Quarterback | 2007
On the face of it this is really high for a guy that played exactly 12 games and didn't set any school records, not even for a single game. But this is more about the impact of the man than what the man himself did. One thing that Brian Kelly recognized is that you need a story to get your foot in the door to sell a story, and the best one he had was Ben Mauk during that 2007 season, and Kelly sold that story to no end.
Ben Mauk captivated this city in a way that an outsider rarely does in such an insular media environment because he was a great story, by far the best thing going in the city. That really set the stage for the insanity of the 2008 and 2009 seasons when Bearcats Football took the city by storm. That is not to say that those runs in 08 and 09 couldn't have happened with Dustin Grutza under center, but Mauk was a very large piece of the foundation. Plus he was also damn good at Football.
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