The Heisman Trophy

THE REQUESTS POURED in, and Archie Griffin abided—again and again and again. He did interviews, attended banquets, visited hospitals, and spoke at schools. The Ohio State running back was, after all, an instant celebrity in Columbus, after winning the Heisman Trophy in 1974 as a junior. He didn’t want to come off as cocky, and, to a fault, he simply couldn’t say no.

“I got a ton of requests to do this, do that, and I was trying to do a lot of that stuff,” Griffin said.

The Buckeyes’ legendary coach, forever tough and temperamental, called Griffin into his office. He was well aware of the many ways his star was being pulled.

“Hey, you cannot do everything for everybody,” Hayes told him. “You can’t please everybody. You’ve got to pay attention to your school and pay attention to what we’re going to do out on the football field. It’s going to make you soft.”

Or, as Hayes even more colorfully said to the Associated Press before the September 13 opener against Michigan State in 1975, “He can’t go to the bathroom without somebody wanting him to make a speech or interview him. We have to shield him. If we don’t, it will take the edge off him. The coach will have to get mean. Arch can’t be mean.”

It was pure Hayes: insulating in his meaning, and blunt in his delivery, but it was the kind of guidance Griffin needed as he began a chase that would see him do what Doc Blanchard in 1946, Doak Walker (’49), Vic Janowicz (’51), Roger Staubach (’64), and every other Heisman winner to date had all failed to do: win a second trophy.

For forty years and counting, Griffin has stood alone, his phone ringing just a little bit more than often as nine players—most recently Florida State’s Jameis Winston in 2014—have tried to match him, but to no avail. He remains steadfast that it will happen, and when it does, “I hope I can be the first to congratulate them,” he said.

Breaking mindsets is difficult work in this underlying bias of voting, but just as Hayes was safeguarding player and program by telling his running back that it was OK to be mean, Griffin was telling voters that it’s OK to give him an equal in a place in history that seems more and more unobtainable as time passes. “I will always have that designation of being first, and I’ll be proud of that as well,” Griffin said.

Long before he began his waiting game, Griffin simply needed reassurance that Mr. Nice Guy could break character.

“I appreciated those words, because I wasn’t sure if I should be doing all those things for people, because I wanted to be helpful and it was hard to say ‘No’ at times,” Griffin said. “But it helped me to know that my coach, if I said ‘No’ to people asking me to do something, that it was OK. Coach Hayes was a man that always talked about being able to help other people, but then he told me, ‘You can’t do everything for everybody,’ so it helped me in handling those situations.”

He learned to say ‘No,’ but try as his coach did to help Griffin keep his focus inward and not outward, Griffin couldn’t help but still feel the pressure. Until he won in 1974, Griffin wasn’t aware that none of the previous juniors to win had not been able to repeat, but, “Everyone’s scaring it into me now,” he said after being announced as the fortieth winner.

It was a point he’d become all too familiar with over the next twelve months, and as difficult as it seemed at the time—Blanchard was fourth in his follow up, Walker third, and Staubach, like Janowicz, didn’t crack the Top 10—Griffin considered another lesson from Hayes.

“Coach Hayes used to have this saying, ‘You’re either getting better or you’re getting worse. You never stay the same,’” Griffin said. “It was probably a little warped thinking on my part, but for me, to at least stay the same, I need to win the Heisman Trophy again.”

He recalls an evening before the start of that senior season. While he was thumbing through the Bible, a feeling of the intensity of that repeat bid was weighing on him. “It was too much to put on a person, and I just turned it over to the Lord,” Griffin said.

“I remember when I read that verse, it was as if someone had taken a big weight off my shoulders,” Griffin said. “That verse told me that my job was to find joy in serving the Lord, and if I did that, one of two things would happen. He’d take that desire away from me of winning the Heisman Trophy or he’d give it to me as a gift.”

Griffin was, on the field, a marked man, as everyone wanted a crack at the reigning golden boy. On option plays, whether receiving the pitch or not, “you’re going to get popped,” he said. It was nothing dirty, but he recounts opponents taking shots at him after dropping him to the ground, saying things like “Get up, Heisman Trophy winner.”

“Those type of things did happen, and I expected them to happen,” Griffin said. “But it got harder.”

And not just in the physical sense, as Griffin withstood that extra punishment. The caliber of challengers around him in what would become the Year of the Running Back added to the degree of difficulty in what Griffin was trying to accomplish.

In 1974, when Griffin ran for 1,620 yards in winning by a 1,101-point landslide over USC’s Anthony Johnson, the two were among nine running backs across the country that had topped 1,100 yards in the regular season. A year later, there were twenty, including the Trojans’ Ricky Bell—a 6-foot-2, 215-pound converted fullback whose 1,875 yards were six from breaking the record Cornell’s Ed Marinaro set in ’71; Cal’s all-purpose monster Chuck Muncie (1,871 total yards); and Pitt’s Tony Dorsett (1,544).

“There were some great running backs, no question, and I love all [those] guys, because they were impressive to me,” Griffin said. “But I didn’t really think that much about it; it was really about that job at hand that we had to do at Ohio State.”

Griffin also had an important streak to maintain, of 100-yard games that dated back to the first months of his sophomore season. The face of the preseason’s fourth-ranked team tore through No. 11 Michigan State to start the year, with 111 yards and three touchdowns on 29 carries, followed with 128 yards on 24 tries vs. No. 7 Penn State, and after a 157-yard day against North Carolina, steamrolled 13th-ranked UCLA for 160 yards and a score.

“There were people who thought that we could possibly lose those first four games because of the talent that we lost the year before and we had coming back,” Griffin said.

His consistency helped propel the Buckeyes to No. 1 by October—a spot they’d maintain through an 11–0 regular season—and again positioned him as the trophy favorite.

