Ask LGHL: Is Desmond Howard the worst analyst in college football?

Every day for the entirety of the Ohio State football season, we will be asking and answering questions about the team, college football, and anything else on our collective minds of varying degrees of importance. If you have a question that you would like to ask, you can tweet us @LandGrant33 or if you need more than 280 characters, send an email HERE.

Question: Is Desmond Howard the worst analyst in college football?

I realize that this seems like an incredibly difficult question to answer considering the fact that Danny Kanell still exists and continues to pollute the world of college football with his lazy, out-dated, and reductive takes. However, it is a question that needs to be asked, and we here at Land-Grant Holy Land will do the difficult, but necessary work to come up with an answer.

Now, before we get into the meat and potatoes of this discussion, I do want to assure all of our loyal readers from north of the (Ohio) border, that our conclusion after carefully considering this question will in no way be influenced by Howard’s decades of unrepentant trolling of his home state’s flagship institution. Despite the fact that for nearly the entirety of the past two decades, his Corn and Blue homerism has shown what a terrible analyst he is when picking the winner of The Game, we are approaching this with a level head and no outside biases.

For example, when Des has a good point, we are more than happy to give him his due. Case and point:

However, getting down to brass tacks, before Week 3 of the 2022 college football season even begun, three of Desmond‘s four College Football Playoff teams had already lost, and the fourth (his alma mater) had only faced off against the likes of Colorado State, Hawai’i, and UConn — ranked No. 120, 128, and 126 respectively in Bill Connelly’s SP+ rankings... and yes, that is out of 131 FBS teams.

Also, his national champion — Texas A&M — had already been so thoroughly embarrassed that they had to make a change at starting quarterback and suspend a whole host of starters in Week 3.

But Howard’s ineptitude goes far beyond his inability to make even semi-coherent college football predictions. If you follow us on Twitter, you know that we are fans of the occasional troll; humorous back-and-forth ribbing is one of the inherent joys of being a sports fan (as exemplified by this very article), but when you are paid to provide cogent analysis for a network that declares itself to be “the worldwide leader in sports,” you have to be at least somewhat stealthy to hide your obvious biases and hatreds.

I’m not saying that they aren’t going to seep into your analysis or how you view the sport. They are part of who you are and how you see the world, you can’t change that. But, while one would hope that you would actively work to curb those basest of instincts, the least you could do is be self-aware enough to hide them in a way that doesn’t make you look like a completely unserious clown when you put them on full display for the world to see.

While Howard has not yet reached Mark May levels of ass-hattery, he’s a lot closer than anyone else in the world of college football punditry should ever be.

Now I know that Ohio State has a ton of alums in the CFB media, and the likes of Kirk Herbstreit and Joey Galloway (and Urban Meyer) regularly anger Buckeye fans as much for not being homers as they do Buckeye haters for being homers. So I appreciate that it is a difficult line to toe, but Des, my dude, you’ve got to at least try.

When you are so obviously incapable of actually analyzing the sport (Pittsburgh, Baylor, and Texas A&M in the CFP?), at least make semi-veiled attempts to hide your haterade.

So, in closing, is Desmond Howard the worst analyst in college football? Even though it brings me absolutely no joy in saying so (I’m lying, it brings me a lot of joy), yes, I believe he is.