The Heisman Trophy

Let me get a couple things off of my chest about this award.  Considering the Heisman Trophy is supposed to go to the best player in the college football each year, it still amazes me that the voters generally disregard that and just vote for the best player on the best team year after year.  I don't want to get into to many specifics, but if you can't tell, I think the Heisman Trophy has become irrelevant, kind of like Notre Dame football (oh wait, that trend seems to be over).  In any case, I was glad to see that the Heisman voters actually got the winner correct for the third year in a row.  Before these past three years, the voters seemed stuck in their ways with their voting philosophy, how else do you explain Mark Ingram winning in 2009 when Toby Gerhart and Ndamukong Suh were clearly better players?  And what about Eric Crouch winning in 2001?  The dude had more interceptions than touchdowns and Rex Grossman was by far the better player that season.  So it was refreshing to see the best player in the country win the award for the third year running.

And congratulations to Johnny Football (and I don't like this nickname, but I don't want to look up how to spell his last name).  However, I wish they would stop saying that he was the first freshman to win the award and how big of an accomplishment that is when he was in fact a redshirt freshman.  That means he was at least on the team for a year before becoming the starting quarterback.  And do you know who else won the Heisman after playing on their team for only one season?  Tim Tebow.  He was considered a sophomore when he won, but it wasn't like he saw significant playing time as a freshman, so he was basically a redshirt freshman when he won it.  That means that this is technically the second time a second year player has won the award and that Johnny Football's Heisman isn't as special as they are making it out to be.

Lastly, I wanted to talk the pointlessness of the coverage of the Heisman Trophy Ceremony.  Basically it is an hour-long puff piece about the nominees and the only part worth watching is the last five minutes when they reveal the (most likely wrong) winner.  Unless the Heisman Trophy is your favorite thing about college football, why in the hell would you watch the whole hour when all you really need to do is turn it on in the last couple of minutes to see who won?  Better yet, just continue watching HBO's Saturday night movie or another Two and a Half Men re-run and check the internet a couple of minutes after nine o'clock to see who won.  It's not like the winner somehow dictates the outcome of a game or anything.  So, here is my proposal to the Heisman people - if you want people to actually tune into your ceremony, announce the winner at a randomly different time each year.  That way if someone wants to see who won and generally just watches the last five minutes live, then they would have to watch the entire program because they wouldn't know when the announcement is going to be made.  Then again, that might make people even less likely to watch and more likely to just check out the online headlines later.

"While I think it's cool that Manti Te'O celebrates his Hawaiian heritage, I feel like he went a little overboard at the Heisman Ceremony this year.  Did he really need to wear a plant around his neck, too?"