It’s my favorite time of year! Head-scratching and hand-wringing over the Heisman Trophy!
What should be the most prestigious award offered to a college football player has, in my mind, been tarnished by the unwritten limitations placed on the award, evidenced in the yearly trotting out of quarterbacks and running backs as the top candidates for “best player in college football”.
Quarterbacks ARE putting up huge numbers in explosive, pass-oriented offenses, and the players taking their handoffs are scoring the touchdowns that make fans get out of their seat. But to limit the Heisman Trophy to this glamorous subsection of the sport is not calling attention to the greatness we’re all seeing all over the field.
This year, we’re seeing more of the same. All of the finalists are very good players and deserving of some sort of recognition. But to say four quarterbacks – USC’s Caleb Williams, TCU’s Max Duggan, Ohio State’s CJ Stroud and Georgia’s Stetson Bennett – are the four best players in college football is incorrect. Alabama’s Will Anderson, Georgia’s Jalen Carter, Michigan Olusegun Oluwatimi all don’t get invitations?
While I do believe USC’s Caleb Williams is the best player in the country this year, there have been mistakes over the years. I’ll save the “at least get the right guys as finalists” and “there should be five” discussions for another day. Here are the most glaring errors, in which a quarterback or running back was awarded the Heisman, but probably was less deserving than one of his less “glamorous” cohorts. We’ll go back all the way to 1990 (there’s a reason).
And as much as I believe Notre Dame mauler [autotag]Quenton Nelson[/autotag] was the best player in college football in 2017, I’ve excluded him here because in spite of Baker Mayfield’s struggles in the NFL, he was pretty amazing that year. In order to be included on this list, a player had to finish in the Top 10 of voting.