It didn’t hurt that there was no true consensus on who was the best option to dethrone him.

A November 1 meeting in Berkeley, California, was a chance to offer some clarity in the West, with Cal’s Golden Bears knocking off the fourth-ranked USC Trojans 28–14. Muncie ran for 143 yards and had 62 more receiving, while Bell was limited to 122 yards, 34 below his season average.

Muncie ended up outrushing Griffin (1,460 yards to Griffin’s 1,357), but Cal was a three-loss team, falling to No. 20 West Virginia and 19th-ranked UCLA, with the win over USC their only defeat of a ranked opponent. That didn’t help his case, and neither did his not being the true focal point of the nation’s top-ranked offense, which was averaging 458.5 yards per game. Quarterback Joe Roth, who didn’t take over the job until the third game of the season, ended up fifth in the country with 1,880 passing yards.

Bell, despite losing head-to-head to Muncie on a Trojans team whose season was spiraling out of control, wasn’t going to concede the region, either.

John McKay’s announcement before the Cal game that he would be taking over the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers rocked a program that would lose four straight. Bell still ran for 195 yards in a 13–10 loss to Stanford, and, with 190 in an 8–7 defeat to Washington the following game, had broken O. J. Simpson’s single-season Pac 8 record of 1,739 yards. He entered the final week against the rival Bruins 143 from the all-time mark and settled on 136 and two touchdowns.

The West’s contenders boiled down to two guys—the country’s top rusher on a four-loss team in Bell, and Muncie, whose three-loss squad didn’t get invited to a bowl game; the East had Dorsett, with a résumé that boasted a 303-yard day (the most ever allowed by Notre Dame), from a Pitt team with four defeats.

Then there was Griffin, the centerpiece of the top-ranked and unbeaten Buckeyes, the household name and model of consistency—though that last part did come to an end in the days before votes were due.

In the regular-season finale at eighth-ranked Michigan, Griffin was held to 46 yards on 19 carries, bringing an end to his streak of 100-yard games at 31. As he walked off the field after the 21–14 win, Griffin couldn’t help but wonder if he’d cost himself the trophy.

“I did, no question,” he said. “But at the same time, the big thing was we won the football game and that was most important.… I felt that people would appreciate the fact that you could go almost three full seasons with gaining 100 yards every game, which I think people appreciated and respected that kind of consistency and that would mean a lot.”

He ran for 263 fewer yards than the year before, and five others ran for more yards, but Griffin would carry four of the five regions—with Muncie taking the Far West—in claiming 454 first-place votes and 1,800 points in all. In a show of how much dissension there was between Muncie and Bell, they were separated by just 22 points, with the Cal Bear second (730 points) and the Trojan third (708). Dorsett finished fourth with 616 points. Underscoring the Year of the Running Back, the position made up the top six, and seven of the first eight.

“Two Heismans—that puts him in a class all by himself,” Hayes said succinctly at the ceremony.

Decades later, Hayes’s words still ring true. Griffin remains alone in that class, each bid after his going awry, be it from injury, raised expectations, the rise of teammates, or—in this new age—scandal. The photo of Griffin posing with the trophy in 1975, wearing an ensemble that screams ’70s—dark turtleneck with blazer and a gold chain hanging around his neck—and holding up two fingers, has taken on iconic status.

If a Heisman jinx truly exists, it resides in every attempt to try to claim that elusive second trophy.

“Obviously it’s a hard thing to do, because I thought it would have happened by now and more than once by now,” Griffin said.

“I’m not going to let down, Charles White, if you’re listening,” Oklahoma’s Billy Sims said in the summer of 1979.

The USC running back, along with Sims, Tennessee’s Roland James, Texas’s Steve McMichael, and North Carolina State’s Jim Ritcher, was on a week-long college football promotional tour co-sponsored by the National Collegiate Athletic Association and ABC. What began at the College Football Hall of Fame, then near Kings Island amusement park in Ohio, took them from New York to New Orleans, Dallas, and Los Angeles before finishing in San Francisco.

Sims and White were the biggest attractions. The Sooners running back stood as the reigning Heisman winner, while the Trojan was the nation’s leading rusher in 1978 and finished fourth in the voting.

Be it the fact that he was traveling alongside the trophy winner, or that he ran for 97 more yards than Sims and had to watch him hoist the trophy, White’s focus was clear.

Aside from his message to White—and a Sports Illustrated cover in which the two were in a tug of war with the trophy under the headline “Hey, Man, That’s My Heisman!”—Sims wasn’t letting on that the Heisman was in his thoughts. He had, quite literally, come out of nowhere to win the award as a junior. After just 71 carries for 413 yards as a sophomore, Sims broke out in the Sooners’ wishbone offense for 1,762 yards and 20 touchdowns and topped the vote by a mere 77 points over Penn State quarterback Chuck Fusina. The vote was so close that the New York accounting firm of Harris, Kerr, Forster and Co. had to count the ballots for a second time.

Now the possibility of equaling Griffin hung there, but Sims had a take-it-or-leave-it attitude about the chase.

“A lot of people ask me, ‘What are your chances of winning the Heisman again?’” Sims said. “I just tell them that last season I was sort of an unknown running back and I really wasn’t in the game to win the Heisman Trophy and I’m not going for it again this year. But if it happens, fine.”

Just four years removed from Griffin winning his second, the feat had nowhere near the same mystique it does today, and at that point it was overshadowed by the former Buckeye’s struggles in the NFL. Taken with the 24th pick in the 1976 draft by the Cincinnati Bengals, Griffin never came close to that benchmark figure of 1,000 yards in a season, with his best season coming in 1979 when he ran for 688 on 140 carries.

