November 19, 2005: USC - 50 Fresno State - 42
Why did the Heisman Trophy become the preeminent individual award in college football? Was it merely a matter of timing, created a couple years before the unheralded Maxwell Award was established to honor the same thing? Or was it for no other reason than the name Heisman is more distinct than the name Maxwell? I like to think the Heisman has maintained its unique status for 90 years because of the trophy itself. Modeled after New York University’s Ed Smith, the bronze bust by Frank Eliscu is instantly recognizable. Certainly, it is far more aesthetically rememberable than the Maxwell, never mind the predictably benign NFL MVP Trophy. Though the game has been thoroughly revolutionized, Smith’s pose, the extended right arm to ward off imaginary defenders while safeguarding the ball in his left, remains the premiere gridiron emblem. The image is so potent that 1991 Heisman winner Desmond Howard famously brought it to life, a mimicry that has itself been mimicked by other winners over the years, including last year’s Colorado star Travis Hunter. In this data-driven age where athletic greatness is considered quantifiable and provable, the Heisman can feel anachronistic, even irrelevant. But the trophy’s modern critics have never quite grasped that it was always more about creating an image, something halfway between measured and myth.
Initially christened the Downtown Athletic Club Trophy in 1935 after the men-only New York social club that awarded it, the moniker was altered the next year not for real-life John Heisman’s gridiron accomplishments as player or coach but because he had been DAC president. And so, the inaugural Heisman winner was Yale’s Larry Kelley, who would recall that upon receiving the telegram of his victory, “didn’t even know there was such a thing,” betraying its paltry origins. Indeed, Kelley spurned professional football and even Hollywood’s offer of a movie based on his life, suggesting the sport’s often fanciful amateur ideals. That quickly changed. 1938 winner Davey O’Brien would sign with the Philadelphia Eagles, 1940 winner Tom Harmon starred in the autobiographical “Harmon of Michigan” for Columbia Pictures, and 1946 winner Glenn Davis would briefly date Elizabeth Taylor. The Heisman’s prominence grew with the game itself, assuming the aura of a gridiron Academy Award, as Dan Jenkins noted for Sports Illustrated in 1969, writing of a “war…waged as earnestly by campus publicity men and by the 1,371 writers and broadcasters who are eligible to vote as by the players themselves.” That’s why Notre Dame’s Joe Theisman literally changed the pronunciation of his last name in 1971 to rhyme with the statue, and why in Hunter’s first game at Colorado in 2023 his coach Deion Sanders was already promoting him in an on-field interview. The Heisman is something to be sold as much as won.
Even as the Downtown Athletic Club remained the award’s stewards for years, eventually giving way to The Heisman Trophy Trust in 2003, it farmed voting out, and at present, there are 928 voters comprised of 57 former winners, 870 media members, and a single vote based on the result of a fan poll. There are probably 928 complaints about voting tendencies too. Accusations of regional and positional bias as well as favoritism toward the game’s biggest brands have existed in perpetuity. ESPN, which began broadcasting the ceremony in 1994, has been charged with promoting certain players ahead of others, typically those featured on their network. Dreaded preseason Heisman watchlists set expectations and narratives that can persist despite evidence while the sheer number of voters tends to elicit a groupthink-induced feedback loop. The hype can become numbing, as it was with Louisville’s Lamar Jackson in 2016, the foregone winner for so long that by the end, certain media members were trying to gin up prosaic lightweights as alternatives. Winners, meanwhile, are often unjustly judged a second time in accordance with their success in the NFL, or lack of it, like judging an apple’s taste by eating an orange. What do I think should define a Heisman winner? I couldn’t hope to explain it, honestly, but I know a Heisman winner when I see one, and as much as Doug Flutie and Barry Sanders are, Chris Weinke and Mark Ingram are not. Reggie Bush of the University of Southern California? He is definitely a Heisman Trophy winner.
