Goodhearted, justice-loving Americans that they are, the vast, vast majority of Heisman Trophy accepted that Cam Newton is innocent until proven guilty of all charges, marked his name at the top of their ballots and made him one of the most lopsided Heisman winners in the 76-year history of the award. Even after Newton had established himself as the runaway frontrunner in late October, that verdict wasn't always so certain. But the one outcome everyone (well, almost everyone) can agree is unacceptable is to punish a player and/or team that haven't been handed a guilty verdict by the only relevant jury, the NCAA. And the jury's initial verdict, pending further evidence, is "not guilty."So 729 of 926 voters did the only thing they could do: Vote the most obviously outstanding player in the country No. 1 and hope they don't have egg on their faces when the NCAA puts the finishing touches on its investigation into Newton's recruitment a year or two. There is no "integrity" in punishing a person who hasn't been proven guilty.
But that doesn't mean more than a few of them didn't feel slimy about it. And on the heels of the first ever Heisman revision, followed by six months' worth of stories about the NCAA's heightened antennae toward agents and corruption, college football must look as slimy as ever. Today, photos of Reggie Bush posing with the Heisman after his landslide victory in 2005 and USC celebrating the BCS championship a year earlier exist in a kind of ironic limbo, very real triumphs that have been officially reclassified as affronts to the integrity of the sport and retroactively thrust down the memory hole.
Still, less than six months later, we have a Heisman winner whose father has been tentatively convicted of organizing an illegal pay-for-play scheme that only narrowly avoided strangling his son's eligibility by a series of technicalities that even the commissioner of the SEC – not to mention commissioners of other conferences – clearly isn't entirely comfortable signing off on. Post-Bush, there isn't a college football fan who can't imagine the same tentacles reaching into Auburn's trophy case in the future with a single piece of paper or retrieved text message.
If that evidence never turns up, or never existed – and Auburn seems confident that it won't, and/or that it didn't – Newton still goes down with an unofficial asterisk that will float beside his name in the pantheon for decades. For certain people, it may stay there forever. He's not the only one: Guys like Gino Torretta, Chris Weikne, Eric Crouch, Jason White and Troy Smith carry one, too, for very un-Heisman-like flops on the biggest stage that would have certainly cost them the trophy if the vote took place in January instead, after the bowl games.
Even if Auburn loses next month in Glendale, it's not really conceivable that Newton could turn in a performance that would close the chasm between him and runners-up Andrew Luck and LaMichael James. And if he delivers another big game in a Tiger win, his season on the field will clearly belong alongside Barry Sanders in 1988, Marcus Allen in 1981, Vince Young in 2005 and a few others as the greatest individual season ever in college football. But however it's written, the story of Cam Newton, overwhelming Heisman Trophy winner and destroyer of planets, can never end without the chapter of lingering doubts.
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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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