Two Web site polls show Auburn quarterback Cam Newton leading the Heisman Trophy race. Voters have until Dec. 6 to decide.
The 925 ballots for the 2010 Heisman Trophy were mailed Monday from New York. The voters, mostly journalists, have until Dec. 6 to return the ballot, although in recent years the vast majority have been submitted online.
The three-week period between mailed and submitted ballots has traditionally been a time for Heisman voters to ruminate over the leading contenders, especially as they watched pivotal late-November games.
But in this college football season, there is one runaway contender in the Heisman Trophy chase: Auburn quarterback Cam Newton. And while voters will closely watch Newton’s final games against Alabama and South Carolina, they are also keeping a close eye on a news story that is changing almost daily.
Federal, state and N.C.A.A. investigators are looking into Newton’s recruitment a year ago because of allegations that he was being shopped to Mississippi State for a six-figure amount. There are also news reports that Newton left Florida in 2008 because of three instances of academic cheating.
Although there is a great deal of uncertainty about the outcome of the investigations and how long they will take, interviews this week with a cross section of Heisman voters have made three things evident:
¶If the vote were held this week, Newton would be the likely winner by a substantial margin.
¶A growing sector of the voters, however, is increasingly troubled by the reports about Newton and probably won’t vote for him unless he is exonerated before Dec. 6. If additional damaging reports about Newton surface in the next two weeks, this sector of voters will expand; many voters said they were waiting for more information before making a final decision.
¶Reggie Bush’s unprecedented forfeiture of his 2005 Heisman in September is weighing heavily on the minds of voters, who are nervous about awarding another Heisman that could be revoked in the future.
“As long as Cam Newton is eligible to play, he gets my full consideration,” said John Hunt, a Heisman voter from The Oregonian newspaper. “And if the season were to end right now, he’d get my No. 1 vote. The Heisman Trust can take away a trophy, but as voters, we’re not in that business.”
Chuck Hathcock, the sports editor of The Grenada Star in Mississippi, who also has a Heisman vote, expressed an opposing opinion.
“Sooner or later, we have to send a message about what’s right and what’s wrong,” Hathcock said. “People tell me that the kinds of things we’re hearing about with Cam Newton are just part of college football now. But I say it’s not a part of college football, and if it is, we need to stop it.”
Tom Luicci, the chairman of the New Jersey Heisman voting chapter, said any voter who had made up his mind already “isn’t being fair.”
“We should wait to see what the next couple of weeks tell us,” Luicci, who writes for The Star-Ledger of Newark, said. “The Reggie Bush situation is branded in the brain of every voter. We don’t want to be caught looking silly twice.”
(Company policy does not allow New York Times reporters to vote for athletic awards.)
There is no comparable precedent in Heisman history to what the voters are faced with this year. The trophy, first awarded by New York’s Downtown Athletic Club in 1935, has few candidacy guidelines. Voters are charged with selecting “the most outstanding player,” according to the original ballot 75 years ago. Wording has since been added to require that the winner be compliant with N.C.A.A. eligibility bylaws, and be a student in good standing at an accredited college or university.
Although good citizenship, personal integrity and principled behavior were never official guidelines for winning the trophy, in the first 30 years of the award, such virtues were valued by the voters. Newspaper accounts of the candidates’ lives on and off the field shaped voters perceptions since many of them — in an era before nationally televised games — had never seen some top candidates play.
This began to change in the mid-1950s and into the 1960s, even though Heisman winners continued to be chosen, at least in part, because voters admired something about their personal story. The award almost universally went to a running back or a quarterback from a prominent team and the voting was like any other election — it had elements of a popularity contest. But when more games were broadcast in the 1970s, and with the explosion of games on cable television after the late 1980s, the Heisman race evolved into much more of an assessment of football accomplishment.
src: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/19/sports/ncaafootball/19heisman.html?ref=sports
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