A running back, Reggie Bush’s stats were not especially eye-popping, at least, not in comparison to other winners through the years. But that’s why he was the ultimate epistemological Heisman winner, and which is why he remains the ultimate Heisman winner too. How did we know he deserved to win, and how did we know that we knew it? You knew he deserved to win simply by seeing him play, not least because when you saw him play, you could not quite believe what you were seeing. Yet, even if he won the award in what was deemed by most outlets as a landslide, when USC lost the subsequent national championship-deciding Rose Bowl to Texas and the Heisman runner-up Vince Young, so many prisoners of the moment swapped sides and suggested that Young should have won all along. These short-sighted about-faces amusingly and inadvertently epitomized the frequent Heisman critique that it only goes to the best player on the best team but even worse, implied the award should be results-based rather than a matter of taste. And though Young was impressive in imposing his physical will, Bush frequently reconfigured what was physically possible. In other words, Young was inevitable, but Bush was inconceivable. Give me the latter.
Bush was never as inconceivable as he was that year against Fresno State, an indelible 50-42 seesaw. You knew it would be a wild night at the L.A. Coliseum from the first touchdown which occurred when the ball bounced off the helmet of one Fresno State Bulldog and into the arms of another in the end zone. The Bulldogs were at the apex of their Anybody Anytime Anywhere era, the mantra instilled by coach Pat Hill to demonstrate his proletariat program’s determination to battle any willing blueblood. They knocked off a few but taking down #1 USC, the two-time defending champs riding a 32-game winning streak would have been the crowning accomplishment. The two teams slugged it out with a bevy of big plays, and Fresno State’s sustained excellence provoked Bush to go higher than ever before, ending with 513 all-purpose yards, including 294 on the ground, and scoring two touchdowns, though he set up two more with long runs that came up just short of the end zone, demonstrating power, speed, and agility in equal measure. Yet, for all he did on the night, nothing else, and nothing else in his whole career, compared to his 50-yard touchdown run with barely a minute left in the third quarter.
As a game predominantly played with brute force in close quarters, football coaches have since its inception sought ways to manufacture empty space for their fastest players. For all the formational and strategic inventions, however, no grand designs can compete with a player creating that space on all his own, as Heisman winners have done time immemorial, whether it was LSU’s Billy Cannon bulling his way to it, Nebraska’s Johnny Rodgers juking it into existence, or Texas A&M’s Johnny Manziel forging it via his unique gridiron acrobatics. But no Heisman winner ever did what Bush did on November 19, 2005, when he took a handoff, surged up the middle, and followed his blockers to the left where three converging Bulldog defenders essentially guided him out of bounds at about the 25-yard line. Or at least, appeared to guide him out of bounds at about the 25-yard line. Instead, Bush came to a dead stop on the boundary’s edge, if only for a split-second, brought the ball around his back from his left hand to his right and then ran the opposite direction, leaving dumbfounded defenders in his wake while gliding in for the touchdown. Unlike those other plays, it was not so much exhilarating as it was mystifying, a football player scoring a touchdown by pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Reggie Bush did not merely make some space, he reversed the whole damn space time continuum, and in doing so, transmogrified the facts and figures of his stat line into folklore. In other words, it was his Heisman Moment™.
That no one has ever been more deserving of the Heisman Trophy than Bush made it ironic when he became the first and only winner to vacate his trophy in 2010 after the USC football program was hit with NCAA sanctions directly related to his receiving so-called improper benefits. In lieu of the Heisman Trust retroactively rescinding Bush’s victory, he gave the trophy back of his own quasi-face-saving accord. He broke the NCAA’s Amateurism rules, it was true, and never exactly apologized for doing so, though even a cursory understanding of the NCAA’s formation and invention of the term student-athlete would reveal those rules as one-sided and cynical, and the NCAA never apologized for them either. In fact, they went to the Supreme Court to try and defend them in 2021, getting skunked 9-0. (“The NCAA’s business model would be flatly illegal in almost any other industry in America,” wrote Justice Kavanaugh in his concurring opinion.) The NCAA had sought to make Bush an example, a warning, and it backfired as the argument to return his Heisman marked a tipping point in public perception. Every supposed scandal in the twenty-tens involving a CFB player benefiting from their name, image, and likeness resonated a little less, so that by the time so-called NIL was decreed lawful, it felt preordained. There were other, more influential pioneers in the push for player compensation, like Ed O’Bannon, but in his public pillorying, Bush played an outsized role, nevertheless. He gave up his Heisman so that one day in 2024 he could reclaim it, eating the NCAA’s original sins so they could be cleansed, a fitting emblem of college sports’ great leap forward.
When you look at it through that light, what Heisman winner’s legacy could possibly compare?