Are college football’s voters getting smarter?

The conventional wisdom heading into the Heisman Trophy balloting, at least among bloggy and Twittery types and the more thoughtful pundits, was that either Toby Gerhart of Stanford or Ndamukong Suh of Nebraska should win the Heisman, but that the award would instead go to either Colt McCoy of Texas, Mark Ingram of Alabama, or (less likely, but still more likely than Suh) Tim Tebow of Florida.

Gerhart and Suh were like the indie films that get on every snobby movie reviewer’s “should win” list for the Oscars, while McCoy, Ingram and Tebow were the loud, obnoxious Hollywood blockbusters that would inevitably walk away with the big prize.

The voters, according to this thinking, would, as per usual, ignore the sole stated criterion for the Heisman — “most outstanding college football player” — and would instead use the standard formula of “quarterback, or occasionally running back, on the best team.” Gerhart and Suh would be doomed by the win-loss records of their respective teams, as well as their own unique Heisman disadvantages (Gerhart is a white runningback on a non-traditional West Coast power; Suh is a defensive player).

Even the smart, thoughtful blog Heisman Pundit wrote Saturday, in the immediate aftermath of the season’s final games, that McCoy, Ingram and Gerhart are the “only three players…who can win the Heisman” — and Gerhart had just a 10% chance, compared to 60% for McCoy and 30% for Ingram. Suh, wrote Heisman Pundit, “isn’t going to win the Heisman, but I think he has a chance to finish as high as fourth or fifth” after his performance against Texas made him “a darling among the hard-core college football media.” On Monday, HP said “I’d be shocked” if Suh gets invited to NYC.

Yet Suh was indeed invited, along with Gerhart, Ingram, McCoy and Tebow. And it may not be a mere consolation prize. Lo and behold, according to Stiff Arm Trophy (formerly Heisman Projection), which is sort of the Five Thirty Eight of Heisman punditry — eschewing vapid talking-through-its-hat commentary, the site has correctly projected the last seven Heisman winners, and come within an average of 1.8% of their vote totals, by way of simple math, tabulating actual declared votes by actual Heisman voters and adjusting by region — the Heisman race is an extremely tight three-way battle between Ingram, Gerhart and Suh, with McCoy in fourth place and Tebow a distant fifth, closer to sixth-place candidate C.J. Spiller than to any of the top four.

Not only “can” Suh win, he very well may. And if he doesn’t, there’s a good chance Gerhart will. Among the presumed trio of traditional front-runners supposedly favored by the dull, slow-moving, criteria-ignoring Heisman-voter collective consciousness, only Ingram still has a chance. And he’s probably the most justifiable candidate of the “big three,” his chances driven the most by his performance on the field this season rather than by preseason expectations, career achievement or name recognition.

It’s still too early to say who will win; although all ballots have been submitted, more publicly declared votes are still trickling in. And the race may simply be too close to call, in any event. It’ll be interesting to see what Stiff Arm Trophy, which has a perfect projection record to defend, ultimately says about this incredibly close race.

But even if Ingram ends up winning, it’s clear that Gerhart and Suh — the “should win” candidates — will, at worst, miss out on the trophy by the narrowest of margins, perhaps in part because they split the “smart” vote right down the middle, allowing the preferred candidate of the more formulaic voters (Ingram, by virtue of Alabama’s win over Florida and McCoy’s poor performance against Nebraska) to just barely squeak through.

All of which leads to the question: are Heisman voters smarter than we’ve been giving them credit for? Or, more precisely, have they become smarter, or perhaps I should say, fairer? And if so, is this indicative of a broader trend among college football’s opinion-poll decision-makers generally?

I submit that it is. The same increase in smarts/fairness, and concomitant decrease in mindless collective-consciousness-type voting, has also been evident this season in the AP poll and, to a lesser but still significant extent, the coaches poll.

The polls, as I’ve observed previously, have been fairer than ever before to deserving mid-majors, and more willing to give teams very significant demotions or promotions from week-to-week as dictated by results on the field. All the biases and bad habits are still there — mindlessly carrying over the previous week’s rankings into the new week, rewarding teams for preseason expectations and NFL Draft projections and names on their jerseys — but they’re less intractable than in the past, such that when something ridiculous happens (like a handful of voters keeping 0-1 Oklahoma ahead of 1-0 BYU after losing to them in the first game of the season), it actually seems ridiculous, instead of simply commonplace.

