To the pundits who say you can't win with a quarterback controversy, William & Mary has this retort: Check out our No. 4 national ranking. And we haven't even played a game yet!

Okay, so maybe the Football Championship Subdivision's preseason rankings that I helped create are about as credible as recent Twitter updates from the Washington Post's Mike Wise, who falsely reported Monday that Ben Roethlisberger would be suspended five games just to see how many reporters blindly followed.

(Wise was rewarded with a healthy helping of poetic justice: a suspension.)

I digress. The point is that regardless of what we "experts" have predicted and Tweeted, William & Mary is still a good football team, and it was also announced Monday that the Tribe be going with fifth-year senior Mike Callahan at quarterback, regardless of the fact that he has yet to throw a pass in the FCS.

Now before you start calling Callahan the perfect hybrid of Montana State's Denarius McGhee and Cody Kempt - a guy that has all the experience coaches love and all the mystery that has helped him avoid fan hatred - Callahan won the quarterback battle over two guys with equally little FCS experience.

It proves this much: 1) The Bobcats aren't the only good team that had to make a tough quarterback decision this fall, and 2) you could do a whole lot worse than starting a guy who's spent nearly half a decade playing college football and almost as many years in your program.

So why did MSU sniff in the face of the conventional wisdom put forth by the William & Mary, the nation's second-best public university (Thank you Forbes. Aren't rankings great?), by going with the redshirt freshman McGhee over their own fifth-year senior Kempt?

It would seem that for Rob Ash, a head coach entering his 36th year in the business who was hired at MSU because of his ability to put out fires and is every bit as traditional as William & Mary's 31-year head coach Jimmye Laycock, such a decision would be out of character.

Maybe it is. But it proves this much: Ash has character.

He could have made the easy decision and handed the ball to Kempt, a 6-foot-3, 225-pound Adonis in a flak jacket, a former Oregon Duck who has 13 FCS starts and one Civil War concussion, a kid who pledged his loyalty to MSU when it needed a quarterback and has given the program three years.

Instead Ash turned to McGhee, the first African American quarterback in Bobcat history. He can barely see over his offensive line and his last meaningful pass was an interception in high school.

You could say this much: somewhere, Mike Wise is applauding. Ash's move was a bold one, made despite the norms of the profession.

The only difference was that Wise's stunt was self-righteous. Ash's act was anything but. The best player plays. Nothing more, nothing less. There's no purer proverb in all of sport and Ash put it into practice on Tuesday.

Next year, hundreds of college football coaches will enter preseason drills claiming that they too subscribe to such a philosophy. The pundits will laugh.

But not at Ash.

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