College Football Morning: How the Heisman Trophy Works

The five kinds of players who win it, and 28 candidates for this year's hardware.

Like most things in life and college football, the Heisman Trophy has changed over the years.

Unlike most things in college football, the Heisman Trophy hasn’t changed that much lately.

With college football, it’s difficult to compare history from when you were paying attention to history from when you weren’t. I came of age as a college football fan around 2004, at the age of nine and then ten. I remember Jason White winning the Heisman in 2003, but I don’t remember watching any of his games that year. Matt Leinart? I watched Matt Leinart play football.

I bring this up because I don’t know if there’s a difference between late-2000’s and early-2000’s Heisman winners or if it simply feels that way to me. Basically: How good was Eric Crouch?

Without a comfortable answer to that, I admit the following is limited to perceptions gathered over the last 20 years. My apologies. It’s the best I can do.

The Five Kinds of Players Who Win the Heisman

The best way I’ve found to conceptualize the Heisman race is to think of it as a flowchart, or like a quarterback’s progression. Does anyone fit the first category? No? Move to number two. Does anyone fit the second? No? Move to number three. Is there someone in the third? Yes? Great. Give that man the Heisman. The approach varies by voter, and the categories are as subjective as the voters’ votes, but to put it simply: Five categories.

First, you have your transcendent quarterbacks: Joe Burrow. Johnny Manziel. Robert Griffin III. These are the guys under center who were so dominant and so electric that it didn’t matter what their team did. Of course, their teams all won a lot, but that was an effect of having a Heisman-caliber quarterback, not a cause. These players won the Heisman because they were the face of college football.

Second, you have transcendent players who aren’t quarterbacks. These are rare. DeVonta Smith and Reggie Bush are the only two I identify over the last twenty years. Smith wasn’t exactly the face of college football, but he would have been had the context around that season been different. Bush was Reggie Bush.

Can a transcendent player win the Heisman over a transcendent quarterback? Theoretically. I kind of doubt it, given modern society’s Quarterback Culture™. But I suppose it’s possible.

Third, we come to the great quarterbacks on title-contending teams. This category contributes the most eventual Heisman winners. Bryce Young. Jameis Winston. Troy Smith. Great quarterbacks, to be sure, but not necessarily players who would have won the award had their team not stood a decent chance of winning the national championship.

This is where the Heisman has changed a bit over recent years. Had the 2018 season existed in the two-team rather than four-team playoff era, the award might have gone to narrow runner-up Tua Tagovailoa rather than Heisman winner Kyler Murray. A generation of Nissan commercials would have never been the same.

The question this poses—this is the only big question surrounding the Heisman in 2024—is how further playoff expansion will broaden this category. Is making the playoff enough for voters to give signal-callers the title contention boost? Or do teams need to be viewed as having a realistic shot at winning it all? Murray gives us some answers, but not all of them. I don’t think voters seriously thought of Oklahoma as a title contender in 2018. But Oklahoma received that level of attention because it was one of merely four playoff teams. For the 10-seed this year, it should be a little different. There’s only so much oxygen in the room.

What happens if there isn’t a great quarterback with a good shot at the title? We get to our fourth category: Great quarterbacks without a title chance. This is what happened with Caleb Williams and Jayden Daniels the last two years. Had Oregon beaten Washington in last year’s Pac-12 Championship, the Heisman was probably going to Bo Nix. Had Daniels and Brian Kelly not upset Alabama in 2022, the Bryce Young repeat Heisman conversation would have been tougher.

You might be wondering here about the repeat Heisman question. Give us a moment. It’ll help to talk through the fifth category first.

The fifth category is great players on title contenders. What if there are simply no great quarterbacks in a class? Or what if there are great quarterbacks but they either play for mid-majors or put up worse numbers than the season before?

This is where the sport found itself in 2009. Kellen Moore threw 39 touchdowns and only three INT’s, but he played for Boise State. Case Keenum threw for nearly six thousand yards, but he played for Houston (and threw a bunch of picks). Colt McCoy led Texas to the national championship, and he still nearly won* the Heisman, but his numbers were notably down from 2008. The award went to Mark Ingram. There was one other great quarterback that year, but we’ll get to him in the repeat conversation.