So from Sims’s standpoint, being on the same footing as Griffin wasn’t a precursor for success.

“I don’t know what it would mean,” Sims told the Associated Press in 1979 of a second win. “Besides, look at Archie Griffin. So what is he doing now with two Heisman trophies?”

For the second straight year he was a consensus All-American, was once again the Big Eight Player of the Year, and in the final two games of the season he ran for 529 yards, including a career-high 282 against Missouri (and a week later he had 247 in a 17–14 victory over third-ranked Nebraska). But Sims would become a victim of the microscope under which reigning winners are placed, where any blemish on a résumé becomes a major focus.

What one might call the Sooners running back’s “blemish” came October 13 when No. 4 Texas held him to just 73 yards on 20 carries in a 16–7 loss. It snapped a 14-game streak of 100-yard games and in that defeat, Sims didn’t have a single run over 16 yards. Asked afterward if he believed it cost him the Heisman, Sims replied, “I don’t care. I have one already.”

He may have been able to overcome it if he had lifted Oklahoma into national title contention as a senior, but heading into the voting the team was fifth at 10-1-0. Meanwhile, White had nearly 300 more yards at 1,803, fueled by a national record of 1,090 in five straight games, and his Trojans were sitting second in the AP Top 25, a Rose Bowl date with Ohio State looming.

White won comfortably, picking up 453 first-place votes to Sims’s 82, with 992 points separating the two. Sims was unavailable for comment at the time of the announcement, but coach Barry Switzer opened up, showing frustration with the voting process. He believed that professional scouts, not media members, should award the Heisman, though he also laid out the grim reality facing anyone making a chase at Griffin’s record: the heightened expectations.

“He’s had a better year than any other Heisman winner trying to repeat,” Switzer said. “His two years were better than Archie Griffin’s two years he won the thing.”

Years later, Griffin admits that he thought that Sims was going to join him. “I certainly thought he would,” he said, “and he had a great chance.” Arguably, Sims had a better chance than anyone in history, even if unlike modern-day winners he only had one opportunity to go for No. 2. But the worst thing that would happen to repeat bids is time, and more than a decade would pass before anyone made another run at Griffin.

It came as little surprise that Herschel Walker left Georgia for the USFL after his Heisman-winning junior season in of 1982, especially with some wondering if after his freshman year he would challenge the NFL’s rule (at the time) of not admitting players until their class had graduated. Given the fact that the next two juniors to claim the award, Barry Sanders in 1988 and Andre Ware a year later, flipped on their initial comments about sticking around and bolted for the pros, there was obvious skepticism when BYU’s Ty Detmer said days after claiming the ’90 trophy that “I made a commitment to the school and I believe in living up to that.”

He didn’t balk, and the game had its first returning winner since Sims twelve years earlier in a quarterback who had broken twenty-one national total offense records, twenty-one passing records, and tied five more in throwing for 5,188 yards and 41 touchdowns. With 1990 runner-up Notre Dame’s Raghib Ismail bolting after his junior year, Houston’s David Klingler (fifth) was the only player joining Detmer in the top 10 in voting who was back on campus in 1991.

Detmer was set up to be the heavy favorite as a senior, though in reality, that bid may have ended before it ever even started.

His stock had already taken a hit during his junior campaign with debacles against Hawaii—that one coming the day he was given the award—and Texas A&M in the Holiday Bowl, and when coach LaVell Edwards met with Detmer before the season, he delivered a message of putting the past in the past, one that could be seen as twofold given those highs and lows.

“The worst thing you can do is feel like you have to live up to the year before,” Edwards told his quarterback. “Try to get that out of your mind and do the best you can now. Win as many games as you can and be as effective as you can.”

Unfortunately for his hopes of winning a second trophy, he was anything but effective.

In the 19th-ranked Cougars’ season-opening 44–28 loss to No. 1 Florida State in the Pigskin Classic, Detmer was held without a touchdown pass through three and a half quarters before throwing two in the final eight minutes. He threw for 229 yards and an interception, which was his 15th in the last six games dating back to ’90 as BYU slipped to 25th.

A week later against No. 23 UCLA, Detmer did throw for 377 yards, 2 scores, and 2 more interceptions, and broke the career passing yardage of San Diego State’s Todd Santos with a five-yard pass to Micah Matsuzaki in the second quarter. It wasn’t enough, though, with a 27–23 defeat knocking BYU out of the Top 25.

The setbacks continued the next time out vs. No. 12 Penn State, which sacked Detmer 6 times and limited him to 158 yards on just 8 completions.

If there was a silver lining, it was that after that skid—which gave the Cougars their longest losing streak since they lost four straight between the 1974 and ’75 seasons—few were paying attention anymore.

“I wasn’t under a microscope this year,” Detmer told the AP that November. “That really made it nice.”

Statistically, he rebounded, finishing with 4,031 yards and 35 touchdowns to 12 picks, punctuated by leading the Cougars to a 52–52 tie with San Diego State after trailing by 28. Detmer connected on 4 of his 6 touchdown passes in the final twenty minutes in throwing for a school-record 599 yards.

Detmer was heading back to New York as a finalist, but it wasn’t even close. As the quarterback said days before the ceremony, “I’m going to New York to watch Desmond.”

That would be Michigan’s Desmond Howard, who gobbled up 640 first-place votes, while the reigning winner had just 19 in coming in third, 1,632 points behind the wide receiver, with Florida State’s Casey Weldon in second.

That amounted to the largest margin of victory in any contest since O. J. Simpson won by 1,750 points in ’68 and still stands as the biggest in any vote in which another Heisman winner was in the field.

“The expectations were just too high,” Detmer said of his failed bid. “Every game had to be better than the previous one.”

Never mind Archie Griffin. Jason White was thinking about Army’s Doc Blanchard and Glenn Davis.

