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Friedlander: Why you should still be bullish on Cam Ward’s Heisman Trophy chances
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Every good investor knows it’s smart to buy low and sell high.
That would make now a good time to jump in on Cam Ward’s Heisman Trophy action.
People began rushing for the exits of the Miami quarterback’s Heisman bandwagon from the moment Georgia Tech, quite ironically, took a knee to close out Saturday’s 28-23 upset of the 9th-ranked Hurricanes.
Even the folks in Vegas got into the act.
According to DraftKings sportsbook, Ward now has only the 4th-best odds to win college football’s most prestigious individual honor. At +700, he’s gone from the odds-on favorite to looking up at Colorado’s 2-way star Travis Hunter (+110), Oregon quarterback Dillon Gabriel (+330) and Boise State running back Ashton Jeanty (+350) on the list of candidates.
The drop is understandable. Thanks to the proliferation of social media, we live in a knee-jerk reaction society. And no one jerks their knees as quickly and as dramatically as sports fans.
But the reality of the situation is that Georgia Tech did little or nothing to damage Ward’s Heisman hopes.
It’s not as if he lost the game. His team did.
Take away the numbers on the scoreboard and look only at the numbers he put onto the stat sheet and you get a much different perspective on his performance against the Yellow Jackets.
Brent Key’s strategy of defending Ward by keeping him and the rest of the nation’s top-scoring offense off the field worked to perfection. Tech shortened the game by rolling up a nearly 10-minute advantage in time of possession.
Ward still finished with 348 yards on 25-of-39 passing with 3 touchdowns and no interceptions.
No, it’s not a video game stat line.
It is, however, nearly a mirror of his stat line for the season, underscoring just how impressive his entire body of work has been.
Through 10 games, Ward is averaging 349 yards, 24.1 completions and 3.2 touchdowns per game. All of which are among the top 2 among FBS passers. With his 74-yard scoring strike to tight end Elijah Arroyo on the game’s opening possession, Ward became the first quarterback in Miami history to throw for 30 touchdowns in a season. He’s well on his way to 40, too.
And he still has as many as 3 games remaining to add to that total before the Heisman votes are tallied.
By that time Georgia Tech will have been long forgotten, the memory replaced by the more indelible moments he’s produced over the course of the season.
Heisman moments, if you will.
The Mahomes-like flip to tight end Riley Williams to set up the winning touchdown against Virginia Tech. The 25-point second half comeback he engineered to beat Cal. The 5-touchdown barrage against Duke.
Cam Ward is a MAGICIAN 🤯 pic.twitter.com/O05hItdWxL
— Robert Griffin III (@RGIII) September 28, 2024
Those are the things the voters will remember. Not one momentary hiccup that at least in the short term had had little to no negative impact on his team’s ACC championship and Playoff chances.
The Heisman is an individual award, after all. Not a team award.
It’s also an honor in which a spectacular first impression can turn out to be more important than even the most convincing closing argument.
That was the case in 2016 in a Heisman race that came down to a pair of ACC quarterbacks.
Clemson’s Deshaun Watson won the head-to-head matchup with Louisville’s Lamar Jackson both on the scoreboard and the stat sheet. And he compiled better numbers over the final few weeks of a season that saw his Tigers win the ACC championship and Jackson’s Cardinals lose their final 2 games.
But it could be argued that the Heisman had already been decided by then.
The competition was essentially over in mid-September once Jackson accounted for 5 touchdowns and more than 400 yards of total offense in back-to-back wins against Syracuse and No. 2 Florida State. Performances he punctuated with what has become known as the Heisman Hurdle in which he leaped over an Orange defender on the way into the end zone.
Though Ward’s early work this year wasn’t quite that spectacular, it was good enough to create a buzz that reinforced his considerable preseason hype as the nation’s top transfer and more importantly, kept his name at the forefront of the Heisman conversation.
There’s no better way to promote a campaign – marketing, political or otherwise – than with name recognition.
And Ward has gained more of that than any of his fellow Heisman frontrunners.
Hunter might be doing things at Colorado no college football player since Charles Woodson in 1997 has done. But he plays for a team whose national attention is diverted to a coach whose personality is even larger than his star player’s massive snap count.
Ashton Jeanty?
Yes, he absolutely dominated Oregon (192 yards, 3 rushing TDs) and is on the verge of crossing 2,000 rushing yards and winning the NCAA rushing title. But many still view him as a guy putting up huge rushing numbers for a G5 team that few if anyone has actually seen play.
And while Gabriel is the best player on what is currently the nation’s best team, he’s thrown for 646 fewer yards and 10 fewer touchdowns than Ward.
None of this is to suggest that Ward has already wrapped up the award. As we experienced with an actual election during the past few weeks, there’s no accurate way of predicting how these things will turn out until all the ballots are cast.
But the market can usually be counted on to eventually bounce back after experiencing a slight drop. That’s why the smart money is still bullish on the Miami quarterback’s Heisman stock.
Even if the oddsmakers aren’t.
Award-winning columnist Brett Friedlander has covered the ACC and college basketball since the 1980s.