*Toby Gerhart, nearly a transcendent non-QB, slid in between McCoy and the winner.

Some of Ingram’s Heisman can probably be attributed to the difference between how running backs were viewed fifteen years ago and how running backs are viewed now. That’s definitely a difference. 2009 voters were used to running backs winning Heismans. 2024 voters aren’t. But when it comes to how the running back position has changed, Heisman voters’ perceptions probably aren’t changing things as much as offensive coordinators’ approaches. There aren’t as many bell cows as there used to be.

The other running back to win a Heisman in our sample, Derrick Henry, won it in 2015. You could argue Henry belongs with Smith and Bush as a transcendent player. I lean towards the theory that Deshaun Watson threw too many picks and Baker Mayfield’s numbers were low by Oklahoma standards (not by anybody else’s, but we’ve seen a lot of high-octane Sooners). You could also argue that Christian McCaffrey was transcendent but that Henry’s significant edge in touchdowns won it for him. This theory would go that McCaffrey knocked out Watson and Mayfield but elevated Henry in the process by bringing running backs into the conversation. The best takeaway here is probably that when there isn’t a clearly great quarterback, or at least an acceptably great quarterback on a championship-caliber team, things get wacky.

We promised to return to the repeat Heisman question, having seen it come up with Bryce Young. Who’s a better case study than Young? That fourth quarterback from 2009. Tim Tebow.

In the college football world, Tim Tebow was as transcendent as they’ve recently come. He wasn’t the passer Joe Burrow was, but if you’re newer to college football, imagine a Joe Burrow-level star QB who runs people over and invokes the will of God on his opponents, all in the days of a monolithic ESPN, Bush-era sensibilities, and Twitter not yet enjoying widespread prominence among sports journalists (Instagram didn’t exist yet at all).

Tim Tebow won the Heisman in 2007, neatly fitting the category of a transcendent quarterback. In 2008, he lost it to Sam Bradford before beating Bradford in the national title game. In 2009, he lost the SEC Championship to Ingram and Alabama. Tebow was invited to the Heisman ceremony, but he finished a distant fifth, closer by vote count to tenth-place finisher Golden Tate than he was to fourth-place finisher Ndamukong Suh.

Tebow was still Tebow in 2009. In 2008, he both transcended and won a national title. But voters had given him the trophy in 2007, and they didn’t circle back in ’08 or ’09.

Maybe Bradford was transcendent himself. He did throw for 50 touchdowns that year. But people didn’t tune in to watch Bradford the way they tuned in to watch Lamar Jackson in 2016. People tuned in to watch Tim Tebow. He still didn’t win the Heisman.

In some ways, this could be viewed as reassuring. While Tebow was transcendent, Bradford was probably the better quarterback, especially with Tebow’s truck stick tendencies moderated as NFL scouts entered his field of consciousness. (This is what happens with good blue-collar big men in college basketball, too. Luke Harangody would have been more effective his last two years of college if he never started shooting threes.) But Tebow was transcendent! And he didn’t win the Heisman.

One explanation here is that you only get one year to transcend before Heisman voters get bored. Another explanation is that a great quarterback on a title-contending team still trumps a transcendent quarterback if the transcender is attempting a repeat. A third is that there are levels to transcension, and this is all subjective, and those first two categories aren’t mutually exclusive. The third category is probably where the truth most lies.

We cannot see a repeat Heisman winner this year.

Nobody who’s won a Heisman is still playing college football.

But you can’t not talk about the repeat Heisman phenomenon when offering a study of how the Heisman gets won.

The full list of Heisman winners, extremely subjectively categorized over the last 20 years:

Transcendent Quarterbacks (6): Joe Burrow (2019), Lamar Jackson (2016), Johnny Manziel (2012), Robert Griffin III (2011), Cam Newton (2010), Tim Tebow (2007)

Transcendent Players (2): DeVonta Smith (2020), Reggie Bush (2005)

Great QBs on Title Contenders (8): Bryce Young (2021), Kyler Murray (2018), Baker Mayfield (2017), Marcus Mariota (2014), Jameis Winston (2013), Sam Bradford (2008), Troy Smith (2006), Matt Leinart (2004)

Great QBs (2): Jayden Daniels (2023), Caleb Williams (2022)

Great Players on Title Contenders (2): Derrick Henry (2015), Mark Ingram (2009)

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Who’ll Win It This Year?