They were the only teammates to claim the Heisman in back-to-back years—1945 and ’46. In 2004, the Oklahoma quarterback—on campus for a sixth season after he was granted another year of eligibility for a medical hardship as he underwent knee surgeries in 2001 and ’02—had designs on joining them.

Asked that October in a press conference whether he or the Sooners’ breakout freshman running back Adrian Peterson should be getting more attention, White didn’t hesitate.

The way White saw it, he already had his trophy, edging out Pitt wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald by a mere 76 points in 2003 behind the strength of 396 first-place votes. He had returned to Norman to win a Big 12 championship and a national title, not for a second Heisman. But being able to hand off—figuratively and literally—to another trophy recipient was far too unique of an opportunity, so he opted to deflect the Heisman hype.

“He came in and just kind of took over. He was a freshman that year and was playing really well,” White said of Peterson. “I thought it would be super special to be a teammate of a guy that had won one also.”

Two players on the same team in the top 10 in voting was far from unprecedented, though there was the possibility of blocking each other in this popularity contest.

After 1946, twenty-nine times teammates finished in the top 10 together, and on eight occasions—Michigan’s Leon Hart (1949), Oklahoma’s Billy Vessels (1952), Notre Dame’s John Huarte (1964), Nebraska’s Johnny Rodgers (1972), USC’s Charles White (1979), the Cornhuskers’ Mike Rozier (1983), Miami’s Gino Torretta (1992), and Ohio State’s Eddie George (1995)—one of them won the trophy.

White, though, was dealing with a situation that just one player, Blanchard, could understand. The Cadets’ halfback was the only other returning winner who finished behind a player from his own team in voting—coming in fourth as a senior—and here was White, publicly pushing for the same fate.

“I just thought [it] would be very unique and you couldn’t ask for a better guy to win it than Adrian, because he worked so hard [and] he was a freshman, just out of high school,” White said.

It was more of the personal anti-promotion for a player who, when asked to replicate the 1979 White-Sims SI cover with USC’s Matt Leinart—the preseason favorite—refused. Granted, White’s numbers were down overall, throwing for 2,961 yards and 33 touchdowns, whereas he helped the Sooners to a 12–0 regular season and a spot opposite the Trojans in the Orange Bowl for the Bowl Championship Series title, after racking up 3,744 and 40, respectively, the year before. Nevertheless, over White’s last six games of his Sooners career, he tossed 21 touchdown passes and just one interception.

That late surge certainly had something to do with Peterson, who ran for 1,843 yards and 15 scores. As defenses keyed in on stopping him, White took advantage, and it was he, not the freshman running back, who was named the Big 12 Offensive Player of the Year.

White was back in New York that December, along with Peterson, Leinart and his USC teammate Reggie Bush, and Utah’s Alex Smith as finalists. It was a far more relaxed feel for the Sooners quarterback, because “I knew ‘Hey, we’re going to do this, this, and this, and after that, we get to do this,’” White said. “The year before I was constantly asking people ‘OK, what are we going to do next? What am I supposed to wear?’ It was just a lot more fun the next year.”

He had the confidence of Griffin, who days before the ceremony said, “I’ll be awfully proud of Jason,” but not that of the nation’s pollsters, as White finished third behind Leinart in first and Peterson in second.

White was resigned to his finish before the ballots were even counted, saying, “I pretty much knew the people that were up for the Heisman Trophy that year; it would have been tough to win it regardless, just because of the athletes that were in it and the great seasons they had.”

The concept, given the 3-2-1 ballot, is a subjective topic, as the format would seem to dissuade it. But we’re talking about a vote where Leinart came in first (1,325), with Peterson second (997) and White third (957), and that 328-point margin of victory could have become much tighter or even flipped if just one Sooner was vying for attention.

Had Peterson absorbed White’s points, or vice versa, either one would have won handily. Even if we just remove either player from the Southwest (given the Oklahoma players’ dominance there, and that there was only one other player from that region in the top 10 in voting in Texas’s Cedric Benson, who was sixth), it’s conceivable they would have collected the brunt of the region’s first-place votes. White had 171 in all, representing 513 of his points, and Peterson drew 154 for 462 points. Put either of those totals toward the other Sooner, and we’re talking another Heisman for Oklahoma, and in the case of White, an equal for Griffin.

Instead, Leinart won, and set the stage for nearly an identical story to play itself out the following season in Troy.

That Leinart was even returning to USC as a senior was stunning. He followed up that 2004 Heisman season by throwing for five touchdowns in a 55–19 rout of Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl and was expected to be one of the top, if not the top, pick in the NFL draft, but Leinart passed it all up to come back to USC for one more season.

As he addressed a crowd of roughly 500 inside the Trojans’ Heritage Hall, he joked of the multi-million-dollar payday he was delaying. “I get $950 a month,” he said of his stipend, drawing laughter. “Come on, $950 a month. We’ve got a training table. We’ve got food.”

He added, “The money is not important to me. I realize the opportunities. My teammates and being here is more important to me right now.”

History seemed his and the Trojans’ for the taking. They were coming off back-to-back national championships and eyeing an unprecedented third in a row with nine starters back on offense and fourteen starters back overall.

Winners of twenty-two straight games and a 36–3 over the course of the previous three seasons, those USC teams were celebrities in the world’s playground for them, and they shared their stage with the rich and famous.

Will Ferrell, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Kirsten Dunst were spotted on the sidelines during games, as were André 3000, Snoop Dogg, and Dr. Dre.

“When you’re sitting on the bench and you see George Lucas or Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson cruise past, you’re like ‘Is that who I thought it was?’” linebacker Oscar Lua told USA TODAY.

