Declaring a player a “breakout” is easy once the season is over. Predicting a breakout season before a player establishes himself as a legitimate star is another matter entirely. Freshmen are harder to predict than returning players for the obvious reason that, while we may have watched hours of film, we’ve never seen them on the field facing big-time college competition.
For the Ohio State Buckeyes last season, I’d easily hand the freshman offensive breakout award to Treveyon Henderson. Not a surprise. After all, he was the top-ranked running back in his class, and everyone thought that he was likely to break into the starting lineup pretty fast.