When Oklahoma won the national championship in 2000, Sooners coach Bob Stoops wore out his vocal cords defending the talent of his quarterback. Senior Josh Heupel couldn't throw the ball 20 yards without duck hunters reaching for their rifles. Heupel couldn't outrun anyone, either.

But, Stoops argued, without his brains and his leadership, Oklahoma would have been just another good team.

	Oklahoma expects consistency not greatness from Jason White.

Three years later, the Sooners are favored to win another national championship, this time with a senior quarterback, Jason White, who has made only four starts in his career. Stoops, perhaps bowing to the obvious, perhaps dreading the thought of another season of playing Johnnie Cochran for his quarterback in the court of public opinion, said last week at the Big 12 Conference preseason press gathering that "You don't have to have a great quarterback to win a national championship."

Well, duh. Stoops isn't dissing White, or Heupel, or the other quarterbacks in recent years who, if they made it to the NFL at all, rarely rose above clipboard holder. He's stating what has become a fact in college football life: Unlike the NFL, great college quarterbacks are more often the icing than the national championship cake.

College and NFL stars such as Brett Favre, Peyton Manning and Donovan McNabb never came close to playing for No. 1. Among the winners of the coveted ring are quarterbacks such as Jay Barker of Alabama (1992), now a morning drive-time sports radio host in Birmingham; Tommie Frazier of Nebraska (1994-95), in the mortgage business in Omaha; and Craig Krenzel of Ohio State, who returns for his senior season after directing the Buckeyes to a 14-0 record and a surprise national championship.

Nebraska fans will surely argue that Frazier was a great quarterback in running an offense that included a large dose of option. There's no question that a debate on what makes a great quarterback could tax the limits of the Internet.

But what Stoops is referring to, as are the other college coaches and NFL scouting personnel surveyed by ESPN.com, is the guy who doesn't necessarily make Mel Kiper's hair stand a little taller. It's the quarterback with an arm as strong as it is accurate, feet that provide an escape route when the offensive line collapses, and the brain that can extrapolate a coming blitz from the way a linebacker snaps his chin strap.

The reasons why that guy can be succussful underline the appeal of college football and highlight the differences between playing on Saturdays and playing on Sundays. To a man, college coaches and NFL scouting personnel surveyed by ESPN.com agree with Stoops. A great quarterback is a luxury item, not a necessity. Says Virginia Tech quarterbacks coach Kevin Rogers, who taught McNabb at Syracuse, "You better be good on defense. You better be good on special teams. Or, you have to be a dominating running team."

Says Penn State offensive coordinator Fran Ganter, who has won two national championships as a member of Joe Paterno's staff, "I totally agree with (Stoops') statement. Joe always says that the first thing, foremost and most important, in a quarterback is his leadership ability, and that he has a hold on the team. His ability, and how he throws, is secondary. You win championships with defense. Every one of them played great defense."

A Winning Combination

Since 1950, only two quarterbacks have won the Heisman Trophy and led their team to the national championship in the same year: Danny Wuerffel of Florida (1996) and Charlie Ward of Florida State (1993). Compare that to the NFL, where four quarterbacks have been named Most Valuable Player and won the Super Bowl in the last 14 seasons alone: Kurt Warner of St. Louis (1999); Brett Favre of Green Bay (1996); Steve Young of San Francisco (1994); and Joe Montana of San Francisco (1989).

There's no better example of a team that finished No. 1 without a star at quarterback than the 1992 Alabama team. The Crimson Tide defense included four players who would become first-round draft choices. Barker, then a sophomore, completed 4-of-18 passes in Alabama's 34-13 upset of No. 1 Miami in the Sugar Bowl.

"Our coaches were able to hide my weaknesses," Barker says. "My job was, don't make mistakes, play field-position football, set up the defense. You've got to put it in the quarterback's mind that, 'We're not going to call on you much, but when we do, you've got to make plays.' Coach (Gene) Stallings did that. He told me, 'You've got to realize that we can't make mistakes.'"

The recipe that Ohio State used last year is typical of this type of team: a stout defense, outstanding special teams, a talented tailback in Maurice Clarett, and Krenzel, a quarterback who, while he didn't have a Smith & Wesson for an arm, compensated with his brains and his leadership.

"He better at least be a guy who is not going to screw it up," says Buckeyes offensive coordinator Jim Bollman, "and will allow everyone around him to do what they can do."

A year ago, Krenzel completed nearly 62 percent of his passes in the regular season. The molecular biology major earned a high grade in making the right decisions.