With no professional football team in Los Angeles at the time, the Trojans basically were the city’s de facto franchise. But this was more than that. In 2004, USC would set a Pac-10 record in drawing an average of 85,229 fans per game at home and in ’05 they shattered that, pulling in 90,812 a game, and went over the million mark over the course of the season for the first time.

“It’s pretty clear that USC football is the place to be,” coach Pete Carroll told the school’s website.

In Leinart, college football boasted the poster boy of the nation’s most dominant program, who was expected to put up monster numbers and lead his team in a perceived sprint to the BCS Championship. That final point was key, because with Leinart’s win in ’04, four of the previous five Heisman winners had all been quarterbacks who took their team to the title game. In an era where the marquee player on the best team won, Leinart fit the bill in 2004 and, it was presumed, again in ’05.

“There’s a lot of preseason hype about Archie Griffin being the only two-time winner of the Heisman, but everybody on our team knows that’s not what I’m about,” Leinart told the AP before that season.

Granted, Oklahoma’s Adrian Peterson was back after finishing second to Leinart, but he would wind up taking himself out of the running. He missed one game—the Big 12 opener against Kansas State—and was limited in three others with a sprained right ankle. He still ran for 1,108 yards and 14 touchdowns, but since Notre Dame’s Angelo Bertelli in 1939, who was activated by the Marine Corps after six games, only two winners have missed a game (Charles White in 1979 and Charlie Ward in ’93).

The quarterback’s numbers improved that fall—he threw for 3,453 yards and 27 touchdowns at the time of the voting, which was 463 more yards than he went to New York with as a junior—in putting the Trojans in line to play for that third straight title. But for those looking for the truly spectacular, running back Reggie Bush supplied it.

He ran for 1,685 yards on just 187 carries, a stunning 8.9 average, and led the nation with 2,611 all-purpose yards, which amounted to 217.5 per game. It was all on display in a 50–42 scare (an eventual USC victory) from No. 16 Fresno State, in which Bush set a Pac-10 record with 513 yards and delivered his Heisman moment as he took a handoff with 1:27 to play in the third quarter, USC clinging to a 34–28 lead.

He broke through the left side of the offensive line and toward the sideline as one defender caught up to him at the 25-yard line, with two more just downfield. But instead of stepping out of bounds or cutting back inside, Bush simply stopped. Completely. The defender backpedaled, losing ground as the Trojan then changed direction and raced back inside for the 50-yard touchdown.

“Reggie’s got my vote,” said Leinart—who, as a former winner, received his own ballot.

Unlike ’04 when Peterson and White hurt one another by competing for attention, this was complete and utter domination. Bush claimed 784 of the 892 first-place votes and 91.7 of the maximum possible points—the most ever—while Texas’s Vince Young was second (1,608) and Leinart third (797).

In retrospect, given the NCAA scandal that forced USC to forfeit games and, ultimately, Bush to return the trophy (which we’ll get into later), along with Young stealing the Trojans’ thunder and title in the Rose Bowl (also, a topic for a subsequent chapter), the question of whether or not Bush deserved to win has been up for discussion. But to underscore how little debate there was at the time, Young’s 613 were the most second-place votes in history and Leinart’s 18 first-place nods were the fewest of any returning winner.

That put USC alongside Notre Dame with a record-tying seventh Heisman, one for which Bush was quick to thank his quarterback.

“Matt, what more can I say?” Bush said. “Your decision to come back has changed my life.”

By virtue of being the first sophomore to win the Heisman, Florida quarterback Tim Tebow was mathematically the biggest threat to win a second trophy. But that’s not entirely why he seemed destined to be Archie Griffin’s equal.

He was seemingly too good to be true, a player who went from a relief role during the Gators’ 2006 national title run to having coach Urban Meyer call him “the best quarterback of our era” after just one season as a starter.

A barreling runner and sidearmed left-handed passer, he was the perfect fit for Meyer’s spread option offense, throwing for 3,132 yards and 29 touchdowns and just 6 picks, while rushing for 838 yards and 22 scores ahead of the 2007 Heisman ceremony.

On the topic of Heisman moments, that play that becomes the backbone of a campaign, here’s a ranking of the five best: 5. Barry Sanders runs for 293 yards and 4 touchdowns—including an 80-yarder—on Iowa State in 1988; 4. Charles Woodson’s 78-yard punt return for a touchdown against Ohio State in 1997; 3. Johnny Manziel scrambles, loses the ball, catches it, and still throws a 10-yard touchdown pass vs. Alabama in 2012; 2. Desmond Howard strikes the pose after a 93-yard punt return for a score against Ohio State; 1. Bush’s stop/start.

Missing from that list? Doug Flutie’s Hail Mary against defending national champion Miami in 1984. The Hail Flutie game occurred November 23, and while Flutie was that year’s winner, this moment came after the voting deadline.

Tim Tebow the player was Paul Bunyan in orange and blue. His legend was in the Jump Pass I—coming against LSU as a freshman—and II—which sealed the ’08 national championship vs. Oklahoma. It was in The Promise—a 102-word declaration after a stunning 31–30 loss to unranked Ole Miss that paved the way to that ’08 crown, and which is immortalized with a plaque outside the Florida football offices.

Tim Tebow the man wore his Christianity on his sleeve, and his morals like a coat of arms. When blindsided at SEC Media Days ahead of his senior season and asked if he was still a virgin—the exact phrase being “Are you saving yourself for marriage?”—a beet-red Tebow responded, “Yes I am.” He was a miracle baby, his mother Pam contracting amoebic dysentery on a missionary trip to the Philippines and falling into a coma. She had no clue she was pregnant and the drugs doctors administered caused the placenta to detach, robbing her child of oxygen, a condition known as placental abruption. It was expected the baby had suffered brain damage and she was urged to abort the fetus.

