Tonight’s Heisman Trophy ceremony at the Marriott Marquis (7:00, ESPN) will be one of the most special and most memorable in the award’s 67 years – for all the right reasons and all the wrong ones.
The four-quarterback derby between Miami’s Ken Dorsey, Nebraska’s Eric Crouch, Florida’s Rex Grossman and Oregon’s Joey Harrington could be one of the closest-ever Heisman races. It will also be the first time the award won’t be presented at 19 West St., with the Downtown Athletic Club struggling financially and damaged by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Dorsey won the Maxwell Award Thursday, edging Crouch 1,109-1,053 in one of that award’s closest votes. Eight of the last 11 Maxwell winners also won the Heisman; but of the eight closest Heisman races, only once did the Maxwell victor emerge in New York, and tonight promises to be almost as close as Bo Jackson’s 45-point win over Chuck Long in 1985.
“That’s too much math for me,” Dorsey said. “I haven’t even done what it takes to actually win it. I think a lot of guys are deserving of it. This year, everyone says no one has stepped up and taken it. I don’t believe that. It’s just guys are playing at a different level this year. A bunch of guys are stepping up.”
Dorsey has stepped up as much as anyone. Rose Bowl-bound Miami is 11-0 and ranked No. 1 going into the national title game, the same circumstances that spawned UM’s other Heisman winners: Vinny Testaverde in 1986 and Gino Torretta in ’92. Dorsey threw 23 TDs and nine interceptions – four in an 18-7 win at Boston College that he managed to find a way to win.
Crouch – who ran 11-1 Nebraska’s option attack to near-perfection, and whose 59 career rushing TDs are an NCAA record for quarterbacks – won the Walter Camp and Davey O’Brien Awards, but his Huskers got drilled 62-36 by Colorado.
Harrington’s three fourth-quarter comebacks led 10-1 Oregon to the best regular-season record in school history. He got tons of hype before the season when boosters bought a 10-story poster on a New York City building to tout him for the Heisman, but he threw a pick that led to a 49-42 loss to Stanford.
Grossman was named AP Player of the Year and led the nation in passing, but his 2-point conversion try fell incomplete in last Saturday’s 34-32 loss to Tennessee, one of two UF defeats on the year. And no sophomore has ever won the Heisman.
“In a perfect world, the Heisman winner comes from behind and wins the last game with a great play,” Grossman said.
Of course, tonight’s show is just further proof that the world is far from perfect. The proud DAC has lost 80 percent of its membership since the early 1980s and filed for bankruptcy in 1998 before selling off two-thirds of the building. It carries an $8 million mortgage and was losing nearly $100,000 per month before Sept. 11, when hundreds of survivors poured into the lobby and the damaged building was turned into a temporary triage center.