We the media love to use betting odds these days to express probabilities in sports. The reason for that is simple: Betting markets are really, really good predictors of the results of individual games. Over the long term, nothing in the world predicts football or baseball or basketball or hockey scores better than betting markets. With the Heisman…it’s different. Betting odds are useful, but the market is not staggeringly efficient.

The market isn’t wholly inefficient, so don’t go empty your 401(k) to bet it on the Heisman. But the Heisman odds are more a gauge of the horse race than a market with strong predictive power. Right now, Dillon Gabriel leads Cam Ward at the front of the pack, with Jalen Milroe, Carson Beck, Jaxson Dart, Quinn Ewers, Nico Iamaleava, and nearly every other prominent quarterback in the country following, in order. Of the 19 players with odds shorter than 40-to-1, 18 are QB’s. The 19^th is Travis Hunter.

These 19 are all fair candidates for markets to like. In a sense, a bet on Avery Johnson is partly a bet on a 13–0 start for Kansas State. Simultaneously, sportsbooks have to cover their liabilities with every prominent quarterback. If they leave the door open on one, bettors will fill it, and odds will remain artificially short on that character for the rest of the year. But as we showed above, a quarterback is not guaranteed to win this Heisman trophy. Four of the last twenty winners were not quarterbacks, and the award has not shifted dramatically towards QB’s in the last twenty years.

There are far more than 28 players who can win the award. Some of the players who follow represent archetypes as much as they represent themselves. But the following 28 players are the best Heisman preview we can offer. They’re a combination of the 19 players mentioned above, those with the shortest odds, plus nine with longer odds we think help paint the picture.

Potential Transcendent Quarterbacks: Cam Ward (Miami), Nico Iamaleava (Tennessee), Jalon Daniels (Kansas), Shedeur Sanders (Colorado), Riley Leonard (Notre Dame), Kyron Drones (Virginia Tech), KJ Jefferson (UCF)

A quick recap on where these guys came from:

·      Ward started at FCS Incarnate Word then played two years for Washington State before transferring to Coral Gables.

·      Iamaleava is a redshirt freshman from California who ran for three touchdowns in the Citrus Bowl.

·      Daniels is the central figure in the KU football renaissance. He’s listed as a redshirt junior.

·      Sanders is Deion Sanders’s son. He started at Jackson State and transferred to Colorado when his dad made the move.

·      Leonard was Duke’s quarterback before transferring this offseason.

·      Drones was a backup at Baylor before transferring to Virginia Tech before last year.

·      Jefferson is a year older than DJ Uiagalelei and spent his first five years of college at Arkansas.

Of these seven, Sanders is the likeliest to actually transcend. The Sanders Family Hype Machine is not what it was at this point last year. People have gotten to know how Deion Sanders operates, and there is a very real scenario where Heisman voters won’t vote for Shedeur Sanders because his father banned a Boulder columnist from press conferences. (Journalism!) The bottom line? While Deion Sanders is an asshole and Shedeur Sanders does have shortcomings, the younger Sanders is a very good quarterback with the potential to put up jaw-dropping numbers. In youth sports, there’s always a kid with a football/basketball/baseball IQ years beyond his peers. That’s kind of what Sanders is in college. He knows what he’s doing and he passes with tremendous accuracy.

Sanders did inherit some of his father’s hubris, and his arm isn’t a spectacular genetic gift. Colorado should play from behind a lot, which might drive up his interception numbers as he tries to make plays. But Shedeur Sanders is a good quarterback with the potential to go down as a special college player. Given the subjectivity around college football transcendence and how well the Sanders family sells commercials, you will hear a lot about this man if things are going well.

Iamaleava has gigantic downside, but his upside is equal in magnitude. He is an unknown, and as an unknown, he commands the kind of respect you give a noise in the woods when you’ve heard grizzlies are around. Behind Daniels, Iamaleava may be the college football player likeliest this season to make you turn on a game just to watch him play.

Daniels has struggled to stay healthy, but when he’s in the ballgame…man. It’s like playing Madden back in the day with Michael Vick. Electricity all the way through. The health is a risk, as is Kansas going 5–7 (not saying they will, but it’s possible).

