The convergence of the past and present is constant in college football, and the Heisman Trophy — to be given to its 2015 recipient on Saturday in New York — has a way of forging that connection quite often.
For fans of the snubbed players on Saturday, past snubs of note — Gino Torretta over Marshall Faulk in 1992, Eric Crouch over Rex Grossman in 2001 — will be cited. For fans of the winning player, past victories could be celebrated. If odds-on favorite Derrick Henry takes the trophy, you will see many comparisons made to the 2009 ceremony, in which Alabama running back Mark Ingram won a crowded race in which no overwhelming choice emerged.
The convergence of past and present in college football is regularly brought to the surface of memory by the Heisman. This year, however, that convergence is shrouded in mystery and a whiff of sadness.
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It is now 10 years since Reggie Bush of USC won the Heisman in a mano-a-mano competition with Vince Young of Texas.
Yes, it might have been better for USC as a team had Young won the award. It’s beyond clear that Young used this snub as potent fuel for the 2006 Rose Bowl. While USC head coach Pete Carroll should have had Bush on the field as a decoy for LenDale White on that unforgettable fourth-and-two play in the final minutes, the fact remains that Bush was not entirely “there” in the Rose Bowl. He wasn’t the first Heisman winner to play a below-par bowl game, and he won’t be the last.
Winning the Heisman creates a target for the opposing team in a bowl game. It creates a unique emtional stew which can be very hard for a 2o- or 21-year-old athlete to handle. Bush appeared to buckle under the weight of Heisman publicity. Young played with something — a lot of somethings — to prove. Texas won a national championship. USC barely missed in its attempt to win three straight national championships and become a next-level college football dynasty.
(Don’t worry, LSU fans; you won the 2003 national title as well, and I view you as 2011 co-national champions with Alabama, so don’t think you’re being shortchanged. There’s nothing wrong with sharing. You’re not being excluded.)
The Bush-Young comparison invites the question: How different would college football history have been if Young had won the Heisman in 2005? That question has contained a layered answer ever since the Heisman was stripped from Bush, a few months after the NCAA hammered USC with severe penalties in June of 2010.
Earlier this week, that answer changed.
Alex Putterman of The Comeback (the new sports site which partners with us and the other sites which appear across the top of this page) filed a story on the latest twist in the case of Todd McNair, the former USC running backs coach who is suing the NCAA for defamation. The NCAA’s severe penalties against USC extended to McNair, whose career has been derailed and who has spent the past several years of his life in the courts, fighting the NCAA for every last bit of legal turf.
The big news, documented by Putterman in his story, is that an appellate court ruled that the NCAA showed a “disregard for the truth” in its wording of the report on McNair and, by extension, USC. The finding gives public systemic recognition to what many in the college sports community have believed all along: The NCAA was out to get USC.
So much anger — nationally and especially in Los Angeles — has been directed to Bush himself over the years, and also to Pete Carroll for getting out of Dodge before the NCAA hammer fell by going to the Seattle Seahawks. Yet, McNair is the one who has been victimized the most. He in many ways most centrally exposes the wayward nature of the NCAA’s process and procedure in the Reggie Bush case. No one should forget that.
Bush and Carroll have done quite well for themselves after leaving USC. For all of the injuries which have limited Bush’s NFL career, he DOES have a Super Bowl ring and a pretty fat stack of cash for the trouble. Carroll has merely established himself as one of the all-time great coaches in the history of football, succeeding at the highest level after dominating at USC.
McNair, on the other hand, has fought a very lonely and exhausting fight. The outlook is brighter for him, but these are years of his life he’ll never get back. Moreover, he has not yet reached the finish line in his ordeal. Spare a thought for him as the foremost victim of this case.
Bringing the focus back to the 2005 Heisman and its long list of “what-ifs,” however, let’s simply realize that the idea of stripping players of Heisman Trophy awards appears more foolish than ever before. On a broader level, the Heisman Trust needs to re-evaluate so many aspects of how it does its business. A narrow and exclusivist (yet vague — see item No. 4 here) Heisman finalist policy is just one of the ways in which the award is out of step with an enlightened view of collegiate athletics (and the young men who participate in them).
The country, in a troubled time, deserved to see a service-academy player (Keenan Reynolds of Navy) come to New York for a well-earned moment in the sun. If the Heisman Trust decided to invite the top 10 players in the country for a victory lap, Reynolds would have gained that opportunity, and Americans would have felt a little bit better about themselves.
The Heisman Trust, however, sticks to its narrow-minded ways… which include stripping players of awards even though they won them and basked in the honey-soaked glow of an award which is supposed to have some connection to integrity and virtue in a business which contains very little of either.
Back to Bush and the currently-vacated 2005 Heisman: Not only should the McNair news at USC lead the Heisman Trust to give the award to its rightful owner; the larger reality of college sports should create a clear line of demarcation between “NCAA penalties” (which are not criminal laws) and true criminal wrongdoing. Thinking strictly in a narrow, short-term context: If the Heisman Trust wants to punish truly appalling behavior, that seems like a decent and appropriate message to send to the country, given the prestige associated with its award.
NCAA sanctions for taking some money in what is a billion-dollar business where athletes can’t even make money from the selling of jerseys or other products they bring into existence? That should not rise to a reality serious enough to merit the stripping of an award… if one even starts with the premise that this award should ever be stripped from its winners in the first place.
Let’s be real about this: The Heisman Trophy is given to the best college football player in the United States, not the best community servant (that’s what the Danny Wuerffel Trophy, handed out on Thursday to Ty Darlington of Oklahoma, is for). There are plenty of ways to honor various kinds of athletes and their contributions to college sports. The Heisman is about the quality of the player, not the quality of the person.
In light of how the NCAA-USC case has turned, and in light of how foolish it is to strip players of awards — especially when they’re based on NCAA-related matters and not more serious forms of wrongdoing — maybe the Heisman Trust should just focus on football, and let other people and organizations serve as watchdogs.
A decade after Reggie Bush’s Heisman, no other Heisman ceremony casts as long a shadow over the Heisman Trust than this one.
