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The Hyped Man Trophy Heisman is coveted, but its credibility has been diminishedPosted: Wednesday September 04, 2002 12:30 PM
OK, football fans, who do you think is the Most Valuable Player in the NFL this year? You say: Who could possibly know? The season hasn't even started yet. Well, sure, but the argument about this year's best college football player began well before the season started. It does every year. It's the race for the Heisman Trophy -- or, as it should be known, the Hyped Man Trophy. No matter how fine a season you have as a college player, you really can't be called the best unless you've had enough preseason publicity to be declared a Heisman contender before any games are played. It would be as if the Oscar nominees for best actor were determined before any film was shot, and most of the voting was done by people who had only watched a couple of scenes. Hundreds of sportswriters vote for the Heisman. I received a ballot for a couple of years. I was no more qualified to choose the best college player than I would have been to determine the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, but, like everybody else, I read all the publicity releases, studied the statistics, and made a thoughtful decision based on who best influenced me. It was great. It was the one time I felt like a United States senator. And the Hyped Man hype has become even worse since I was an expert voter. Now college athletic departments provide posters, CD-ROMs and Web site addresses to tell voters what they don't know about players they may never see in action. The University of Oregon, which I used to think was a fairly sensible athletic school, paid $250,000 for a huge billboard of its Heisman candidate outside Madison Square Garden last year. Somewhat more modestly, Marshall College and the University of Louisville have sent out hundreds of bobblehead dolls of their nominees to impressionable voters. The truly amazing thing about the Hyped Man Trophy, too, is that it has become at least as important as who wins the National Championship. Maybe that's because -- as ridiculous as the Heisman election process is -- college football is also the only sport in the world where the championship is primarily decided by polls and computers, rather than by a tournament. Who can take it seriously? Incredibly, college football kicked off on Aug. 22 this year, as the NCAA now permits schools to play 12 regular-season games. Inasmuch as there are now 28 bowl games, that means almost half of Division I schools will play 13 games -- almost as many as an NFL team. Plus, there is mandatory spring practice and daily weightlifting the rest of the year. Yet the NCAA refuses to sanction a championship tournament because that would take the student-athletes away from their books for too long. So, everybody just speculates on who will be, allegedly, the most "outstanding" player in college football, even if everybody knows it's mostly a PR contest and that no matter how outstanding you are, you can't win unless you're a quarterback or a running back on a winning team in a major conference with a diligent PR man. Still, the Heisman only gets more and more attention. Almost a half-century ago, a sportswriter named Lawrence Robinson of the New York World-Telegram wrote: "The people who take the Heisman seriously are the same ones who insist the world is flat." The World-Telegram is long gone. The Hyped Man thrives. Just be careful of that first step off the edge of the earth. It's a long way down. Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer Frank Deford is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com and appears each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. His new novel, "An American Summer" (Sourcebooks Trade), is available now at bookstores everywhere. |
