The Living Room Times

Stiff Arm Trophy, formerly Heisman Projection, which is 7-for-7 in predicting Heisman Trophy winners since 2002, has made its final projection:

We’re now up to 313 ballots, 33.8% of all the ballots. And on those 313 ballots, we project that Mark Ingram will earn 1336 points – or 48.1% of the maximum 2778 possible.

We’re now projecting that Toby Gerhart will earn 1241 points – or 44.7% of the max possible. Ndamukong Suh will earn 1188 points – or 42.8% of the max possible.

Colt McCoy comes in at 939 points, or 33.8%; and Tim Tebow comes in at 295 points, or 10.6%.

We are reasonably confident that Mark Ingram will win the Trophy. With only a 3.4% advantage over Gerhart, it’s far from a sure thing – as our past projections have overestimated the top-two gap by 2.6 to 4.2%. That said, it would take a fairly dramatic difference between the known and unknown ballots for Ingram to lose.

We are not, however, confident that Gerhart will defeat Suh for second place. With less than a 2% gap, it’s too close to call. Even late Friday, as batches of ballots were coming in, Suh and Gerhart traded places several times.

We’re very confident that McCoy will place fourth – and that Tebow will place fifth.

In addition, we’re projecting with confidence that Ndamukong Suh will earn the most first place votes.

This is the most captivated I’ve been by the Heisman race since 2002, when Carson Palmer won what seemed like a wide-open contest by 4.9% — and I was in New York for it, and saw Palmer afterward. But I’d say this race, although it doesn’t involve a Trojan and although I’m watching it from a distance, is even more fascinating, for all the reasons noted by Dr. Saturday and Dan Shanoff, as well as by Stewart Mandel, echoing the Brendan Loy thesis that Heisman voters are getting smarter.

Anyway, I’m very curious to see how it turns out (and I’m hoping Stiff Arm Trophy is wrong for the first time ever!). Alas, I’ll miss the actual ceremony because my office Christmas party is tonight. But I’ve subscribed to @StiffArmTrophy‘s tweets on my cell phone, so I’ll get the result that way. 🙂