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I’ll have expanded thoughts on this year’s Heisman race tomorrow and will put up more pictures and information from the weekend when I get back to Los Angeles on Monday.
I will say this, though: the HeismanPundit.com Heisman Poll got it right again, as it predicted a top four of Ingram, Gerhart, McCoy and Suh (tie)–see the left side bar. Pretty darn good. I also predicted that the final vote would for the first time feature four players with at least 800 points–and that’s what happened.
Thanks to everyone who checked out the site during these past few months. Be sure to keep coming back as I’ll be plugging along, Heisman race or no Heisman race. I’ll be releasing my All-American teams next week and then it’s time to take a gander at the bowl matchups and recruiting. I’ll also start to formulate my early candidates for the 2010 Heisman.
Never too early to get a beat on the race for the most prestigious award in sports.
HP
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This entry was posted on Saturday, December 12th, 2009 at 9:07 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
BOOOOOO. Fans voting for this award turned the heisman race into an allstar ballot. A travesty that McCoy has the most wins at in cfb history and never won the Heisman.
least deserving winner EVER. this was east coast bias, plain and simple. Gerhart should have ran away with it, but even McCoy and Suh would have been more deserving.
and why was Tebow even invited? his vote total was closer to Spiller’s than to Suh’s!
this was just a disgusting SEC lovefest all-around.
Least yards per game by a winning RB since Archie Griffin’s horribly undeserving second Heisman. What a sham.
Had Gerhart, Suh, or McCoy taken it home I would have been content. Ingram winning the award shows the voting method’s and who votes needs to be rethought.
DruggyBear runs a California-based blog ridiculing Tebow’s tears, and now he wants to complain about bias because his guy didn’t get selected? I saw a poll at foxsports where it showed the demographics of all online voters, and Gerhart only had a majority in California, Washington and Oregon.
Bias anyone?
Ingram grabbed a majority from states all over the country, it was not restricted to the east coast alone. And it is funny to hear anyone say there is a bias towards Alabama.
Gerhart averaged less yds per carry and ran the ball something like 80 more times than Ingram. 17 (65%) of his touchdowns came within 5 yds of the endzone – 11 of those within 2 yds. Simply put, he had more opportunities to score TDs.
Ingram also sat on the sidelines for the most part during three blowout games against North texas, Chatanooga and FIU. He averaged almost 12 yds in one game on 8 carries, but sat out the rest of the game and watched his backup rush for 118yds.
So it isn’t all about raw stats. It is about coming up big when the team needs you in crunch situations. His best games were against the toughest defenses.
Raw stats, anyone?
YARDS PER CARRY
Ingram: 6.2
Gerhart: 5.6
RECEIVING YARDAGE
Ingram 327
Gerhart 149
TOTAL YARDS PER SCRIMMAGE
Gerhart 1885
Ingram 1864
FUMBLES LOST
Ingram 1
Gerhart 5
TOP 20 DEFENSES ON SCHEDULE
Ingram 6
Gerhart 0
I’m not here to dis Gerhart. He had a great year and no one should’ve complained if he won the Heisman. But some people are ragging on Ingram in this thread, and that’s hogwash.
The fact is that being helping a national championship contender is an integral part of the Heisman criteria. Always has been. You can win it without doing that, but you have to do something really special, like past winners Barry Sanders and Tim Tebow.
Under that established criteria, Gerhart just has not done anything to put him ahead of Ingram. His best bragging point is 26 TDs to Ingram’s 18, but their total yardage is essentially the same and Ingram beats him in yards per carry and has significantly less fumbles.
Once you see that their stats are similar and Ingram was key to his team getting to the BCS Championship game vs Gerhart being key to his team making it to a bowl, you see that Ingram really was the right choice under the established criteria.
Doing a little something to make up for a past of Alabama’s many great stars – Don Hutson, Bart Starr, Joe Namath, Kenny Stabler, John Hannah, Wilbur Jackson, Ozzie Newsome, Tony Nathan, Dwight Stephenson, Cornelius Bennett, Bobby Humphrey,Derrick Thomas, David Palmer, and Shaun Alexander, just to name a few – never getting their due? That’s not the reason Ingram deserved the award, but it makes some pretty good icing on the cake.
And Ingram came up shot when his team needed him most in Alabama’s biggest rivalry. Ingram was benched against Auburn. The game winning drive starred his back-up.
No player who deserves the Heisman is benched on a game winning drive against their biggest rival.
“TOP 20 DEFENSES ON SCHEDULE
Ingram 6
Gerhart 0″
Isn’t that a little misleading. Since they are both running backs, shouldn’t you be looking at the run defenses they faced?
Top 20 run defenses on schedule
Ingram 1
Gerhart 1
Ingram got 4.0 yards per carry in that game, Gerhart got 4.6
If you want to look at top 25 run defenses, Ingram only played against 1, Gerhart 3, and he still averaged 4.6 against those three top 25 run defenses.
The run defenses that Ingram played against averaged 67th in the nation (if we completely ignore Chattanooga, although if we do that his YPC drops to 6). The run defenses that Gerhart played against averaged 59th in the nation.
Ingram had 119 yards per game, Gerhart had 145.
Tebow and Bradford should get a little of the credit for Igram’s Heisman. Four years ago there is no way Ingram is even in the discussion with those kinds of numbers as a sophomore.
