The Living Room Times

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.

Continue reading →