Reggie Bush deserved the 2005 Heisman over Vince Young

I’ve always been a fan of the Baseball Hall of Fame’s selection process: Some years, five guys are determined to be deserving of induction, and other years, none is.

Granted, this is in the hands of baseball writers — maybe the most self-aggrandizing of any sport, which is saying something — so you get a lot of unnecessary nuance. “Well, I view him as more of a third-ballot Hall-of-Famer than a second-ballot Hall-of-Famer” and whatnot. But there is a clear declaration: Sometimes more guys are deserving than others.

The 2005 season perhaps brought more worthy Heisman candidates than any other year this century. Let’s put it this way:

Thanks to hindsight, we like to pretend the 2005 Heisman voting was a miscarriage of justice — that second-place Vince Young was dramatically a better choice in early December than winner Reggie Bush was. Young’s performance against USC in the BCS title game later proved who was the deserving winner, right?

Come on. If anything, it was a miscarriage of timing.

I scoff at award voting (especially Heisman voting) as much as anyone. Don’t even get me started on 2009, when voters gave the award to maybe the fourth- or fifth-best Alabama running back ever instead of Ndamukong Suh, the most dominant defensive player of his era and, by leaps and bounds, the best player of the season.

Either Young or Bush would have run away with the voting in 2009, 2006, or 2001 (Eric Crouch). But you can only pick one guy, and let’s not pretend Bush wasn’t an incredible damn running back.

Watch this, and then watch it again. It is the most enjoyable thing you will do today.

Young was a force of nature. It took him a redshirt year and about a season and a half to reach fifth gear, but once he reached it, Texas was damn near unstoppable. The Horns got shutout by Oklahoma in 2004, then Young got benched the next week after a couple of awful interceptions against Missouri. But the light switch flipped on, and Young won his last 20 games in a UT uniform.

Bush, however, was a cheat code from the start of his career to the finish.

You know the star athlete who’s faster than everybody else and can get away with stuff you’re not supposed to get away with? You know the high school running back who reverses field like four times and makes a bunch of crazy decisions but scores on an 80-yard run because he’s simply on a different plane of existence than everybody else?

Yeah, that was Bush in college. (At least, until his final game.) What he did to poor Fresno State should have been illegal. We should be forever thankful that the USC defense laid an egg and turned the Fresno game into a 50-42 shootout — it meant Bush had to stay on the field and keep making incredible plays.

He did this while sharing carries with another all-world back (LenDale White, who rushed for 1,302 yards that year). And in his last two games before ballots were due, he rushed 47 times for 554 yards.

This was a virtually perfect Heisman résumé.

Bush rushed for 1,740 yards in just 200 carries, an insane clip of 8.7 yards per carry. He also caught 37 passes for 478 yards. He is the only Heisman-winning back of the last 20 years to average more than 6.1 per carry. Hell, Barry Sanders averaged only 7.6 yards per carry. Barry Sanders!

Bush gained 2,218 yards in just 237 touches. 2015 winner Derrick Henry gained 92 more yards, but in 169 more touches. Ingram gained 226 fewer yards in 66 more touches. 1999 winner Ron Dayne gained 173 fewer yards in 101 more touches.

Bush was lightning in a bottle. If he didn’t win the Heisman, they should have officially made it a QBs-only award.

The Trojans owned college football in the calendar year of 2005. Depending on how you define the terms, USC was either a dynasty in the making or was already a dynasty. Pete Carroll signed the best recruiting classes and put star athletes in position to make star plays.

And there’s a perfectly valid case that the Trojans were the better team than Texas for the season as a whole. One of the hazards of football’s short season is that we have only a best-of-one series to decide our champion. Texas won the one game that counted (and yes, it counted), and good for the Horns. They were incredible, too.

But let’s not pretend USC wasn’t amazing or that Bush only won because he played for a glamorous program. Texas is kind of a marquee name in its own right.

Let’s put this all another way: Bush won the Heisman by 933 points, despite his own quarterback finishing third and potentially siphoning off some votes. This was a runaway victory, and it was warranted.

If we want to start picking the Heisman winner after the postseason, then fine. Let’s do that. But these are the rules we’ve got, and without knowing what would happen in the national title game against Texas*, Bush was an easy, obvious choice.

Hindsight has led us to further bolster Young’s case and denigrate Bush because of the NCAA investigation that uncovered the impermissible benefits Bush received. Again, that came out after the vote. And, well, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that he wasn’t the only Heisman winner to get inducements. It’s been baked into the college football cake since about 1890.

I thought it was unnecessary to strip him of the Heisman, as if he’d done something criminal, but I got it. (I don’t, on the other hand, get mandatory disavowment of him. He played. We all saw it.)

It wasn’t the fault of 2005 Heisman voters that they could pick only one player, and Young was more than worthy. But they still got it right.

* Young was virtually perfect in that game, but let’s not forget Bush had 177 yards in 19 touches. It wasn’t his fault that he wasn’t on the field for what could have been the game-deciding play. This isn’t exactly the only time a Carroll team has overthought things with a title on the line.