“They thought I should have an abortion to save my life from the beginning all the way through the seventh month,” Pam told the Gainesville Sun in 2007.

She refused, leaning on faith. As Bob Tebow told Sports Illustrated in 2009, “I prayed, ‘God, if you give me a son, if you give me Timmy, I’ll raise him to be a preacher.’”

Tim Tebow became exactly that, delivering sermons as a missionary in the Philippines, and months after winning the Heisman, while working at a clinic that his father runs in Southeast Asia, he performed circumcisions for impoverished children despite no formal training.

“The first time, it was nerve-racking,” he told the Orlando Sentinel in the spring of 2008. “Hands were shaking a little bit. I mean, I’m cutting somebody. You can’t do those kinds of things in the United States. But those people really needed the surgeries. We needed to help them.”

Tim Tebow was the Heisman’s Golden Boy redefined in the era of Twitter and a nonstop news cycle, and because he possessed a game that didn’t look to translate to the NFL—with that herky-jerky throwing motion—he was no threat to bolt early for the pros.

As a junior he led the Gators to the national title game with 2,515 yards and 28 touchdowns through the air and 564 yards and 12 scores on the ground, but despite having more first-place votes than anyone (309), he lost to Oklahoma sophomore Sam Bradford (his opponent in that BCS finale). That marked the first time since Oklahoma’s Tommy McDonald in 1956 that a player drew the most first-place votes and finished that far back.

Asked if it was any consolation, Tebow replied, “Not really. You lose, you lose.”

By the time his senior year drew to a close—a season in which he and Florida were No. 1 up until losing the SEC Championship Game 32–13 to Alabama, ending any national title aspirations—the Tebow love affair had, in many ways, become Tebow Fatigue.

Teammates and coaches would often sing his praises and arguably no player in Florida history was more popular. Indiana basketball coach Tom Crean, for example, noted that he had used video of Tebow to motivate his team, calling the quarterback “toughness personified.” But some had grown tired of his clean-cut persona, hence that virginity question ahead of his senior season.

“There’ve been moments, there’ve been days, when you get tired, you get frustrated, you get exhausted,” Tebow told USA TODAY in December 2009. “You want people to believe you’re doing things for the right reason, but sometimes people just look at the negative. ‘It’s fake. Or it’s this or that.’ That’s when my faith really encourages me that everything happens for a reason and God has a plan.”

The numbers—2,413 yards passing, 859 rushing, and a combined 31 scores—weren’t enough to claim that final Heisman vote, but Tebow did become the only player invited to the ceremony three times. That in itself is interesting, looking back at the vote count.

Tebow was a distant fifth in 2009, behind Alabama’s Mark Ingram, generating just 43 first-place votes and 390 points overall. He was a whopping 425 behind the fourth-place finisher, Nebraska’s Ndamukong Suh. In the twenty-eight years of inviting contenders to New York, never had the Heisman dug so deep to include a player in a field of four-plus finalists. The 1990 ceremony came close, as Virginia’s Shawn Moore was 340 points ahead of the last finalist, Houston’s David Klingler, but typically the cutoff had been around 200 points or less. But Tim Tebow was a former winner, and let’s face it, a ratings draw in all his polarizing glory.

If anyone was going to win a second trophy, it was going to be Tebow, or at least it legitimately could have been Tebow. Those first-place votes in his junior season show us that the majority of voters were ready to finally put another on that pedestal. But there’s also this nugget: his name only appeared on 750 of the 902 ballots cast, meaning 153 voters left him off completely.

Remarked Tebow that night after he finished third in ’08: “They either love the Gators or they hate us.”

During his rookie season with the Denver Broncos in 2010, Tebow told an AP reporter that despite the outside hoopla, he never truly focused on winning another Heisman. It wasn’t that he was immune to it, but at a program where anything but a national title was a failure, the trophy became secondary.

“If you were maybe somewhere else where you didn’t have that pressure and that expectation of winning a championship, maybe the Heisman would affect you more,” Tebow said. “But I don’t think it really had an effect because of our level of expectations and then the expectations others put on us, too, were so high that you were always more focused on winning a championship than winning a Heisman.”

It’s a sentiment that Bradford—who reached the title game in his winning season—and Ingram—whose Crimson Tide claimed a championship the same year he took the trophy—could certainly have related to in playing for glamour programs Oklahoma and Alabama. But injury kept the second and third sophomores to take the Heisman from ever even presenting a challenge in their encores.

The setup for the 2009 race was unlike anything in the trophy’s seventy-five-year history. Never before had a season begun with two returning winners, which this one had in Bradford and Tebow, and with Texas’s Colt McCoy also back, it was the first time the top three vote-getters were all still in the college ranks.

“Just to win one is tremendously challenging,” Bradford told the Tulsa World. “To win two is extremely hard to describe.”

Especially when you consider that star-laden field. Bradford, though, was on his way to a strong start to his follow-up campaign as he rewrote the Sooners’ record book in the season-opener against BYU at Dallas Cowboys Stadium.

Bradford hit Brandon Caleb for an 18-yard completion late in the second half to break Jason White’s school record of 7,922 yards. But a play later, his bid for a second Heisman came to a screeching halt as he was hit by the Cougars’ Coleby Clawson.

The linebacker broke through an offensive line that was playing with four new starters and drove Bradford into the turf, with the Sooner landing on his right shoulder. He was left writhing in pain, clutching his arm as he rolled around. The quarterback held his right shoulder as he walked off the field and a short time later was on the sideline in a T-shirt, his throwing arm in a sling and an ice pack on his shoulder.

