Both Vince Young and Reggie Bush unceremoniously switched teams this week, with neither of them expected to assume a starting role. Young, who provided the Titans with some magnificent comebacks and notable drama, is a noteworthy NFL story run aground. He’ll back up Michael Vick on the Eagles, an understudy to the role he could never fulfill. Bush, as my friend David Roth put it, will continue to be more famous than good. On the Dolphins, he will do the same thing Reggie Bush has always done as a pro, which is an attenuated version the genius wrought at USC.

For anyone who followed the 2005 season, when Young and Bush vied for the Heisman and went head-to-head for the championship in Pasadena, these two athletes will never be ordinary, average, or negligible. Even if you deem them busts—a term that is always relative—it’s hard to ever fully regard them as mortal.

The memory of Young, looking physically very much like today’s Vince Young, knifing through the USC defense for a game-winning touchdown in Pasadena remains vivid because pro failure can only diminish it so much. Against Michigan a year earlier in the same stadium, Young had proven that he and Texas could dominate the college ranks. USC was something else altogether, a slate of future draft picks that brought college football dangerously close to the pro game. Young went off, unquestionably, without blinking. And he did it against future NFL players, mere months away from his own entry into the NFL, looking very much like an NFL player himself. It’s hard to shake that off as juvenelia.

Bush was always a trickier, if even more mesmerizing, case. He wasn’t an every-down back in college; LenDale White made this arrangement possible, but then again, this arrangement made LenDale White possible. Young was simply so hard to beat, it was like watching a pre-draft pro. With Bush, there were questions about his role in the NFL, his strength, even his taste for grit. What Reggie Bush did once he got the ball in his hands, though, was nearly inexpressible, or at least supernatural. He drew comparisons to all-time great Gale Sayers, in large part because there had simply never been another player who eluded defenders with such serpentine ease. Bush could outrun anyone, but he could also change direction or spin without losing speed. He actually seemed to accelerate when cutting across the field, or temporarily losing ground.

You know the rest: Bush got the Heisman (since redacted), and once that was done with, Young won the title—with Bush surprisingly quiet. When the Houston Texans announced their intention to take defensive end Mario Williams over the (presumably) game-changing Bush or hometown hero Young, their sanity was questioned. In retrospect, it was the only solid choice. Bush was pretty much the same player, except he only occasionally broke the big plays that made him so dangerous in college. Young looked like a winner at times, but notably absent was the all-around, gargantuan production that had been his trademark. In the NFL, Reggie Bush lost his afterburners, and Vince Young couldn’t pass, run, or cope with life as a pro.

Bush and Young are disappointments, at least compared to the expectations we had for them coming out of college. Yet they still read as very much the same people we watched in 2005, their exploits a first act, not a preamble. (Bush’s ongoing college-era scandals have made it especially easy for us to stay fixated on his USC days.) As hokey as it sounds, though, they will always be legendary.

There is no comparable figure in basketball, a direct consequence of players leaving as early as possible, and the college game—vastly diluted by NBA flight—barely resembling the pros. In fact, excelling for three or four years in the NCAA is now seen as a liability, a red flag. If nothing else, sticking around suggests a lack of talent. On top of that, playing college basketball leads to false confidence and bad habits. That’s harsh, maybe, yet for players like Adam Morrison, their past mocks them. It’s certainly not a badge of honor, as with Bush and Young. Theirs is an aura that refuses to fade. Adam Morrison, wherever he lives, represents our collective bad faith. Young and Bush will always get something of a pass; Morrison must pay.

Basketball’s Naismith unified Hall of Fame operates according to the logic that shelters Young and Bush. These days, though, it’s unlikely that any player will be inducted solely on the basis of a college career. The continuity between college and the pros has disappeared, and in its place, we’ve gotten the myth that once upon a time, future Hall of Famers ruled college and then took the pros. Football is resounding proof that, even if college and the pros draw close, success is anything but guaranteed. However, in this, football is both more realistic and more charitable. Players like Young and Bush are not a matter open for dispute.

We can’t help ourselves around them. Who knows whether that means the system works, or still has room for a most exceptional, even magical, kind of slippage?