I'll admit it: I didn't think Florida jumper Marquis Dendy had a shot to win The Bowerman — the award annually given to the nation's most outstanding collegiate track and field athletes, both men and women. He was up against the stiffest possible competition: Oregon's Ed Cheserek, a distance runner so prodigiously talented that he's done things not even Steve Prefontaine did.
And jumpers just hadn't had much success with winning The Bowerman: Only two had claimed the award in its first six years of existence.
But Dendy is prodigiously talented in his own right, as gifted a jumper as a school increasing known for its leapers has ever produced, and he matched Cheserek's distance dominance with a similar sweep of the long jump and triple jump at the NCAA Indoor and Outdoor Championships in 2015.