What college football really needs, besides more bowl games, is an injection of additional postseason awards. There simply aren’t enough of them.

Sure there is the Heisman Trophy for college football’s outstanding player, which went to Florida quarterback Tim Tebow. The top player also is honored with the Maxwell Award (Tebow) and the Walter Camp Award (Darren McFadden of Arkansas).

OK, so a pair of awards honor quarterbacks: The Davey O’Brien Award (Tebow) and the Johnny Unitas Golden Arm Award (Matt Ryan, Boston College), given to the top senior. The Bronko Nagurski Award (Glenn Dorsey, LSU) honors the nation’s top defensive player, and so does the Chuck Bednarik Award (Penn State’s Dan Connor).

The top running back gets the Doak Walker Award (McFadden), the best tight end the John Mackey Award (USC’s Fred Davis). The Jim Thorpe Award (Arizona’s Antoine Cason) goes to a defensive back, the Fred Biletnikoff Award to a wide receiver (Michael Crabtree, Texas Tech).

The Outland Trophy (Dorsey) honors the outstanding interior lineman and is not to be confused with the Vince Lombardi/Rotary Award (Dorsey also), which goes to the best linemen.

Sure, the top placekicker gets the Lou Groza Award (Thomas Weber, Arizona State), and the best punter is given the Ray Guy Award (Durant Brooks, Georgia Tech), but what about the top long-snapper and the most skilled holder? Zip.

As the helicopter parents who make a habit of complaining about their children getting short-changed on media coverage as their children sit in the background begging them not to call and growing redder by the second, the long-snapper and the holder “try just as hard as the rest of the players.”

And what about an award for the wire holder, the guy who trails Mark Mangino, holding the headphones wire, moving left when the coach moves left, moving right when the coach moves right, trotting when the coach sprints toward Raimond Pendleton? He “tries just as hard as the players.” Without him, the coach wouldn’t be able to communicate with his assistants who watch from upstairs.

As for coach-of-the-year awards, there are a dozen of them, including the AFCA, Walter Camp, Bear Bryant, Home Depot, Bobby Dodd, Munger, Sporting News and Liberty Mutual. Mangino figures to win more of them than anybody else, deservedly so.

In 2005, Kansas broke a string of nine consecutive football seasons with a losing record. In 2007, KU was ranked as high as second, finished the regular season with an 11-1 record and ranked No. 1 in fewest penalties per game, a sure sign of sound coaching. The same program that had a 2-18 record in Big 12 road games in Mangino’s first five seasons went 4-0 in ’07. (Missouri felt like a road game, but doesn’t count as one.)

If Mangino doesn’t win some of the dozen awards, don’t sweat it.

The Heisman Trophy of coaches awards is the one awarded by the Associated Press. He deserves it. He also would deserve a John Bartlett Award, if only it existed, for his recent quote: “Our football tradition is not really a great one, but anyone can have a bad century.”