BY EMILY BADGER
The Orlando Sentine
In that dead period between spring football and August two-a-days, there's not much to do in the college football war room other than staple old stat packs together and strategize for that
ultimate public-relations showdown - the battle for the Heisman Trophy.
Popular logic says the award, arguably the most prestigious in all of college sports, demands more of
its winners than just fat stats and a top-20 team finish. Other sacrifices at the altar often include
life-sized billboards, CD-ROM displays and generally anything that might garner a buck on eBay.
Inside the war room, the theory goes that such mass-media blitzes can garner votes for players. And
so several Heisman campaigns, even with the first kickoff more than three months away, already are under way.
Minnesota has sent out its first round of postcard-sized fliers hyping tailback Laurence
Maroney, along with All-American candidates at center (Greg Eslinger) and guard (Mark Setterstrom). And last week, Memphis unveiled its campaign for tailback
DeAngelo Williams _a NASCAR-themed race-for-the-Heisman pitch built around a 7 1/2-inch
model stock car that will be mailed to potential voters this summer.
"Our main objective is to get something a media person would receive and not throw in the trash," said
Memphis sports information director Jennifer Rodrigues, who designed the campaign. "Even if the
media person gave it to a son, maybe that kid will walk in the room on Sept. 5, and say, `Hey, dad, this
guy is on TV right now.'''
Sept. 5 is a big day for Memphis, a Conference USA team that rarely plays on national TV. That afternoon, Memphis opens the season against Ole Miss on ESPN.
Rodrigues doesn't want to imply that her program can't live up to the same standards as an Oklahoma or USC, "but we're realistic." And so she knows her staff will have to work that much harder to promote a player who doesn't play for a "power" school.
One of those schools is USC, which isn't doing a whole lot to remind anyone of quarterback Matt Leinart's existence. He won the thing last year, which may be the best promotion in itself (although Oklahoma's Jason White thought his victory in 2003 was more of a drag than an advantage last year). Leinart and teammate Reggie Bush, a tailback, are among the early front-runners this year, allowing USC's sports information staff to lay low and hang onto the thousands of dollars other schools will spend on campaigns.
"We always went into a season believing that you had to have a lot of the foundation laid, that you had to change the candidate's name from Joe Smith to `Joe Smith comma Heisman Trophy candidate,' " USC Sports Information Director Tim Tessalone said. "What we found out in Carson (Palmer's) case was we didn't do any of that."
Palmer won the Heisman in 2002 but wasn't even on the cover of the team's media guide that season (safety Troy Polamalu was). A quarterback with an unpredictable track record, Palmer was on no one's
short list at the beginning of the season. But a sterling performance on the field, and in national TV
games, helped him overcome that.
"The voters out there are smart enough to understand and realize who the best players are, the best player is," Tessalone said. "I think they got it right the last couple of years."
(One reason he says that may be that two of the past three winners are from USC, but we digress.) Low-key campaigns actually may pay off. A recent Ph.D. dissertation showed that voters place little stock in team-sponsored reminders and memorabilia.
Clark Haptonstall, the director of the sports management program at Rice, recently completed his
dissertation on what influences Heisman voters. A former SID at Marshall, Haptonstall ran Heisman
campaigns for dark-horse candidates Randy Moss and Chad Pennington. Moss was invited to New York in 1997 as one of the four finalists that year. Haptonstall knew his guy had no chance of winning (Michigan cornerback Charles Woodson did), but he sat in the Downtown Athletic Club wondering if his $7,000 campaign had had any effect.
Last year, the Heisman Trophy Trust gave permission for Haptonstall to survey all of its 921 voters.
Sixty-one percent of voters who actually submitted a ballot the year White was selected responded.
Media members and past winners vote on the award, and the names of the media members are kept secret. Haptonstall still doesn't know their identities - the surveys were mailed through the Heisman Trust - but he now knows that voters are most influenced by personal observations, statistics and newspaper coverage.
On a list of 30 variables, various team-sponsored promotions made up the least effective tactics.
"Player labeled by his university as a `Heisman Trophy candidate''' ranked 28th. Large billboards - as Oregon famously did in Times Square for quarterback Joey Harrington in 2001 - ranked last.
"I won't go as far as to say it doesn't help raise the visibility of the university, but it does not help
their candidate gain votes from Heisman Trophy voters," Haptonstall said.
Voters want to be persuaded by experts, he said, and they view SIDs more as propagandists. "They're saying, `What would I expect them to say?' They see it as almost publicity hucksters."
Many of the biggest programs seem to have already figured this out. But while schools such as USC don't need to politick for votes, smaller programs will continue to feel the pressure to overcome the
publicity advantage inherent in playing in the major conferences.
Florida isn't planning much for quarterback Chris Leak. Neither is Oklahoma for tailback Adrian
Peterson. Michigan, which has candidates in quarterback Chad Henne and tailback Michael Hart, has
never done anything to promote individual players.
"We don't feel like we need to go that extra mile and come up with bobblehead dolls, all that stuff,"
Oklahoma assistant SID Chris Freet said. "We're on TV constantly."
But Bowling Green must maximize the effect of its two early games on national TV for quarterback Omar Jacobs, who remains almost unknown nationally despite throwing for 4,002 yards, with 41 touchdowns and just four interceptions, last season.
"That's going to be the impetus as to whether or not a campaign will be viable for someone at a school like Bowling Green," Sports Information Director J.D. Campbell said of early games at Wisconsin and Boise State. "You've seen Chad Pennington, Byron Leftwich, Ben Roethlisberger and Alex Smith come from non-BCS schools and compete very well for the award, and we think Omar is that type of player."
Minnesota has a similar disadvantage even though it plays in the Big Ten.
"We're one of those schools that we're not a Michigan and Ohio State or USC, but we're not in that lower level," Minnesota football media relations director Shane Sandersfeld said.
In that middle netherworld, there is always the danger that an overzealous campaign can come off looking foolish. Purdue quarterback Kyle Orton wasn't a Heisman finalist last year even though the school went to great lengths to promote him.
"Everybody is saying all this Heisman talk, but like Purdue last year, you can have two games where things don't go your way," Sandersfeld said, "and all that hype is down the drain."
Given the importance voters place on standout performances in major TV games, Haptonstall isn't
optimistic that less-powerful programs and non-BCS contenders have truly closed the gap. In the past 20 years, BYU quarterback Ty Detmer is the only Heisman winner to have come from outside the six BCS conferences and Notre Dame.
Haptonstall had dinner in New York in `97 with his counterparts from Washington State, Michigan and
Tennessee, the other schools who had finalists that season. Michigan had done nothing to promote Woodson. Tennessee had done everything it could think of for Peyton Manning.
"If he doesn't win, nobody's going to say it wasn't because we didn't try," Haptonstall said he was told
by a UT official.
That is the other half of the mentality, regardless of whether voters are out there filing away the fliers or
sporting their Ty Detmer ties.
"There's a lot of pressure on my part to make sure I don't get a phone call from Coach (Tommy West) saying, `These people said they've never heard of (Williams)!' " Rodrigues said. "We fight that battle every day with our women's basketball program, our men's basketball program. We fight that on a daily basis, so we're kind of accustomed to it."