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2018 Mountain West Football 50 Best Players: #1, Boise State QB Brett Rypien
The Broncos’ senior quarterback is back atop our countdown of Mountain West football’s best players for the second straight year.
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What legacy will Rypien leave behind?
At last, we finally reach the #1 spot on our countdown of Mountain West football’s top players in 2018. If the debate raging around this year’s selection is any indication, the big takeaway, as always, is that it’s hard to make it to the top.
This makes Boise State quarterback Brett Rypien, the top selection on our list for the second year in a row, a rare talent: If you go back to the top 50’s origins at our old digs, where we began this exercise in 2013, Rypien is just the second player (Donnel Pumphrey being the other) to be #1 twice.
Rypien made the all-Mountain West second team after throwing for 2,877 yards and 16 touchdowns last fall, but it was his work in conference play that earned him the top spot on our list. He completed 64.7% of his passes and averaged 8.6 yards per attempt against Mountain West foes, finishing with a 13-to-1 touchdown-to-interception ratio.
While it’s unlikely that he’ll unseat Kellen Moore as the program’s best quarterback ever by season’s end, there’s every expectation that Rypien can match Moore by leading the Broncos back to a New Year’s Day bowl game for the first time since 2014.
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