Ingram was just as important in the Auburn game as ever, and let me tell you why. Auburn went into thatgame under teh assumption they would probably lose, but they wanted to accomplish at least one thing, and that was to end Ingram’s bid for a Heisman and to give their RB bragging rights as the best RB in the state.
This is a fact.
Another fact is that any defense can stop any RB if they want to gamble and assume run every time he is in the backfield. AU did precisely that, putting eight men in the box to spy Ingram. Once Alabama figured this out, Greg McElroy picked apart the secondary and used Ingram occasionally just to keep them unbalanced. That is how Bama won the game.
Yes, the PAC 10 teams on paper seem to have better rushing defenses,but is that because the PAC 10 has better rushing defenses or just mediocre rushing offenses?
Consider that as far as yds per carry, the SEC has 7 teams (not including Bama) in the top 40 whereas the PAC-10 has only 3 (not including Stanford).
Five of those SEC teams are top 20, only two of the PAC 10 teams fall in that category.
On overall rush attempts, the SEC has five teams in the top 20 whereas the PAC 10 has only one.
So obviously a conference that plays itself a lot,a nd doesn’t rush as much as other conferences, will automatically have an advantage when it comes to national rankings in rush defense.
Although it’s true that Auburn successfully keyed on Ingram, I also think he was off his game a little bit in that game.
But it’s worth noting that Auburn was at the best Alabama’s 6th-toughest game on the season (after Florida, LSU, VA Tech, Ole Miss, South Carolina, and Arkansas). Against the other 5, Ingram averaged 170 rushing and 36 receiving.
Ingram made the difference between a team that is playing for the national championship and a team going to the Capitol One Bowl at best.
Are Gerhart and Su legit candidates? Absolutely, and I’m not saying otherwise. But people who are saying this award is a “joke,” etc. do not have a clue. Ingram wins under the traditional criteria of best play on the biggest stages.
the Pac-10 bears some responsibility for this travesty as well. why didn’t they campaign independently for Gerhart?
the lack of a championship game doesn’t help either ok Stanford may not have been in it this year but why don’t they just add BYU and Utah and go Pac-12 already? that would strengthen the western voting bloc in Utah and also Nevada, where many fans of those schools live.
not to mention what it would do to help the Pac-10 in the BCS….
The Pac 10′s reputation has taken a bit of a hit due to their opposition to expansion, a conference championship game and playoffs. But they remain one of the most favored conferences in Heisman voting:
Counting each year by each team in a conference as a chance to win and dividing by the number of Heismans shows which conferences have been favored. From most favored to least favored:
Big 12: 168/4 = 42.0 chances/Heisman
Pac 10: 439/10 = 43.9
Big 10: 754/16 = 47.1
SEC: 852/10 = 85.2
So despite being a great source of talent, the SEC has been least favored and the Pac 10 and Big 12 have been most favored.
Hey Hook em,
McCoy took that most wins record from David Greene at Georgia. Are you saying that Greene should have won a Heisman too? Most wins is so team dependent over a 4 year period that it can not be considered a justification for a Heisman.
HP,
If you’re gonna brag about your poll getting all four finalists right and brag about predicting 4×800+ point finalists, then be even-handed and point out that you missed on your personal prediction of McCoy.
So if we’re talking about 2010 already… will Ingram have a better chance of repeating than most simply because he put up mediocre numbers this year? If he’s able to top it next year, which is a pretty good bet, how many people will point to the stats and say “he had a better year than his Heisman season!”?
No way Ingram wins next year. Richardson is going to take even more carries away from him. And there is no way voters give a second Heisman to a guy with mediocre numbers. He isn’t even going to be on the short list. The voters who kept him off their ballots this year will certainly do the same next year to avoid giving 2 Heismans to a player who is barely above average.
Ingram’s best chance at winning another Heisman is to transfer to a Pac 10 school. Where 4 more losses, 4 more fumbles, and 42 more touches for 21 more yards would more than double his vote total.
Ingram wouldn’t get 1,542 yards in the Pac-10 since he’d only have a 12 game schedule–it took him 13 to rush for what he did–and wouldn’t get to play 7 home games and three games against non-BCS competition.
By the way, since when do people add receiving yards to a back’s rushing totals to pad his stats? This is the first year I’ve seen that happen. Running backs are running backs…let’s go by what he ran for.
Gerhart rushed the ball 62 more times than Ingram. That’s more opportunities for Gerhart, not less. At 6.2 yards/carry Ingram would have netted 384 more yards with the same number of opportunities.
I love the fact that you’ve got to pretend Ingram’s reception yards shouldn’t count. It was a case study in denial when you claimed Ingram only had 113 yards against Florida. In reality, Ingram had 189 yards and his 69 yard reception was the play of the game. Ignoring receptions doesn’t make them go away, but it might explain why you insist Ingram is unworthy.
I wonder how much higher Ingram’s yard/carry average would have been if he had played behind Stanford’s All-American offensive line?
HP,
No one should add receiving yards to rushing totals-that’s just stupid. But you can’t ignore all purpose yardage either. Reggie Bush NEVER would have won the Heisman on his rushing totals alone.
Overall I agree that Ingram is the least impressive Heisman RB that I can remember at least back to 1970. I am not saying he didn’t deserve the award. Nobody else was significantly more impressive this year. And please stop it with what would have happened had Ingram or Gerhardt played for another team. You don’t know. Ingram might have broken down with more carries. Gerhardt might have wilted under the SEC championship pressure or behind a less stellar line. Coaches might have used them differently. You can really only go by what actually happened.