Texas – Sam Houston State quarterback Jeremiah Briscoe has been named one of three finalists for the STATS FCS Walter Payton Award, per an announcement from STATS on Tuesday afternoon.
The award will be given out at the STATS FCS Awards Banquet on Jan. 6 in Frisco, Texas, the night before the FCS Championship Game. Briscoe will be joined as a finalist by reigning Payton Award winner Cooper Kupp and his Eastern Washington teammate, quarterback Gage Gubrud.
A national panel of over 150 sports information and media relations directors, broadcasters, writers and other dignitaries voted on the Payton Award, which had 25 finalists from 13 FCS conferences.
Briscoe is looking to become the first Bearkat and second Southland Conference player to earn the Payton Award, given to the top player in in the FCS. It was just the second time a Kat had been named to the Payton Award watch list when he was added earlier in the season, but joins Dustin Long as the only two Sam Houston players to be invited to the award ceremony as a finalist.
He has directed the Bearkat offense to a record-setting season in 2016 and enters the playoffs having already set a new Southland Conference single-season record with 52 touchdown passes, smashing the former record of 48 that had been held by Stephen F. Austin's Todd Hammel since 1989.
Those 52 scores are a dozen more than anyone else in the country and are just four shy of the FCS national record of 56, set by Mississippi Valley State's Willie Totten in 1984 and tied by Grambling's Bruce Eugene in 2005. Briscoe is just the fifth player in FCS history with 50 touchdowns in a season, along with Totten, Eugene, Eastern Washington's Vernon Adams and Eastern Illinois' Jimmy Garoppolo.
It is the sixth time since Sam Houston joined the Southland that it has captured a Player of the Year honor with Briscoe being the first since Timothy Flanders did so in both the 2011 and 2012 seasons. He currently leads all of FCS in touchdown passes (52), passing yards (4,096), passing yards per game (372.4) and pass efficiency (187.0).
Briscoe has posted five games with at least 400 passing yards in addition to throwing for at least five touchdowns in six of 11 games, including each of the last four games of the regular season. He now owns each of the top four single-game touchdown marks at Sam Houston, all coming this year with the previous record being just five, and had two games – vs SFA, vs UCA – with seven touchdown passes.
Since the 2013, FCS quarterbacks had only had a combined five games with seven touchdown passes with Briscoe now being the first quarterback since UT Martin's Derek Carr in 2012 having done it multiple times in a season.
He has done most of his work early on in games, having rarely taken snaps in the fourth quarter. In fact, of his 419 passes attempted this season, only 116 have come in the second half (27.6 percent) and 40 (9.5 percent) in the fourth quarter.
The junior has also spread the ball around this season, throwing his 52 touchdowns to 13 different receivers. His top trio of targets – Yedidiah Louis, Davion Davis and Nathan Stewart – have a combined 31 touchdowns between them with each player approaching 1,000 yards for the season. Should those three each make it to 1,000 yards in 2016, Sam Houston would join the 2013 and 2014 Fordham teams as the only three teams to ever have three 1,000-yard receivers on its roster in a single season.
