Mark Ingram of Alabama was a deserving winner. Of something.
Good football player. Solid guy. Nice stats. Great team -- No. 1 in the nation, in fact. Hard not to like Mark Ingram
Of course, Toby Gerhart deserved the Heisman Trophy just a little bit more.
Easy for me to say. Gerhart's my hometown kid from Norco High, who went to a school for rocket scientists, political geniuses and future tycoons, and tried to win the Heisman the old-fashioned way -- by racking up the most impressive statistics of anyone in the nation, as well as leading his team of academic curve-busters to their first bowl game in eight years.
Close, but no award. By the narrowest margin in the 75 years of this coveted trophy, Gerhart finished second.
Heartbreaking loss.
Heartbreaking reasoning. The Heisman's 926 voters opted for formula. Find the best player on the best team.
They opted for short-term memory. Find the candidate who has the best final weekend, (when Gerhart didn't play).
They opted for the uniform. Find a guy from a known football-player factory. That is, put a USC, Ohio State, Florida, Oklahoma or Texas uniform on Toby Gerhart and the trophy would have been engraved in October.
Gerhart, of course, was a much better sport about it than I. He copped to some disappointment, but he was hardly morose.
"I'm proud and humbled just to be here," he said after the twisted and mangled results were announced. "Coming from a small town, to New York for this. No hard feelings.
"I came up a little short, but in my heart I still feel like a winner. Nobody here should feel that disappointed."
I was, and I wasn't even in the running.
As I said, though, easy for me to say Gerhart should have won. But I wasn't the only one. Virtually every college football analyst who bothered to calc it out understood that Gerhart's deeds for unheralded Stanford were more impressive than anyone else in the running. His numbers were bigger and they came against tougher defenses. His burden was tougher than Ingram's, having to get his numbers when every team knew who was coming.
He never faltered, saving his best for the last month when Stanford faced Oregon, USC, Cal and Notre Dame.
He began the season out of the public eye, not a Heisman hopeful but a Heisman who's that? He turned down Stanford's offer to push his case last summer, preferring to let his performance stand on its own.
Then he kept getting better, week by week, picking up Heisman support yard by yard, touchdown by touchdown.
When last year's winner Sam Bradford was injured, and natural favorites such as Tim Tebow and Colt McCoy showed chinks in their armor, Gerhart began to fill the void.
By the time he steamrolled Oregon for 223 yards and three touchdowns, as the Cardinal handed Oregon its only Pac-10 loss, he was in the conversation.
A week later, when his 178 rushing yards and three touchdowns punched the breath out of USC, he was among the front-runners.
Television analysts who probably couldn't spell his name when the season began were touting him as their Heisman man. When he finished his season with a 205-yard rushing night against Notre Dame, scored three touchdowns and threw the first pass -- a touchdown -- of his college career, play-by-play man Brent Musberger blurted that it was the finest performance he'd ever seen by a college player.
Fittingly, it wasn't until after Gerhart had played his last regular-season game that someone finally went over-the-top gushy about this humble kid.
"I took pride that I earned it," said Gerhart of his late-blooming candidacy. "I tried to come from nowhere."
Nice try, anyway.
A nice try for the underdog, the unsung and the overlooked. If you're a fan of monopolies, empires and kangaroos courts, it was your day. Again.
Really, no offense meant to Ingram. He may well have been the second-most deserving player in the running. It wasn't the first time that Heisman voters got it wrong, nor will it be the last.
Earlier in the week, the Doak Walker Award, for the nation's top running back, was handed out to Gerhart. Somehow, though, a running back beat Gerhart for the Heisman?
Gerhart also shrugged off that little inconsistency.
"The Doak, I think, is a committee," he said of voters.
Apparently of smart people
Well, what are you going to do? It's over. Or perhaps not quite.
The guy who perhaps knows Toby Gerhart best had this to say.
"Toby doesn't show much emotion, but he hears what people say and he takes it all in," said his father, Todd Gerhart. "He's a competitor. He'll use all of this and move forward."
Comments