The Heisman Award is given to the most outstanding player in college football every year and the Heisman finalists have been revealed for 2012: Manti Te’o, Johnny Manziel and Collin Klein. There is no denying all three players have a lot of talent, and are very great college football players as is with every year. But again this year the winner the Heisman doesn’t matter.
Winning this award may be a huge honor to players and a big deal to some fans, but at the end of the day the Heisman is an award that has a long and interesting history but not relevant today. Past winners include Barry Sanders, Archie Griffin, Charles Woodson, Desmond Howard and Roger Staubach. These are names even the casual football fan has heard many times because of their greatness and legendary status in the sport. The Heisman has been awarded to 77 fantastic college football players and it was created in 1935. But among the names of these great players are an impressive number of players who never had great National Football League careers. The Heisman is useless because players can be absolutely amazing in college and end up failures in the NFL who spend three or maybe four years in the league before than give up and move on with their lives.
Ultimately the goal of most college football players is to make a living off of the sport in the NFL. The Heisman is not what college players should really care about and neither should the fans. Take a look at Tim Tebow, a fantastic player during his tenure at Florida, but today he is the joke of the NFL. Even his New York Jets teammates have called him “terrible.” The Heisman doesn’t guarantee a future in the sport, and there are countless examples of Heisman winners failing in the NFL.
Recent winners who have been disappointments in the NFL include the “terrible” Tim Tebow, Troy Smith, Jason White, Matt Leinart, Eric Crouch, Danny Wuerffel, Chris Weinke and Ron Dayne. All these players have won the Heisman in 1996 or later. The failures of Heisman winners in the NFL have been very common in recent memory. So, this year on Dec. 8 when the award is given out, remember that the award doesn’t mean success in the NFL, it’s really a pointless award that doesn’t deserve all the hype. The media and fans of college football make the Heisman out to be a huge deal, but it really isn’t.
