Part of the Doc's Mid-Major Week.

Quick: Name the NCAA's leader in total yardage in 2008. Even if the headline tipped you to the school, it's a good bet you're a little slow on the name: Case Keenum.

That's understandable, because Keenum's prolific sophomore season didn't generate much noise -- the only games Houston played on national TV were more memorable for a grisly injury and kicking off way too early on New Year's Eve, respectively. Keenum wasn't even considered the best quarterback in Conference USA. He's not particularly coveted by pro scouts. The kid doesn't even have a decent YouTube compilation. (Believe me, I searched high and low.)

Which is not to say that he deserves any of those things -- Houston's offense remains very heavy on screens and horizontal passes designed to pick up yards after the catch, i.e. to make the quarterback look good on paper for very routine throws -- but the total lack of national hype for a statsheet star like Keenum outside of obscure "Underrated" columns and forward-looking Facebook pages is useful for pointing out just how far passing games have come over the last two decades.

Consider that 20 years ago this December, Andre Ware's numbers earned enough attention from Jack Pardee's Run 'n Shoot to capture the Heisman with a record-setting season in 1989 -- only to have most of those records smashed in 1990 by his successor, David Klingler, who finished third in the Heisman voting and went sixth overall in the 1992 draft; Ware had gone seventh. In the late eighties and early nineties, these were passers of a truly different mold; the numbers proved it. Twenty years later, well, maybe they'd be able to crack first team All-C-USA:

True, Keenum isn't responsible for putting up 95 points on SMU, as Ware was in '89, or 84 points on Eastern Washington, like Klingler. (Although Keenum was the trigger man for the Cougars' 70-point explosion over then-No. 25 Tulsa last November.) And he (or anyone else) will probably never match Klingler's 732-yard, 11-touchdown outburst in the EWU win, both records that still stand for a single game. He has, however, been significantly more efficient at an earlier stage of his career.

But in some ways, even if they did surpass the marks that made the hearts of MC Hammer-era Heisman voters flutter, prolific, off-the-beaten-path passers like Keenum will always be victims both of their predecessors' success and especially of their subsequent failures -- after all, if Andre Ware, David Klingler, Ty Detmer, B.J. Symons and Colt Brennan can put up record-smashing numbers en route to humiliating exposure by respectable defenses and an ugly stint as pro flameouts, how hard can it be? In fact, we fully expect those kinds of opportunistic college slingers to come along in the right system every couple years or so; at a place like Houston, like Texas Tech, Hawaii or BYU, rewriting some kind of passing record is almost a given. It's fine and all, but it's certainly nothing special. It's just part of the natural order in the days of the spread, where outrageous passing stats will never be what they used to be.