Bradford had suffered a grade 2 or 3 AC joint sprain, and No. 3 Oklahoma absorbed a 14–13 loss that dropped it to 13th in the AP poll. The reigning Heisman winner wouldn’t need surgery but would miss upwards of four weeks.

He received well-wishes from McCoy and Tebow, the former coming via a text message, as they grew close during the ’09 trophy festivities and while rooming together at the Manning Passing Academy the summer before the ’10 season.

“I told him I’d be praying for him and hope that he gets better soon,” McCoy told ESPN.com. “I wish him the speediest recovery possible.”

Added Tebow, “He came back for his [junior] year to do some great things, so I wish that he could come back and play it, too.”

A month later—and with Oklahoma at 2–2 after routs of Idaho State and Tulsa and a 21–20 loss to Miami—Bradford did return to throw for 389 yards in a 33–7 victory over Baylor. However, a week later in the Red River Rivalry, Texas cornerback Aaron Williams went unblocked on the Sooners’ second series of the game and dragged down Bradford as he tried to get away from the defender. Bradford landed on that same shoulder, re-aggravating the injury.

“It’s extremely frustrating, obviously,” Bradford said that day. “That’s the way this season’s gone for me. I missed three games, come out to start this one, and hurt my shoulder. It’s really hard to put into words the frustration I feel right now.”

A week later, Oklahoma announced that Bradford would have season-ending surgery to repair the joint and return it to normal strength, and twenty-four hours after that, the redshirt junior stood at a podium and in an emotional press conference, and said he was leaving early for the NFL.

“I dreamed about coming here,” said Bradford, who was flanked by a number of his teammates. “The first time I got hurt, I was sitting on the sidelines knowing I was coming back—that was the light at the end of the tunnel. But to make this decision and realize I’ve played my last game at Oklahoma, it’s really tough.”

He had sought out the advice of the New York Giants’ Eli Manning and San Francisco 49ers’ Alex Smith, both of whom had suffered similar injuries, and felt that surgery and the pros were the right call.

“I talked with as many people as I could to make the right decision,” Bradford said. “After talking to a lot of people, it seemed like this was the unanimous decision that everyone came to.”

Bradford became the first returning winner since Navy’s Roger Staubach in 1964—who himself suffered through an injury-plagued season—to not finish in the top 10 in voting.

That same fate would await Ingram, though unlike Bradford, there was no televised moment where his season crumbled before a nation’s eyes.

Five days before the defending national champion Crimson Tide were to open the 2010 season against San Jose State, Ingram jogged off the practice field. For the most part, his teammates never even realized anything was wrong.

“He just said his knee was hurting a little bit,” Ingram’s backup, Trent Richardson, told the Mobile Press-Register. “He got off the field real quick. We didn’t think it was that bad, and it’s really not that bad anyway.”

But it would require arthroscopic surgery, which a day later coach Nick Saban addressed in a statement.

“Mark will definitely be out for this week’s game against San Jose State and we will manage this on a week to week basis beyond this week,” Saban said. “We will make every decision in the future based on what’s best for Mark and his career as we consult with [team doctors James Andrews and Lyle Cain] on his progress. This is not an injury that will affect Mark’s future ability to make a full recovery in a relatively short time frame.”

An expected two-to-four-week timetable meant Ingram would assuredly miss the opener, as well as the September 11 game against Penn State, and any real chance of another shot at the trophy.

To Ingram’s credit, he didn’t waste any time when he finally did get on the field September 18 at Duke, going around the right side of the line in ripping off a 48-yard dash on the first play of the game. He added runs of 50 and 20 yards en route to 151 yards and 2 scores on 9 carries.

“I just really wanted to make an impact right off the jump,” Ingram told reporters. “It was very satisfying knowing we got the call and I was one on one with the corner and had to make the play. It was good to just set the tone early.”

Ingram added 157 yards and 2 more trips to the end zone the following game against Arkansas in the SEC opener, but those would be his only 100-yard games of the season as his backup, Richardson, made the case for more carries.

Saban has more often than not relied on a two-back system in his time at Alabama, but it’s been those rare occasions where one has demanded 45 percent or more of the team’s carries that the Tide have been a force in the Heisman race. It happened in ’09, when Ingram was responsible for 45 percent (249 of 550 at the time of voting) and went on to win the award; in ’11 as Richardson had 263 of 473 (55 percent) and became a finalist; and in ’15 with Derrick Henry, who had 60.4 percent of the attempts (339 of 561). Those backs also fueled the offense in three out of four of Saban’s national title seasons.

But with Richardson running for a 204 combined yards in the first two games sans Ingram, it largely reverted into the typical Saban timeshare. Ingram had 158 carries to Richardson’s 112, and once again, a returning winner didn’t crack the top 10.

That hadn’t happened in back-to-back repeat attempts in forty-six years, since Vic Janowicz (’51) and Staubach (’64).

Integrity is right there in the Heisman Trust’s mission statement—the first sentence, no less—charging that its honoree “best exhibits the pursuit of excellence with integrity.”

Morality was trotted out in 1972 with Nebraska’s Johnny Rodgers. At seventeen, he was part of a service station holdup that netted $90, and got off with probation and the suspension of his license. Later, he was picked up for suspicion of possessing marijuana, and ran a stop sign with a suspended license.

Morality was again a rallying cry by those who opposed Auburn’s Cam Newton on his way to winning in 2010, after he faced allegations that his father, Cecil, and former Mississippi State player Kenny Rogers had sought $120,000–$180,000 from the Bulldogs during the quarterback’s recruitment out of junior college.

Johnny Manziel was silenced for most of his history-making, trophy-winning season of 2012, though that was per coach Kevin Sumlin’s policy of not allowing freshmen to give media interviews.

But he more than made up for it in his first offseason in the spotlight, with trips to Las Vegas and the NBA Finals. He partied with rappers Rick Ross and Drake and became friends with LeBron James and threw out the first pitch at Padres and Rangers games.

