Re: New Story: The Great Heisman Heist of 2016

Scout Team [171]

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LJ effectively locked down the Heisman . . .

Feb 3, 2017, 4:51 PM

when Louisville hung 63 on Florida State. In fact, Louisville was penciled into the College Football Playoff that day too, but then they ran into a buzzsaw in Death Valley on October 15. Yet, even after Louisville came out on the losing end 42-36, all the scuttlebutt from the pundits & self-styled "experts" was that "the better team lost" or that "Louisville got robbed by the officials". Afterward, whenever Louisville blew out some team, it was just more validation of a decision that had already been made. And whenever Louisville struggled against a purportedly "lesser" opponent but came back to win - remember their 32-25 win against UVa - that was spun as a "Heisman moment". And when Louisville started to fade down the stretch, losing to Houston & then Kentucky, that didn't even get talked about - this race is over; just get those Heisman ballots in now!

Clemson & DW4, by contrast, were regarded with suspicion, contempt even, by the same cadre of talking heads all season long. As the authors noted, they latched on to less-than-spectacular performances against Auburn & Troy (a game in which we had some issues with our O-line) to build a narrative that "Watson had regressed" & that
Clemson was not a "playoff-caliber team". The overtime win against N.C. State just fed this narrative further, especially after Louisville blew them out the following week. (That one especially hurt DW4's chances, because millions of people were watching a game we almost lost & in which he threw a pick-6.) Frankly, I suspect this attitude had its roots in an anti-ACC bias among much of the college football pundit class, who were skeptical of us because we were failing to blow out every ACC opponent we faced, while Louisville (for a time at least) was. As we all know, Dabo Swinney has never deliberately run up the score on an outmatched opponent, while Bobby Petrino won't hesitate to do it. Perhaps this factored in as well - that we never tried for "style points".

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And the finalists are chosen by votes. I learned that while researching the Finalists this season. Once I read the process, it made me much less angry about CJ being "snubbed" as we have said all this time.

4. How are the finalists determined?

This is one of the most misunderstood parts of the Heisman process. You will often hear media or fans complain that a certain player was snubbed by not being invited to the Heisman ceremony. But the finalists are not determined arbitrarily. Starting from the understanding that there will always be a minimum of three finalists, whether or not more will be invited is determined by how close the fourth-place finisher's point total is to that of the third place finisher's, how close the fifth-place finisher's is to that of the fourth-place finisher's and so on.

In the 2008 Heisman vote, for instance, Florida's Tim Tebow finsihed third with 1,575 points. The fourth-place finisher, Graham Harrell of Texas Tech, totaled 213 points. Because of the huge gap between those totals, Harrell was not invited to the ceremony, which featured just three finalists. In 2010, Kellen Moore's fourth place finish of 635 points brought him much closer to LaMichael James' third-place finish of 916, so Moore was included as one of the four finalists. The fifth-place finisher in 2010, Justin Blackmon of Oklahoma State, had just 105 points. There was a clear demarcation of support between him and Moore, so the finalists were capped at four.

In other words, the closeness of the point totals determines the final number of finalists. Where major gaps exist, that's where you get a cutoff.

http://heisman.com/sports/2014/9/15/GEN_0915140346.aspx

New Story: The Great Heisman Heist of 2016