Reggie Bush: Heisman Trust loses its mind
Here’s the great thing about the Heisman Trophy. It’s a cool trophy with a great tradition and it’s a lot of fun to talk about, because it’s a season-long debate. Some people were talking Heisman Trophy for Kendall Hunter before halftime of the OSU-Washington State game Saturday night. Heck, ESPN was talking Heisman for Landry Jones and DeMarco Murray before September arrived.
Here’s the problem with the Heisman Trophy. It’s not to be taken seriously. Billed as an award for the nation’s best college football player, it’s nothing of the sort. It’s a popularity contest. A polticial campaign. A vote on who was the driving force behind the pivotal games of a certain season.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. That’s not a player whose value should be diminished. Jason White and Sam Bradford were paramount players in their Heisman seasons. But they weren’t the best football players.
This Dec. 10, 2005, file photo shows Southern California tailback Reggie Bush pickimg up the Heisman Trophy after being announced as the winner of the award, in New York. Yahoo! Sports reported Tuesday, Sept. 7, 2010, that 2005 Heisman Trophy winner Reggie Bush is expected to be stripped of the award by the end of the month. The former Southern Cal running back would become the first player in the 75-year history of the award to have the Heisman Trophy taken away. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson, File)
Take last season. It took me forever, but I finally remembered that Mark Ingram won the Heisman. A fine ballplayer. An excellent tailback. Maybe even the second coming of Johnny Musso, another Alabama runner who produced in big games. But the idea that Mark Ingram is a better football than Ndamukong Suh is just plain silly. Any voter who responded Ingram, when asked who is the better player, didn’t have any idea what they were voting for.
That’s why it’s a lark of an award. A wink-wink honor. All style, no substance. Part of it is the national scope of college football, a sport with absolutely no conciseness to it. No one can keep up, expertly, with it all. There’s just too much. Seven major conferences, four other conferences, with fabulous players tucked away in places like Boise, Idaho, and Morgantown, W.Va., and tucked away on low-key teams like Oregon State and Cincinnati.
When voters pick baseball’s Cy Young Award winners, or the NBA’s MVP, they have a confined set of players, in a controlled environment. Heisman voters are asked to put a blue ribbon on one entry among anything from blueberry pie to barbequed ribs.
So the Heisman is to be enjoyed, not to be studied. The Heisman is a card game, not the SAT.
Which brings us to the Heisman Trust. According to Yahoo, the New York-based Downtown Athletic Club will strip Reggie Bush of his 2005 Heisman, because the NCAA has ruled Bush ineligible during that season. Yahoo says the Heisman Trust will keep the ’05 trophy vacant.
What a ridiculous idea. Talk about taking yourself too seriously. We’ve established that the Heisman is for grins. Now the Heisman wants to continue the public flogging of Bush for taking money from an agent.
First off, anyone who wants to take the Heisman from Bush has a better reason than agents, like, he wasn’t the best college football player in 2005. Vince Young in ’05 was as good a college football player as God ever made, yet somehow the voters were dazzled by Bush’s two or three wizardry runs a game.
It reminds me of the old Seinfeld episode, where Jerry’s dentist converts to Judaism and starts telling bad Jewish jokes. Jerry was offended. It offended him not as a Jewish person, it offended him as a comedian.
The 2005 Heisman should offend us not as ethicists, but as talent evaulators.
But back to 2010. The Heisman wants to strip Bush of his Heisman and leave the trophy vacated, as some sort of monument to the scandal that afflicted college football in 2010. What a crock. And what an affront to fans.
This stripping of records — vacating victories and coaching records and now awards — is asking fans, who fuel this billion-dollar sport, to suspend belief. Fans saw USC rout Oklahoma in the 2005 Orange Bowl. Fans saw Bush win the Heisman. Fans felt either the joy or disappointment or admiration or whatever emotion was produced by those events.
Take away the Heisman from Bush — same as stripping victories – and you’re telling fans in future years, maybe what you see is what you get, but maybe not. Maybe this guy is the Heisman winner, but maybe he’s not. It’s the problem baseball now has; maybe this guy is the home run champ, but maybe he’s not.
The NCAA and the Heisman Trust want to rewrite history and say Reggie Bush never happened. But Reggie Bush DID happen. We saw him with our eyes. And the idea that retroactive punishment is some kind of balm for the problem, well, that’s absurd.
You want to do something constructive, double efforts to stop rule-breaking and ineligibility on the front end. Not the back end. Not five years from the back end.
If the Heisman Trust wants to punish Reggie Bush, there are ways to do it without involving the public.
The Heisman could cut ties with Bush. Kick him out of the fraternity. Don’t invite him to New York once he has his Decembers free.