Johnny Manziel was the first redshirt freshman to win the award in 2012, but the Texas A&M quarterback finished fifth in his follow-up season.
(By Shutterbug459)

Days before the SEC Media Days, Manziel departed the Manning quarterback camp, in what he said was a mutual decision after he overslept and missed activities.

“I don’t feel like I’ve done anything that’s catastrophic,” Manziel said before a throng of reporters in Hoover, Alabama, at the SEC’s preseason circus. “Of course, I’ve made my mistakes. It’s time to grow up.”

But then he became the focus of an NCAA investigation, as the day before the Aggies’ preseason camp began it was reported that he was paid for thousands of autographs by brokers in Connecticut, Florida, and Texas.

“If the media did their research on who this kid was, no one would be surprised,” 1998 Heisman winner Ricky Williams told the AP. “It’s unfortunate, it’s not his fault. It’s who he’s always been. Just because you won a trophy doesn’t mean you’re going to change your behavior.”

Texas A&M and the NCAA could find no evidence that Manziel had received any money, but he had been found in violation of NCAA bylaw 12.5.1.2, which per the Division I manual states that: After becoming a student-athlete, an individual shall not be eligible for participation in intercollegiate athletics if the individual: (a) Accepts any remuneration for or permits the use of his or her name or picture to advertise, recommend or promote directly the sale or use of a commercial product or service of any kind; or (b) Receives remuneration for endorsing a commercial product or service through the individual’s use of such product or service.

He was suspended for the first half of the season opener against Rice. When he finally did play, he took a hit from the Owls’ Nick Elder on a scramble, jumped up, and made a hand gesture toward the linebacker, as if he was signing an autograph in thin air. Then, after throwing his first touchdowns pass, a 23-yarder to Mike Evans, Manziel threw the investigation in the face of the NCAA by rubbing his fingers together to symbolize money.

Those who had grown tired of his antics had their soapbox, and despite an even better redshirt sophomore season as a passer—3,732 yards and 27 touchdowns when ballots were due, compared to 3,419 and 24 scores in ’12—he finished a distant fifth in the Heisman pecking order. A 1,501-point win for Florida State redshirt freshman Jameis Winston was the second-largest for any vote with a returning winner, and Manziel’s place tied Tebow for the worst finish of any trophy-holder who had been invited to the ceremony.

Manziel later revealed his vote, and even he didn’t top his own ballot. He went with Winston, followed by Boston College’s Andre Williams, and himself in third.

The Texas A&M lightning rod at least made it back to New York as a finalist before leaving College Station for the pros, something Winston couldn’t replicate in an equally rocky follow-up season.

For the record, the normal price for a cluster of snow crab legs at grocery chain Publix runs around $9.99–$11.99 a pound. It’s a hefty figure for a college student, and when Jameis Winston left a Tallahassee store in April 2014 without paying for $32.72 worth, the Florida State quarterback provided social media with fodder for weeks.

Some of the most popular memes were of Winston from the Seminoles’ BCS title game celebration, the crystal football trophy replaced by crab legs; the quarterback stiff-arming a defender wearing a Publix apron while he cradled the crustacean, the two superimposed onto a backdrop of the store; and a promo poster for Discovery Channel’s Deadliest Catch, with Winston’s head put onto a fisherman’s body.

He was also issued an adult civil citation and forced to pay restitution and perform twenty hours of community service. It didn’t impact his standing with the football team, as Winston—who also played baseball for Florida State—was suspended for a three-game baseball series, then reinstated.

“I went to the supermarket with the intent to purchase dinner but made a terrible mistake for which I’m taking full responsibility,” Winston said in a statement. “In a moment of youthful ignorance, I walked out of the store without paying for one of my items.”

Winston claimed the 2013 Heisman over Alabama’s A. J. McCarron despite a sexual assault scandal that, while not resulting in any charges, included admitted missteps by Tallahassee police. Thirteen percent of voters didn’t include Winston on their ballot despite his guiding the Seminoles to an unbeaten regular season, and an eventual national title.

He was undeniably the year’s most outstanding player and was awarded as such, even if some abstained from supporting him. Though the crab legs incident resulted in a tangible penalty, but not one that had an impact on football, a mid-September 2014 outburst in which Winston allegedly stood on a table in the student union and repeatedly shouted an obscene sexual phrase certainly did.

The quarterback was initially suspended for the first half of top-ranked Florida State’s game against No. 24 Clemson, a ban that was extended after administrators found that Winston was not entirely truthful with them.

The Seminoles won 23–17 with backup Sean Maguire filling in, and when Winston returned, they continued a run toward another perfect regular season. But the quarterback was nowhere near as effective, with fewer yards (3,559 compared to 3,820 in ’13), a worse completion percentage (65.3 after 67.9 the year before), fewer touchdown passes (24 in ’14; 40 in ’13), and more interceptions (17) than any other passer from a Power 5 conference.

In the summer of 2013, before he had seized the starting job, Winston joked with reporters when the topic turned toward dealing with the spotlight and criticism, “If I ever get Manziel disease, I want all of you to smack me in the head with your microphones.”

Voters did so through their ballots. Winston had the worst finish of any reigning winner who didn’t miss games due to injury, receiving just four first-place votes and 51 points overall, to come in sixth. A month later, he declared for the NFL draft.

Nine have come close, and nine have failed to stand alongside Griffin. So he waits, a place in history he never imagined he’d hold alone for quite this long.

“I thought several people could get it,” he said. “More recently Tim Tebow when they started giving it to sophomores and they started giving it to freshmen. I thought there were plenty of opportunities for someone to do it twice and I thought that would be done.”