The Heisman Trophy winner will be revealed Saturday. Strike the pose, Jameis Winston.
There doesn’t seem to be much suspense this year, but that hasn’t always been the case. Take last year, for instance, when Johnny Manziel beat Manti Te’o. As I remember, it wasn’t a sure thing going into that Saturday night.
Usually, the run-up to the Heisman features the voters disclosing their choices in columns or on air. Polls are taken, predicting the winner.
This year, though, is different.
The Heisman Trust is mandating that voters don’t reveal their selections until after Saturday night’s show on ESPN. The reason is obvious: It wants to keep the suspense for viewers until the winner is announced.
Several writers said they couldn’t go along with the edict. Dennis Dodd of CBSSports.com wrote a strong column on why he won’t be voting this year.
I have my own views on the subject, which I will disclose later. However, I reached out to Kari Chisholm. Since 2002, he has been tracking the Heisman vote and projecting the winner at StiffArmTrophy.com.
Chisholm’s task is more difficult this year because of the Heisman mandate. Still, he is getting voters to disclose their choices.
I asked Chisholm to weigh in on the situation with his perspective.
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I come at this from a deep sense of respect for the Heisman, and appreciation for the tough job that each of the voters have. I fell in love with football as a kid when Marcus Allen wowed the world – first as USC’s Heisman winner, and then moving into the pros as Rookie of the Year and then Super Bowl MVP.
I’ve been fascinated by the Heisman ever since. I think it’s fair to say that it’s the most prestigious award in all of sport, and one of the most prestigious in the world. Along with the Nobel, it’s just about the only award that typically gets mentioned in the very first sentence of an obituary. (Note: “award” means something that is voted on by outside observers, not won on the field of competition, like an Olympic gold medal or Super Bowl trophy.)
Anyway, this all started in 2002, when Carson Palmer was making a late run at the Heisman. Back then, Google was still new — and I realized that I could Google my way to a significant sample of the votes to predict the winner. I did it, and then wondered if I could do it again. And I did. Over and over.
As a USC guy, I haven’t had a dog in the fight now for quite a few years. And yet, I keep at it – because I love the Heisman Trophy.
I think the Heisman Trust is making a terrible mistake insisting that ballots remain secret. Just a quick search now will reveal that precious few voters are writing columns about how they voted. In years past, there have been dozens — in papers large and small — all building the hype for the big announcement. It can’t be good for the Heisman to silence their biggest fans, their voters.
This year, I am seeing fewer voters disclose their votes in public — and among those who share their votes with me, almost all are asking me to keep it anonymous. A number of voters are mad about it — Dennis Dodd at CBS resigned his vote; Ryan Brown at WJOX will resign after this year. I’ve heard that the voters at the Oklahoman newspaper all dropped their votes in protest this year. The 28-year run of the Scripps-Howard Heisman poll is now over, unceremoniously with a final edition in early November.
Originally, it was the intellectual challenge of projecting the winner. But over the last decade, I’ve become strongly interested in transparency in college football. I’m not alone — the college coaches poll now includes revealed ballots in the final poll, for example. (And the transparency means quite a bit of interesting reporting and controversy.)
Transparency and accountability are critical. There’s a reason election monitors show up in third world countries to observe elections. Outside verification helps ensure that the vote is done legitimately. I’m not claiming that the Heisman Trust has their finger on the scale. But there are people out there that think they do. We already have enough conspiracy theories in college football. We don’t need ’em swirling around the most prestigious award in all of sport.
Their move is a big mistake. After all, what I do is part of the hype machine. In 2009, the closest Heisman race ever (Ingram/Gerhart/McCoy/Suh/Tebow) led to the biggest ratings ever. The Heisman Trust even bragged about it in a press release. There’s just one problem: If it were up to the Heisman folks, no one would have had ANY idea that it was going to be a close race. It was MY site that told the world that it would be close. I led SportsCenter on Friday night that year. 3.78 million people watched the show — and I had 1.3 million page views during the two weeks prior to the show. I helped create that huge level of hype for them.
In any case, I’d be persuaded to knock it off if the Heisman Trust would release the full ballots – every vote, every voter – after the ceremony. But they won’t. Heck, the level of secrecy is stunning. Consider this:
* They won’t even reveal how many voters there are in each state. (It’s wildly unbalanced, with a tremendous structural bias against the West Coast. For example, 10 votes for Oregon, 22 votes for Oklahoma — even though the states are the same exact size, 3.8m people each.)
* They won’t list who the voters are in each state.
* They won’t even list who the state chairs are in each state.
* They don’t release the totals below the top 10, or the regional breakdowns after the finalists.
* They never release full ballot tabulation, not even anonymously. (This would make for awesome statistical analysis — is there regional bias? is there positional bias? what percentage of ballots went to linemen? etc.)
* There are six regional chairmen, and since Beano Cook died and Pat Haden went to USC, they won’t even list anything other than “TBD” on the website, though they have surely replaced them.
I see my role as honoring the Heisman by helping bringing a little transparency to it; doing something that the Trust itself should — but doesn’t — do.