"Somewhere in the game, that type of quarterback is going to have an opportunity to make a play whether you want him to or not." Bollman said. "It may be a scramble, or he pulls it down and runs, or he makes a right decision on a pass play. Craig's pretty good at making decisions."

Krenzel took 30 sacks last year. In some quarterbacks, that indicates an inability to pull the trigger, or the wait for a receiver to become wide open, instead of anticipating when he will be wide open. However, Bollman described Krenzel as conservative.

	Craig Krenzel's decision making was a key to Ohio State's title run.

"A lot of people may say that he holds the ball and takes shots," Bollman says, "but then he has times when he has made some very big plays by pulling it down and running. He pulled it down 47 times on plays where he was not called to run, and he averaged seven yards. It was interesting seeing him grow into the role he had as the year transpired."

Krenzel's ability to run sheds light on another reason that college football teams can thrive without great passers. College football has as many as a dozen different styles of offense, from the option and other offenses where the quarterback is the third running back in the backfield, to the five-receiver set that is designed to stretch a defense from sideline to sideline. In the offseason, Rogers said, "I might go see a Wake Forest, a USC, an Oklahoma. In the NFL, an expert can't tell much difference from team to team."

"In the NFL," Miami offensive coordinator Rob Chudzinski said, "everybody is good. It's a copycat league in both offensive and defensive philosophy as well as the talent level. It's much more the same."

Each college offense demands different skills to run it, and, of course, different skills to defend it. The range of talent in college football isn't that wide. Coaches love to say that football is a game of mismatches. Take your best player, and maneuver him into position so that he can exploit the opponent's worst player. That's difficult to achieve in the NFL, where there are only 32 teams, all of them skilled. Among the 117 teams in Division I-A, the players range from NFL-caliber to barely out of high school. The mismatches are more easily found.

"In the college game, more games are lost than are won," Chudzinski said. "In the NFL, more games have to be won. In college, you're dealing with 19-year-olds instead of 30-year-olds who have been in the NFL for 10 years and have been in that offense or defense for a long, long time. College kids are straight out of high school and still trying to figure out where the biology department is."

NFL teams have more trouble finding mismatches. When they do, in the case of a quarterback who fails to measure up, the defense pounces. In the college game, the disparity in skills and talent can be so great, that a young quarterback can be brought along slowly, or, in Barker's case, hidden. That's especially true in the first month of the season, when the best teams "buy" home games from smaller I-A schools.

	“	Joe (Paterno) always says that the first thing, foremost and most important, in a quarterback is his leadership ability, and that he has a hold on the team. His ability, and how he throws, is secondary. ”
		— Penn State offensive coordinator Fran Ganter

"In college," says Baltimore Ravens director of pro personnel Phil Savage, "because of the nature of the situation, you can get Craig Krenzel some experience at the beginning of the season and get the kid rolling.

"In the NFL, he may never get his feet on the ground. A college quarterback can get away with things. A pro quarterback has tighter windows. A college kid might see a couple of good defensive backs and three or four guys who are hanging on for dear life. In the NFL, you get three, four, or in nickel, five or six guys who are good," Savage says. "In college, a guy who is not dead accurate, it's an incompletion or a defensive back drops it. In the NFL, it's an interception."

In other words, that's why a quarterback like Chad Pennington spends over two seasons signaling plays before he gets on the field and calls them. Once the college conference seasons begin, however, and the skill level across the line of scrimmage is much more the same, that cushion begins to disappear.

Rogers recalls two of his most recent quarterbacks: McNabb and Matt LoVecchio. McNabb, now one of the NFL's best, led Syracuse to the 1998 Big East championship and a BCS bid, and LoVecchio led Notre Dame to eight consecutive victories and a BCS bid as a freshman in 2000.

"A great quarterback can't do it all," Rogers said. "In McNabb's senior year, we were mediocre defensively. I would be surprised if we had one game where we scored less than 24 points. It was a hell of an offensive team. When we played defense, look at the Miami game. We won 66-13. That doesn't happen unless you have a McNabb. With LoVecchio, we turned the ball over eight times. We played decent defense and we played great special teams. We didn't throw much but we threw short passes and screens."

Rogers paused and summed up what every coach believes. "It's a hell of a lot easier to win with a great quarterback, I'll tell you that."

Easier, yes, but, as college football proves, not necessary.

Ivan Maisel is a senior writer for ESPN.com. He can be reached at ivan.maisel@espn3.com.