Any of you who play the NCAA Football video games knows what impact players are, but for those of you who don't, it is a pretty simply concept.  Each team in the game has three "impact players" on their team: one on offense, one on defense, and one wild card.  They are basically the best three players on the team, although offensive linemen are exempt for whatever reason.

Usually if you know a team pretty well then guessing who the three impact players will be isn't difficult.  For instance, last year's game had McCoy, Shipley, and Kindle as UT's impact players, as it should have been.  But I was thinking about this year's team, and I really don't see any obvious choices.  There's a lot of talent on the team (obviously), but most of the positions on the field are having heavy competition for who starts.  If I'm guessing as best I can, I would go with:

 

• Malcolm Williams - He's shown awesome, yet all too infrequent, bursts of skill for two years now.  Clearly the most experienced and reliable receiver on the team, our offense is going to have to go through him at some point if it wants to be effective.
• Sam Acho - He will miss Kindle drawing all of those double teams, but he is still going to put up the numbers and anchor the line, either from the inside or out.
• Aaron Williams - Too much talent to ignore.

This is what I ended up with, and I don't feel like I am more likely to be right than any other guesses.  I had a hard time picking between AW and Curtis Brown, or I could see it being both of them without Acho.  Keenan Robinson is also hard to ignore.  None of the running backs really deserve "impact player" status, in my opinion. Newton is good, but just good enough to be considered a starter at the position, not somebody who is necessarily ready to carry the team at this point.  Garrett will be rated highly, but he hasn't even started a game yet.

Basically, I'm already getting sick of not having football to watch.  The end of the NCAA tourney is less fun than the beginning, and baseball and NBA playoffs don't start for a couple of weeks.  Who do you think the three "impact players" of the 2010 Texas Longhorns are?