Heisman Voter Advocates Taking Reggie Bush’s Heisman If He’s Ruled Ineligible

News on potential USC sanctions and rulings on eligibility of previous players could come as soon as next week according to multiple reports. One of the focal points of that news will be Heisman winner Reggie Bush, a player whose eligibility has been heavily scrutinized. ↵↵One Heisman voter, Tom Shatel of the Omaha World Herald, is in favor of taking away Bush’s Heisman award if he’s found to have been ineligible. There are 925 Heisman voters, so one man in Nebraska does not a movement make, but on the heels of the AP re-voting on Brian Cushing’s NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year award, it makes for an interesting story to follow. ↵

↵↵⇥ I think we should have higher standards for national awards like this. I think the Heisman should and does stand for something bigger than scoring touchdowns. I think it’s absolutely okay to charge every winner with upholding the honor of this award their entire lives. And if they weren’t even eligible when they won it, that’s more than fair game.↵↵A re-vote now would be problematic because our perceptions of players are often colored after the fact by how they did in future years and in the NFL. (If you don’t remember, this was how the players finished in the voting: 1. Bush (2,541); 2. Vince Young (1,608); 3. Matt Leinart (797); 4. Brady Quinn (191). No one else cracked 100 points.) Shatel proposes three options if Bush is ineligible and makes his pick for which one he’d choose.↵↵⇥ 1. Bush should be able to keep the Heisman.↵⇥
↵⇥2. Bush should have his Heisman stripped and the award should be vacated for that year.↵⇥
↵⇥3. Bush should have his Heisman stripped and it should go to the runner-up that year, in this case Vince Young of Texas. ↵⇥↵⇥I would vote No. 2. My only problem with handing it to the runner-up is that, in any given year, the runner-up may not have deserved the Heisman that year and just ended up second.↵⇥

↵↵Vacating doesn’t seem like the worst idea, and it seems to follow suit with what we see when the NCAA takes action in vacating Final Fours and the like. The names are simply scrubbed. You don’t award a Final Four to a team that lost in the Elite Eight, so you wouldn’t simply elevate the No. 2 vote getter to the winner’s spot. Still, vacating always feels kind of hollow and meaningless. He still scored all of those touchdowns and did those flips into the end zone. No matter how many times you remove his names from a record book, it happened, so it’s really a case of too little, too late, regardless of what the voters decide.↵↵(H/T to SPORTSbyBROOKS)↵

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