Lemme start out this post by pointing out that I think the wrong guy won. Ingram had a couple good games and a couple average games. Toby
Gerhart had more total yards, more
TD's, and you can double the yards Ingram got in his worst game and get close to what
Gerhart got in his worst game. But this post isn't about who got the
Heisman this year, it's about how the
Heisman is a fraud every year. While we all should be used to College Football being the biggest joke in American sports (
fyi- College Football is the only sport in the world that
decides it's championship not on the field of play) and every award
that's voted on is gonna have some controversy, the
Heisman is just ridiculous. I have outlined three of my reasons below:
- Only the players on the good teams are considered. Dan LeFevour is the only QB in NCAA history with 12,000 passing yards and 2,500 rushing yards. Those are epic numbers. I know he plays for Central Michigan but you can't deny those numbers and he has never been on any serious list of contention. One of the major knocks against Toby Gerhart is that his team didn't win out. Although those loses had very little to do with the performance of Gerhart (in one of the games, he lit Cal up for 165 total yards, another he got 141 total yards). Furthermore, only some positions are considered. The Heisman Trophy, with one exceptions, sort of (Charles Woodson is the only defensive player to win, but he won largely based on his punt return abilities and his occasional appearances as a wide out), has always been awarded to a WR, a QB or a RB. Can you really tell me that "the outstanding college football player in the United States" has always been playing one of those three positions?
- You can't compare the Stat's. NCAA football is not the NFL. With 144 teams in the Football Championship Sub-division, the competition that Mark Ingram, Toby Gerhart, Colt McCoy and Ndamukong Suh played against can't be weighed against each other. Not only did Stanford never play Alabama, Stanford never played a team that played Alabama. How do you compare the SEC with the PAC 10? How do you compare the 99 yards Ingram rushed for against Tennessee with the 96 yards Gerhart rushed for at Oregon State? It's impossible, these are two very different programs with very different defensive talent and schemes. The only halfway fair way to compare two RB's is to see how they perform against the same defense. But all this shows is how that player performed on that day, not how his season went.
- You can't compare the positions. So far in this post I've only talked about two Heisman candidates, Mark Ingram, a running back, and Toby Gerhart, a running back. I did this because its pretty impossible to compare Toby Gerharts stat's and performance against Colt McCoy's or Ndamukong Suh's stats with Mark Ingram's. It's tough to compare how Gerhart performed against Oregon State and how Ingram performed against Tennessee but its totally impossible to compare Suh's four tackles at Oklahoma with Colt McCoys four TD's against Kansas.
So how does the
Heisman get awarded? The media chooses the
candidates and therefore chooses the winner. Mark Ingram became a serious
candidate after his great performance against Florida, when the media, and therefore the country started to pay attention. Anybody with a computer and a TV can quickly research the best players in the NFL. With literally thousands of college football players, nobody is gonna spend the time looking at thousands of
stat's and thousands of performances unless their paid to do it (or have no life).
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