In other words, the voters are far from perfect — but they’re getting better. I think this applies to Heisman voters and poll voters, and I think there is, roughly speaking, a common reason for it. With all the commentary on college football that’s out there nowadays, the standard practices of voters have become subject to more and more scrutiny. Much of the commentary in existence, both amateur and professional, is, of course, idiotic — but the smartest commentaries are the most likely to have a broad impact, “going viral” within the community that cares about such things. And when that happens, it is capable of nudging conventional wisdom ever-so-slightly, puncturing that dull CW collective consciousness which was previously believed to be impervious to logic and reason. When it happens again and again, the CW can actually start to change.

And so, after years of grumbling and kvetching and crusading in the blogosphere and twittersphere and smart-commentariat-sphere about voters’ inability to process new information, to think outside the box, to give sufficient credit to mid-major teams and surprising upstart contenders and defensive players and white runningbacks at schools like Stanford, etc., etc., we’ve finally gotten to the point where, slowly, slowly, slowly, the voters are getting the message, and their voting patterns are starting to change.

There are still plenty of neanderthalic voters out there, doing totally unjustifiable things like putting 10-2 Penn State ahead of 10-2 Iowa or voting Tim Tebow for Heisman, and still not enough enlightened voters to, say, nudge 13-0 Boise State ahead of 12-1 Florida in the final polls, or get C.J. Spiller to NYC ahead of the career-achievement-award QB from Florida. But those neanderthals are fewer, and have less influence, than ever before, and the counterweight of smart, thoughtful voters can actually have an effect.

Bottom line: They’re getting better. They’re getting smarter. And if you don’t believe me, wait until next year, when the winner of the TCU-Boise Fiesta Bowl is ranked in the preseason Top 5, and the loser is Top 10, and both have a legit chance to make a national title run. And when pure defensive player Ndamukong Suh, even if he loses this year, is the Heisman front-runner heading into the season (and Kellen Moore, if Boise goes undefeated again, gets an invite to NYC and maybe even a whiff of the trophy itself).

UPDATE: Oops, Suh is a senior, not a sophomore, as my post said previously. So much for “smart” commentary… haha.

P.S. One other point about the Heisman, from a comment I made on a previous post:

By all accounts , C.J. Spiller had an amazing game, albeit in a (just barely) losing effort, against Georgia Tech on Saturday, just like Suh did against Texas. And, by all accounts, it was Suh’s performance against the Longhorns that propelled him from Heisman afterthought — just hoping for a the consolation prize of a ticket to NYC — to potential winner. This was possible because the BCS implications of the Texas game were so huge that everybody watched it, including both Heisman voters and media opinion-makers, thus giving Suh a grand stage to show his stuff. Meanwhile, because the Clemson-GT game was being played at the same time as the epic Texas-Nebraska game, its audience was mostly limited to the players’ mothers. Which invites the question:

If Georgia Tech, instead of Texas, had been vying for a spot in the national championship game, and the teams and players had performed identically otherwise, would Spiller, instead of Suh, be the candidate making a dramatic late push for the Heisman, based on his Saturday-night performance? And would Suh be the sixth-place finisher, left sitting at home behind the clearly undeserving career-achievement-honorable-mention Tebow?

But Jazz counters:

The hypothetical reversal of Suh and Spiller certainly has practical implications, but it understates the fact that we have never seen an interior defensive lineman have a game like Suh’s.

The 4.5 sacks are cool enough. Just for logistical reasons, its hard for anyone lining up on the interior of the d-line to accrue 4.5 sacks in a season, much less one game. Beyond that, though, Suh dominated the line in a way we really haven’t seen before, in a way that was apparent in real time on tv, even though tv cameras don’t tend to focus on line play.

Spiller certainly put up great numbers against Ga. Tech, and if he had a wider audience he might have gotten more Heisman buzz. OTOH, his team did lose, and as impressive as he was, we’ve seen that all before.

Suh also lost. But we’ve never seen his like before.