Leonard has also struggled with health, and he’s primarily a runner, not a passer (unless he’s learned to pass this offseason, as many Notre Dame people seem to assume he has). His best-case narrative, though, is hard to beat. A chubby-cheeked small-town kid running people over with a smile? While wearing the Notre Dame blue and gold? Riley Leonard would be a different phenomenon than Sam Hartman could have been. But the size of the narrative upside is comparable.

Jefferson could yet break out, becoming something of a Bo Nix/Cam Newton/McKenzie Milton hybrid down in Orlando. I’m not particularly sold on this happening, but I also don’t particularly expect national title contention from UCF.

Ward is interesting. A good quarterback? Yes. But sometimes good quarterbacks are elevated to great quarterbacks in the public eye simply due to consensus among analysts. I’m worried that Ward’s hype is more a reflection of analyst agreement that he’s good, analyst attempts to find a Heisman sleeper, and the widespread industry desire for Miami to be “back.” Ward is very good. He’s not expected by many to be drafted in this year’s first round.

Potential Transcendent Players: Travis Hunter (CB/WR – Colorado), Luther Burden III (WR – Missouri), James Pearce Jr. (DE – Tennessee), Mason Graham (DT – Michigan), Ollie Gordon II (RB – Oklahoma State)

Ask who the best player is in college football and a large share of experts will tell you Hunter, Pearce, or Graham. Hunter playing two ways is a big deal. If that goes well, it will receive the attention such an effort deserves. Basically, Hunter has the potential to capture Deion Sanders hype while maintaining a looser affiliation with the Sanders family than his quarterback. ESPN can get its views while journalists don’t have to vote for a family they abhor.

Pearce and Graham aren’t Ndamukong Suh, but…they might be? Graham’s importance to Michigan’s title last year went mostly unnoticed, including by us. Pearce is a candidate for the NFL’s first overall pick. If he plays like it and tears up SEC backfields, the younger wave of voters will take notice. Millennial college football reporters would salivate over the chance to vote for a lineman for Heisman. They want you to know how much they know.

Burden is probably the nation’s best wide receiver. His potential for eye-popping numbers is high. Rare is the receiver who can carry an offense. Rarer still is the wideout who can carry an offense against SEC defenses. Burden did a lot to that effect last year.

Gordon is complicated. A beloved figure prior to his summer DUI, some journalists won’t vote for him on principle. If he’s putting up Derrick Henry numbers in Stillwater, though, he might quickly find converts, especially if he expresses enough contrition through the repeated opportunities which surely await. Nostalgia for bell-cow backs could be potent.

Potential Great Quarterbacks on National Title Contenders: Dillon Gabriel (Oregon), Jalen Milroe (Alabama), Carson Beck (Georgia), Quinn Ewers (Texas), Will Howard (Ohio State), Drew Allar (Penn State), Conner Weigman (Texas A&M)

Allar and Weigman are two of the quarterbacks we’re seeing with longer odds than that top 19 above (Michigan’s quarterbacks are in the same boat, but we suspect a two-QB system is in the works up there). Allar was named the top quarterback in the 2022 class by some. After a rough debut season, he’ll play under Kansas’s old offensive coordinator, Andy Kotelnicki. Will that help? It shouldn’t hurt. Another thing that shouldn’t hurt is the 12-team playoff field. Penn State is the single program likeliest to benefit from playoff expansion. They would have benefited more had Oregon not joined the conference at the same time expansion happened, but the Big Ten East’s third wheel might finally earn national respect. All it has to do is exactly what it usually does.

Weigman faces a more treacherous situation, playing at Texas A&M in Mike Elko’s first year. He was the consensus number two QB in that ’22 class, though, behind Cade Klubnik,* and A&M’s schedule is quietly manageable. Also? Mike Elko seems to be a hell of a coach. The Aggies are favored against Notre Dame on Saturday night. If they win that game, they might not be underdogs until Texas comes to town at the end of November. They get both Mizzou and LSU at home. Keep an eye on Weigman.

*Cade Klubnik was not an accidental omission from this list, but you can certainly make a case he’s undervalued. The issue for Klubnik is that there are serious doubts about the remaining competence within Clemson’s program.