Steve Owens has talked at length about how blessed his life has been being part of the Heisman club. Going back and renewing old acquaintance with fellow Heisman winners. Reminiscing and basking in the glow of golden days from decades past. Standing in the spotlight again, knowing that you’re never forgotten.
Isn’t that a harsh penalty? Isn’t that hitting Reggie Bush where it hurts, without telling the American college football fan to keep their intellect and emotions in check, that the award will be ratified in 10-20-30 years, whenever no one has the energy or inclination to go back and investigate the particulars of a winner’s season.
The Heisman Trust wants to strip Reggie Bush of the trophy. Instead, it just might strip itself of relevancy.
-------------Berry Tramel can be heard Monday through Friday from 4:40-5:20 p.m. on The Sports Animal radio network, including AM-640 and FM-98.1. You can e-mail him here and follow him on Twitter @BerryTramel. Visit Berry's website here.
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Comments
To be eligle for Heisman Trophy balloting, you have to be recognized as eligible by the NCAA. Reggie Bush violated his eligibility by accepting 100′s of thousands of dollars in extra benefits. The NCAA investigation confirmed that Reggie Bush violated his eligibility and deemed him ineligible for the 2005 season. If you are not recognized as eligible by the NCAA, by the rules of the Heisman Trust you are not eligible for the award.
To often, athletes are given special consideration when it comes to following rules that everyone else must folow. In this case, the Heisman Trust is making the statement that you must follow and play by the rules regardless of what pinheads like Berry Tramel, Al Echbach and Jim Traber think.
Trammel shows that he takes himself too seriously when he states, “We’ve established that the Heisman is for grins.” No, Mr. Trammel,you’ve done nothing of the sort. You’ve only established that this is your opinion and begged us to accept your opinion as a premise for your argument. You seem to believe that your opinion must be taken as fact, which is a bit high-minded, in my opinion.
The only thing I’ll say is this…Vince Young should have won the award hands down regardless of all this extraneous distraction. He should have won it then and that is before the National Championship Game was even played. Best college football game I’ve ever seen…best and most dominany season by an individual player which led to his team winning the championship. Sanders was just as good, but his team didn’t achieve the team goals which Texas did with Young carrying the Horns on his back.
Seems to me more appropriate to punish Reggie Bush for his misdeeds than the current USC players who did nothing to deserve the punishment handed to them. For once, the guy who did the deed gets at least part of it. What really disgusts me is that usually the people who did the deed get off with nothing at all while subsequent players who did nothing at all are penalized.
Robert, honestly, what is your problem with Tramel? If you don’t appreciate his work, then simply don’t read it. You don’t have to counter the points with which you disagree with some clever (and I’m using that word loosely) jab at the writer.
Berry, great article. I agree with your point about the Heisman Trust taking themselves a bit too seriously. And yes, Young was a far better all-around player.
Tyler, when I believe Trammel does well, I let him know. When I believe he errs, I do the same. Critical reading, for both good and bad, beats fawning every time.
It’s not for grins. It matters for recruiting, it matters to fans, it matters to most members of the press because they have something to talk about if they have nothing insightful to say and that means it must matter to the programs. Because so many fans and players watch, read and listen to NCAA football analysts (I am raising my hand even though I am a little ashamed at times) they in turn influence fans recruits and therefore programs.
Outside Oklahoma Memorial Stadium (its real name for those of us who choose to “repeat the past” and what that phrase really means in this paragraph and also how I interpret both Fitzgerald and Jay Gatsby to mean it is “the very very best moments of the past”) if the Heisman weren’t for grins would be immortalized in larger than life imposing bronze figures the greatest players in the history of Oklahoma football. Leroy Selmon and Jerry Tubbs first and foremost deserve monuments. There are others that belong but if you follow what I consider in recent times is the true award for the best football player in America, the number one NFL draft pick, you have to include Billy Simms and Sam Bradford. Billy Simms belongs anyway. What the Heisman trophy normally represents is “the offensive star on the then No. 1 ranked team.” That does mean something.
Taking Bush’s trophy away is stupid. If we really dug we could find plenty of NCAA rule violations by many of the winners. That loss to USC did happen and I consider it the most embarrassing moment in the history of Oklahoma football.
Berry – a really good column. Right on point.
Bush was eligible when the trophy was awarded – his ineligibility was determined retroactively.
Can we just turn the clock back on any decision we make when hindsight reveals different circumstances that we assumed?
Whatever happened to “doing the right thing”? Perhaps that notion has been watered down for too long, evidenced by the pervasive thinking espoused in this article. Was Bush a great player, yes. Did he break the rules? Man up & face the punishment; even if it’s five years late. I normally enjoy Tramels’ articles. I think his argument is fundamentally flawed.
Well said… except the ending… I think it lost its relevancy long ago.