11 thoughts on “Twitter: Early Heisman projection: …”

  1. David K.

    Tebow doesn’t even get an invite to New York is my guess. I think they should wait til after the bowl games personally, give the players one last chance in big games to make a statement.

  2. Brendan Loy

    If Stiff Arm Trophy’s projections are in the right ballpark, Tebow is right on the fence in terms of getting an invite or not. I believe the decision of where to put the invitation “cut line” is purely subjective, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets that fifth invite, as a sort of career achievement award, provided there is sufficient space between him and Spiller in the tally. If it’s very close between Tebow and Spiller for #5, I imagine they’ll invite neither rather than inviting both. But if they can reasonably justify inviting Tebow, I imagine they will invite him.

  4. David K.

    Too bad, Tebow doesn’t really deserve to go based on his performance this year. There are a number of other players who have done better that won’t get the honor.

  5. David K.

    For example, oh i don’t know, Kellen Moore and Andy Dalton who both lead their teams to undefeated seasons AND have higher QB ratings than Tebow….

  7. B. Minich

    I don’t know, I wouldn’t mind seeing more invites. What’s so special about inviting three guys? There are normally more the three good players! Why not six? Or ten? More then ten seems excessive, but some years, three is too few.

  8. Jazz

    He doesn’t get talked about that much, but the guy among those five who is the most surefire NFL Hall of Famer (assuming he stays healthy) has to be Ndamukoh Suh. It was my impression that Musberger and Herbstreit sort of downplayed his teh awesomeness against Texas, and not just the sacks, but the all-time, unbelieveable, two-gap dominance against the Texas O-line.

    When Texas ran stunts, pulling offensive linemen to create gaps between the tackles, Suh looked like Andre the Giant in Princess Bride. The only surprising thing is that Pellini didn’t go to a 10-back formation, with only Suh on the line.

    Since Haynesworth got $100 million from the Redskins, I expect that Suh will get twice that from a team with a 3-4 defense when he hits free agency.

  9. Brendan Loy

    Far from “not being talked about much,” it appears that Suh may, in fact, win the Heisman. It’s between him, Ingram and Gerhart, according to Stiff Arm Trophy (formerly Heisman Projection), which has yet to be wrong in making a projection of who will win. Their average percentage error since 2002 is 1.9%, and right now they’re saying Ingram 41.4%, Gerhart 39.7%, Suh 37.2%, with a bunch more ballots still to come (presumably). So you really can’t distinguish among those top 3, but it appears very likely it’ll be one of that trio — not McCoy (31.3%), and certainly not Tebow (12.2%). (And yes, the percentages add up to more than 100%.)

    It’s funny, though. By all accounts , C.J. Spiller had an amazing game, albeit in a (just barely) losing effort, against Georgia Tech on Saturday, just like Suh did against Texas. And, by all accounts, it was Suh’s performance against the Longhorns that propelled him from Heisman afterthought — just hoping for a the consolation prize of a ticket to NYC — to potential winner. This was possible because the BCS implications of the Texas game were so huge that everybody watched it, including both Heisman voters and media opinion-makers, thus giving Suh a grand stage to show his stuff. Meanwhile, because the Clemson-GT game was being played at the same time as the epic Texas-Nebraska game, its audience was mostly limited to the players’ mothers. Which invites the question:

    If Georgia Tech, instead of Texas, had been vying for a spot in the national championship game, and the teams and players had performed identically otherwise, would Spiller, instead of Suh, be the candidate making a dramatic late push for the Heisman, based on his Saturday-night performance? And would Suh be the sixth-place finisher, left sitting at home behind the clearly undeserving career-achievement-honorable-mention Tebow?

  10. B. Minich

    Ndamukoh Suh is one of the coolest names when I’ve heard it pronounced correctly.

    And I like your hypothetical. I’ve never liked the Heisman, because it tends to reward the much touted players. I hope Suh wins, because that would be better then the glamor positions like QBs and WRs winning year in and year out.

  11. Jazz

    I should have written “Ndamukong Suh doesn’t get talked about enough” (as opposed to ‘not much’), since as you say, he is certainly in the Heisman conversation.

    Really, though, if “Best Player” means “Value over replacement player”, there’s no contest between Suh, Ingram and Gerhardt. The hypothetical reversal of Suh and Spiller certainly has practical implications, but it understates the fact that we have never seen an interior defensive lineman have a game like Suh’s.

    The 4.5 sacks are cool enough. Just for logistical reasons, its hard for anyone lining up on the interior of the d-line to accrue 4.5 sacks in a season, much less one game. Beyond that, though, Suh dominated the line in a way we really haven’t seen before, in a way that was apparent in real time on tv, even though tv cameras don’t tend to focus on line play.

    Spiller certainly put up great numbers against Ga. Tech, and if he had a wider audience he might have gotten more Heisman buzz. OTOH, his team did lose, and as impressive as he was, we’ve seen that all before.

    Suh also lost. But we’ve never seen his like before. He’s talked about a lot, but somehow, for his sheer uniqueness, my impression is he’s not talked about enough.

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