The core of this list, though, is Gabriel, Milroe, Beck, and Ewers. Beck is probably the best quarterback, but his situation is ironically too good for him to get that level of respect. It’s going to be hard for Carson Beck to transcend. Too many people will point to the assets he has around him. Gabriel might be a better version of last year’s Bo Nix, and Nix came one bad Oregon game from winning the Heisman himself. Ewers has the chance to follow the Joe Burrow career arc, but to make a grand understatement, he’s probably not as good as Smokin’ Joe. The pump is primed for a Milroe redemption season, but don’t underestimate how batshit crazy the Alabama ecosystem can get now that it’s out from under Nick Saban’s iron fist. Tuscaloosa has a disregard for reality on par with Tennessee’s. Coupled with Georgia-level recruiting, that is dangerous.

Howard’s on this list and high in the odds in case Ohio State goes 13–0 and everybody else loses twice. Howard is not on this list because he’s one of the best quarterbacks in the country. I like Howard, and maybe Ohio State really is good enough for his numbers to dazzle. But he is a cog in Columbus. He is not the machine.

Potential Great Quarterbacks: Jaxson Dart (Mississippi), Miller Moss (USC), Avery Johnson (Kansas State), Garrett Nussmeier (LSU), Cam Rising (Utah), Brady Cook (Missouri)

I’m highly skeptical of Cook’s position in the markets, simply because I don’t see how he could be good enough to contend for the Heisman without losing it to Luther Burden. He has a great name. Is that enough?

Among the other five, a few—Johnson, Nussmeier, and Rising—might be more dependent on the new treatment of national title contention. Basically, I don’t think Kansas State or Utah can really contend for a national title, but they could definitely each get the 2-seed, maybe as the 3^rd or 4^th-ranked* team. It would be surprising if LSU won the SEC, but could a 9-seed earn Nussmeier the Kyler Murray treatment if he has the best numbers? Maybe we should have included these three in the last group. This is the 12-team playoff’s impact.

*Scenario: Notre Dame could finish second or third, with the Big Ten or SEC runner-up in the other spot.

Dart and Moss best fit the Williams/Daniels archetype. They could each go down as the best quarterback in the 2024 season, but they’re unlikely to reach those Manziel levels of transcendence. Part of this is that we’re expecting from them. High expectations don’t leave much room for overperformance. Dart plays under Lane Kiffin, and by this point, we know him rather well. Moss plays under Lincoln Riley and holds the higher upside. We’ve seen less of Moss than Dart, but Dart should enjoy the better team around him.

Johnson and Rising have better cult hero potential than Nussmeier. Particularly Johnson. He might be a better player than Howard, the starter he’s replacing in Manhattan. His distinctive hair and willingness to get physical could make him an icon.

Potential Great Players on National Title Contenders: Mykel Williams (DE – Georgia), Kelvin Banks Jr. (OT – Texas), Quinshon Judkins (RB – Ohio State)

It would take a lot of quarterbacks stinking for us to reach this place on the list. The 12-team playoff may do away with circumstances like those which won Ingram and Henry their trophies. But football is hard, and the Big Ten and SEC might chew themselves to pieces in this new world. If they do, these three are some fun sleepers.

Williams is probably Georgia’s best defensive player. In a scenario where Georgia dominates the sport but Beck’s handing the ball off a lot, he could get attention. He might even turn out to be as good as Graham and Pearce.

Banks is probably Texas’s best player. I think we’re a few years away from an offensive lineman getting major Heisman or NFL MVP attention, but it will happen within our lifetimes. We are all learning how much offensive lines matter.

Judkins, a Mississippi transfer, could put up monster numbers for Ohio State. He’s a better player than Will Howard, so in the scenario where Ohio State dominates the sport but Howard remains himself, Judkins could turn into an easy choice. That’s an extremely narrow scenario, but it’s easy to envision it happening.

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More preview business tomorrow, this time on the teams.

Bark.

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This post was also published at www.thebarkingcrow.com, where you can find the rest of Joe Stunardi and NIT Stu’s work, like Joe’s look yesterday at UConn potentially joining the Big 12 and Stu’s examination of whether Georgia Tech will tease Florida State to death.