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Something has been left out of the discussion for this year's Heisman Trophy: football.
This year two of the finalists for college football's most prestigious award--Florida State's Jameis Winston and Texas A&M's Johnny Manziel--have had the press spending a lot more ink on their off-the-field activities.
Last year Manziel, a.k.a Johnny Football, became the first freshman in Heisman history to win the award as "the outstanding college football player" in the country. This season opened with Johnny as the big favorite to repeat. And why not? The best player in the country as a freshman surely would only be better as a sophomore, right?
Well, Manziel did get better this season--more on that in a minute--but only after garnering a career's worth of publicity for what the press called "bad boy" behavior. There was his early departure from football camp, the Manning Passing Academy--as in Archie, Peyton and Eli--after allegedly oversleeping. When he was given a parking ticket on the Texas A&M campus, he tweeted that "I can't wait to leave College Station," and he got himself kicked out of a University of Texas fraternity party--and as anyone who's been in Texas can tell you, to get tossed out of one of those parties you really have to misbehave.
In the eyes of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, though, none of this mattered compared to allegations that Manziel accepted payments for signing autographs.
An athlete being compensated in any way by anyone is the NCAA's cardinal sin and can cause both the athletes and the school to lose scholarships, appearances in bowl games, even victories in past seasons. Only one player, though, in college football history was pressured into giving back his Heisman, and it's not, as you might have thought, O.J. Simpson. Southern Cal's Reggie Bush is supposed to have accepted money and gifts, mostly for his family, when he was still in college back in 2006. If there's one thing the NCAA simply cannot abide, it's a player cashing in on his own celebrity. The NCAA even made USC take Bush's photo off the wall.
No one really knows for sure if Manziel took money for autographs, though if he didn't get paid for signing the hundred of photos that were floating around...