The 2024 Heisman Trophy votes have been cast and the finalists for the coveted college football award are Colorado’s Travis Hunter, Boiste State’s Ashton Jeanty, Miami’s Cam Ward, and Oregon’s Dillon Gabriel.
By all accounts, it’s going to come down to Hunter and Jeanty and you could make a good case for either of them.
That said, Hunter’s story is part of a larger narrative surrounding the Buffaloes and head coach Deion Sanders. Thanks to the outspoken nature of Coach Prime and his players, they’ve often either been in the college football media’s limelight or as its primary target. And some wonder how those narratives might inform whether or not Hunter comes away with the Heisman.
On the latest episode of The Zach Gelb Show, former Heisman Trophy winner Robert Griffin III stopped by to discuss how it might all play out. Whereas host Zach Gelb posited the notion that many voters might silently be casting their votes for Jeanty because they don’t want to get called out by Sanders, RGII has a theory for why voters might make a different choice.
“When people are voting for these awards, yeah, they’re voting for the best player at a certain position, but it might be that they’re voting for the guy that they think they want their brand attached to the most,” said Griffin. “I think that’s a real thing. I think we have to be cognizant of that. I’m not saying that the Heisman is doing that because there’s so many Heisman voters. I don’t know where these votes are coming from. But who wants their brand associated with a certain person? You already know that if Travis doesn’t win, the narrative is going to be it’s because those voters didn’t like Deion Sanders and they held that against him. If it’s a close race, I don’t think I would say that. If it’s not a close race and Jeanty wins, I think there might be some validity to that.”
Gelb wanted to know if RGIII thinks people actually dislike Deion Sanders or if that’s overblown.
“How much hate do you think there actually is, though, for Coach Prime?” asked Gelb. “Because I love the guy. I said years ago he should get an SEC job when he was at Jackson State. I told it to his face, I want to see you at Auburn. So is it just Coach Prime stirs that up because that his team feeds off of it? Or do you think there is a large portion of people that actually hate Coach Prime at Colorado?”
“I think when he went to Colorado, I don’t think people hated him. I think when they were three and zero at Colorado, I don’t think people hated him. But I think when they were sitting there at three and seven, and they were still one of the most-viewed teams in the country, and he had brought so much more money into Colorado, and all the TV networks were talking about Colorado every single day on TV, that’s when I think people started to hate, because now they felt like, ‘Oh, it’s not warranted.'”
Regardless of how the Heisman voting plays out, we may never know how much any of this played a role. But it’s sure to be a discussion topic, especially if Hunter comes away empty-handed.
We’ll find out Saturday evening at 8 p.m. EST on ESPN.
