1997 heisman

[Ed-Seth: This being the 20th anniversary of the 1997 National Championship, Michigan historian Dr. Sap is taking us game-by-game through it. Previously: Those Who Stayed (Colorado); The Hit (Baylor); The Stop (Notre Dame); The Captain’s Down(Indiana); Vengeance (Northwestern), Gut Check (Iowa), Six Picks (Michigan State), The Trap (Minnesota), Judgment (Penn State), The Crucible (Wisconsin) No Flags (Ohio State)]

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UM Bentley Library

December 13, 1997: Heisman Voting

Rk Name Team Yr P 1st 2nd 3rd Total
1 Charles Woodson Michigan Jr CB 433 209 98 1815
2 Peyton Manning Tennessee Sr QB 281 263 174 1543
3 Ryan Leaf Washington State Jr QB 70 203 241 861
4 Randy Moss Marshall So WR 17 56 90 253
5 Ricky Williams Texas Jr RB 3 18 20 65
6 Curtis Enis Penn State Jr RB 3 18 20 65
7 Tim Dwight Iowa Sr WR 5 3 11 32
8 Cade McNown UCLA Jr QB 0 7 12 26
9 Tim Couch Kentucky So QB 0 5 12 22
10 Amos Zereoué West Virginia So RB 3 1 10 21

It was perhaps the greatest Heisman field in the history of that award. It included a generational quarterback and a guy everyone thought would be. It had the most talented receiver the game had ever seen. It had the most productive rusher college football had ever seen. And Twenty years ago today the award for the “most outstanding player in college football” finally went to a primarily defensive player. He was just that good.

In 1997, two-way stars like Tom Harmon were a thing of the past or it was something “cute” that guys like Gordie Lockbaum did in D2 football. As Warren Sapp correctly pointed out a few years earlier, the bronzed Heisman statue has a player carrying the ball, not swatting it down.

Charles Woodson challenged that paradigm. You didn’t need to be a senior anymore to win the award. You didn’t need to be a quarterback or a running back, either. The trophy is engraved thusly: “The outstanding College Football Player In The United States.” The instructions given to voters are to choose…

The outstanding college football player whose performance best exhibits the pursuit of excellence with integrity. Winners epitomize great ability combined with diligence, perseverance, and hard work.

It doesn’t say anything about being an offensive MVP; but that was the paradigm. Paradigms had changed before in the history of this award—it used to be so Domer biased that QB Paul Hornung won it in 1956 while going 2-8 and throwing 13 INTs to 3 TDs (Jim Brown finished third). It says outstanding.

Woodson was. Leave aside the highlight reel and look at the effect he had on that defense. Michigan’s D spent most of that season in a Cover 1 with the free safety either shaded over the side opposite Woodson, or running around in a robber. Students made a shirt (now available on the MGoBlogStore) that noted “75% of the Earth is covered by water, the rest is covered by Woodson.” They weren’t far off. Ask any coach if he thinks he could get away with this:

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Back in 1997, few in America believed the 1,000 voters had finally figured out what that truly meant, especially when they had a nice, easy senior career candidate who “deserved” it for turning down the NFL and virtually repeating his 1996 performance.

[Hit THE JUMP]

[Ed-Seth: This being the 20th anniversary of the 1997 National Championship, Michigan historian Dr. Sap is taking us game-by-game through it. Previously: Those Who Stayed, The Hit, The Stop, The Captain’s Down, Vengeance]

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October 25, 1997: Michigan 23, Michigan State 7

Materials: LOTS of articles. Full broadcast

Granted, it was Michigan-Michigan State. The battle for the Paul Bunyan Trophy. The battle for state bragging rights. Nothing more needed to be said, though if you checked out the articles folder above you’ll note there wasn’t any shortage of things being said from the beginning of the year. Michigan was undefeated. Michigan State was in its 3rd season under Nick Saban, and was demolishing opponents, rising as high as 11th in the country one week before hosting their biggest rival.

Problem was, the fever-pitched build up for this game took somewhat of a hit when the Spartans unexpectedly lost, 19-17, the week before to Northwestern. That meant #5, and 6-0 Michigan would now be playing #15, and 5-1, Michigan State. Not exactly the marquee national matchup that the networks had been anticipating but it didn’t stop ESPN’s College Gameday from paying a visit to East Lansing.

"It's going to be tough," Michigan quarterback Brian Griese said, remembering that his last visit to East Lansing was a 28-25 loss. "Their fans are going to be loud and they're going to be ruthless. It's the state championship," Griese went on. "Before you can go on to win the Big Ten championship, you've got to win the state championship."

Lloyd didn't have a countdown clock for this game, nor was there any more than the usual bulletin board material. But Carr did have a sweatshirt, as Angelique Chengelis reported in the Detroit News:

Hanging on a mirror that each Wolverine player could not avoid seeing was a sweatshirt that read the ugly score and the uglier words.

"It said '28-25, Spartans beat Wolverines,'" U-M safety Marcus Ray said. "It was taped up there all week and we saw it. We just wanted to come up to Lansing and win this game."

[After the jump: THE JUMP]

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Last week I did the thing you're not supposed to do: I got into an argument with a Tennessee fan about conference strength. Actually it started as a conversation about how cute my 1-year-old dog is but all conversations with SEC fans are really conference strength conversations. Before the inevitable deterioration into Woodson-Manning (which is particularly impossible with him because he knew Peyton in school and has an incredible story about how nice of a guy Peyton Manning was) I thought to test his assertion that the SEC has been dominant, except for 2005, since Bear Bryant's day.

Attempting to debate this, I stumbled onto sports-reference.com's SRS statistic. It stands for "Simple Rating System" and was borrowed from the NFL guys. What it represents is how much that team should beat an average team:

So every team's rating is their average point margin, adjusted up or down depending on the strength of their opponents.

This generally works for the NFL because of relative schedule parity. But it proved useless for comparing college football teams and conferences over history because they lacked that. I'll explain why, but first lets apply SRS averages of the conferences since 1964 to our debate, which demonstrates… that I just totally screwed myself:

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Cliggens embicking.

Well yeah, but we admitted this: until Penn State joined and some of the dreks got their acts together it really was the Big Two-Little 8. Let's see mostly Michigan-Ohio State against Alabama et al.:

Big2

It stayed pretty even except when Michigan wasn't good. There's a reason for that: Michigan (35 times) and Ohio State (33) teams account for over two thirds of Big Ten's 100 representatives from the last 50 years. Alabama teams are counted 28 times, with Florida (18), Tennessee (15), Georgia (12), Auburn (11) and LSU (11) all ahead of the next Big Ten team, which is Penn State (8). Until the '90s, the bottom half of the Big Ten sucked way worse than the bottom half of the SEC, according to SRS:

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What really happened here: the SEC teams were playing easier schedules until the Big Ten caught on and started scheduling bodybags, and then things were even until the Big Ten started actually sucking. I explain, after the jump.

[The jump, after which I explain, as I just explained]