The Thighsman: Awarded to the best playa in college football. Design by Irishoutsider.

We open the competition for college football’s most prestigious competition, the Thighsman Award, given to the athlete we believe to be most deserving of compensation for their on-field efforts in the form of abundant warm, waiting, and willing sexual partners off the field. Athletes may not be paid in the form of money (SEC, Big 12, Pac-10, Big East, and Big Ten excluded,) but they do receive the gift of having their own private Jiffy Lube station built into their bedrooms.

And as you’ll see with our nominees this week, the special treatment for the hardworking genitals of these men can’t be begrudged, as their scoring on the field overshadows even their abundant scoring off the field.

(Legal note: any similarities to awards that rhyme with the Thighsman Award, or to squeaky-voiced, one-legged former ESPN commentators of dubious value is purely coincidental. BTW, we have it on good information that Joe used to wear a speedo around his country club well into the late eighties and early nineties. Your sleepless night was sponsored by Lunesta, who pays us to put the image of Joe Theismann prancing around in a tight swimsuit with a Mai Tai in his hand weekly.)

Moving up this week and taking on whole squads of wenches like a drunken Conan…

Rashard Mendenhall, Illinois. The Fighting Redacti wouldn’t be anywhere close to where they are without Mendenhall’s amazing statistical combo of average yards per carry (6.8 per touch) and his durability (114 attempts). Mendenhall had 160 yards rushing against Wisconsin and two tds on a mere 19 carries; in compensation, he should have received at least that many tackles from the ladies of Champaign-Urbana with at least four scores on the evening.

C.J. Bacher, Northwestern. Upset Michigan State almost singlehandedly with a 520 yard, 5 td performance against Michigan State in a 48-41 underplayed shocker of a game on Saturday. In 2013 a young attorney, freshly married to a young attorney, will one day divulge that she spent one night in college with three other women attempting to lick the skin off of C.J. Bacher’s tired but victorious body. The husband will ask if she will re-enact this with two other women sometime with him. And the young female attorney will stop, sigh, and ponder this. She will then say, “No.” And that, friends, is life.

Jacob Hester. The hammer that split Florida’s defense in half didn’t and doesn’t have spectacular numbers: 23 carries, 106 yards, and one td. All Hester did was create something from nothing despite being not obviously talented and (gasp!) a white running back every time LSU needed him to do on lunatic and critical fourth downs. Ample-cheeked LSU beauties should have given him the Hercules treatment and hand-fed him grapes beneath flowing white curtains all night for his efforts.

Pannel Egboh, Stanford. The Pac-10 defensive player of the week had 10 tackes and 2.5 for loss in 2007’s latest UPSET OF THE CENTURY and deserved to wear out eleven Trojans both during the game and afterwards. For his efforts, Stanford’s ample supply of overachieving Asian ladies should have deployed a squad of their best and brightest to make rampant, untamed love to him while simultaneously quizzing him for that differential equations quiz he’s got on Tuesday and filling out the paperwork for the share of the highly speculative but lucrative tech investment capital firm he won for his efforts against the Trojans.

John David Booty, USC. Was seen attempting to cash in on his early Thighsman capital after the game at Les Deux, but the third in the line of unassailable Thighsmen Supreme at USC (Palmer and Leinart, the uber-Thighsman) seems to be drooping a bit in comparison. Four picks gets you lonely weeping with lotion in front of a flickery, old DVD copy of Nina Hartley’s Guide to Anal Sex, not groupie gang tackling from Leinart Hand Release Brigade.