2010 Heisman Trophy: Auburn's Cam Newton Should Be Only Name on Ballot

With 8:01 remaining in the second quarter on the road against bitter in-state rival and defending national champion Alabama, Cam Newton was the calmest person in the building.

As the score popped up on scoreboards all over the country, the nation thought Auburn had finally met its maker.

Alabama 24, Auburn 0.

All except the player who has the biggest impact on a single college football season in history, who was playing in the biggest football game of his life. By a long shot.

This was not a junior college team from Texas; this was Alabama. On the road. Newton against the World.

Just three months prior, only a handful of people had even heard of Newton, a 6'6", 260-pound armored tank with nitrous oxide boosters attached to his Under Armour cleats. Newton’s name would hardly be known by a casual fan at Florida despite the negative headlines that greeted Newton during his time in Gainesville.

Three touchdown passes and a touchdown run later, Newton and Auburn pulled the biggest non-upset in the history of Auburn football. On paper, Auburn was supposed to beat Alabama in the Iron Bowl.

Except, it was not that easy. This is an Alabama team that faltered a little in its title defense, but everybody thought was in a class of its own until early in October. How soon we forget how much ink Alabama got until losing at South Carolina on Oct. 9. Alabama had won two-straight Iron Bowl games after losing six-straight to Auburn.

Newton finished 13 of 20 through the air for 216 yards and three touchdowns, only mustering up 39 gutsy yards against a stingy Alabama defense. The most important thing for Newton was not the average numbers he posted during the game; it was the numbers on the scoreboard that read: Auburn 28, Alabama 27.

Up until very recently, it looked as if the Crimson Tide were going to be dominant over Auburn for a long time. That was, until Newton showed up on campus.

Exactly how he got on campus is up for debate as allegations into his recruitment continue to refuse to die in the news.

Newton technically is not a one-year player. Technicalities ignore the fact that he has been around the block and is at his third school in as many years. This will likely be his only year at Auburn no matter where the NFL labor deal stands.

Some voters feel obligated to protect the sanctity of the most overrated award given to anybody in any sport in the entire sporting community.

Heisman Trust Mission Statement

The Heisman Memorial Trophy annually recognizes 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. The Heisman Trophy Trust ensures the continuation and integrity of this award. The Trust, furthermore, has a charitable mission to support amateur athletics and to provide greater opportunities to the youth of our country. Our goal through these charitable endeavors is for the Heisman Trophy to symbolize the fostering of a sense of community responsibility and service to our youth, especially those disadvantaged or afflicted. All assets of the Trust beyond the expense of maintaining the annual presentation of the Heisman Memorial Trophy are reserved for such charitable causes. The Trustees, who all serve pro bono, are guided by a devotion to college football and are committed to community service and the valued tradition which the Trophy represents.

If you hold a vote for the most overrated award in the history of sports and you neglect to vote for Newton, your vote ought to be revoked and you should be immediately banned from covering college sporting events in the future. If you have any sort of integrity, Newton would be the only name on the ballot.

The key word in the Heisman Trust mission statement, and for some sports writers around the nation that have a vote, is integrity, a word that took a hit before the 2010 season when former USC running back Reggie Bush was forced to give back his Heisman Trophy from the 2005 season. A word that, depending if you have been under a rock for the last 30 years, lacks any sort of credible meaning in college football.

What is this alleged integrity writers keep attempting to protect?

The Heisman Trophy took back Bush’s Heisman win for allegedly knowing about payments to his family while allowing fellow USC alum O.J. Simpson to keep his. Simpson, in fact, has been allowed to keep his twice now.

Cheating is more immoral than some of the things Simpson has been accused of. It’s not 1995; that’s old news, so let’s not go down that road again.

What does integrity have to do with 49 touchdowns: 28 passing, 20 rushing, or even a receiving touchdown where he looked like an oversized NFL wide receiver against a junior varsity defensive back while making a blue-chip play to snag the ball out of the air?

More than 1,400 yards rushing for a quarterback: an SEC record. They play defense in those parts.

What about Newton’s nation-leading 188 passer rating? Newton has completed 67 percent of his passes, not bad for a running quarterback.

Let’s face it. When football fans see a video of an African-American quarterback, immediately they are stereotyped to be a running quarterback. Right or wrong, it’s just the way it is.

Newton is an outstanding runner, but it is hard to see any flaws in his passing game. At first, this writer made a horrible comparison to former NFL number one pick JaMarcus Russell. Russell has better arm strength, and that’s about all.

Russell would have never brought a team back from 24 down against Louisiana-Lafayette while he was quarterback at LSU, let alone doing it against the defending national champions on their home turf with a lot of the same players from the title team.  

After everything Newton has been through, he still had to guts to look his teammates dead in the eye while down 24 points against Alabama to let them know everything was going to be alright.

If you are attempting to find a word to describe collegiate athletics, integrity would not be the first word that would spring to mind. Pointless would be more like it. Debacle should also be considered.

College football is a cheater's game. Always has been, always will be. As much as it would be great to think these are amateur athletes we are seeing in front of us, the very fabric of what made college football ingrained in our culture has been gobbled up by corporate America.

The family atmosphere that attached smaller cities across America in places like Auburn, Lincoln, Columbus, Norman, Ann Arbor and South Bend to these mythical warriors every autumn Saturday has been gone for a while.

Something with the whole product does not seem right. Here we have an outstanding student-athlete that has made his share of mistakes in the past, has been cleared by the governing body who 99.9 percent of the time sides against the athlete, and we have plenty of pundits everywhere questioning his eligibility.

Either the NCAA is satisfied with Cam Newton’s story and there truly is nothing wrong or there is truly a conspiracy theory to keep TCU out of the national title game. This is the NCAA, mind you, that suspended an athlete for selling a game jersey that rightfully belonged to him. Had he taken that jersey and handed it to a fan and they sold it on the internet, it was perfectly legal for the fan to pocket money for the jersey.

The NCAA never, ever sides with the athlete. Until now, evidently.

Does it seem a little odd to you?

Players are juiced and over supplemented in order to fill requirements on Saturdays. Others are already bought and paid for hoping to go in the third round of the NFL Draft or better so they don’t have to take a pay cut by moving on to professional football.

Joking aside, it is difficult to believe college football is a pure place where everybody on the sidelines in pads is there for the educational benefits and the educational benefits alone.

If you are a college football purist, turn and look the other way. Usually when there is smoke with a particular athlete that faces allegations of cheating, there is a large wildfire that accompanies it.

Newton, however, has been cleared to play by the most anal-retentive, ruthless and spineless organization in the world of sports. Okay, should have left FIFA out of this. The NCAA is not stupid. It, too, realizes the amount of money riding on the BCS National Championship Game.

ESPN officially has pirated college football in an unannounced coup, moving all the BCS games to basic cable on ESPN. It is official, college football has made a deal with the devil and it will face the wrath of getting even a one-loss team from ESPN’s billion dollar baby (the SEC) into the national title game at any cost.  

Corporate sponsors need Auburn to be playing Oregon in the national title game for it to have any sort of meaning outside of Alabama and Oregon. If Auburn were playing TCU, the moneymakers on this BCS deal would be fretting nervously. The matchup in the national title game already does not translate well into bigger markets. A game involving a Mountain West team would have been disastrous.

Some voters cite the integrity of the award for reasons to leave Newton off the ballot entirely. For the past month, Newton has been under speculation that pointed to the possibility of Newton’s father attempting to “sell” his son in a pay-for-play scheme. At times, it has been confusing whether the nation’s capital for college football (Bristol, Conn.) wants Newton to win the Heisman because he is the best player in college football or if they want him to win it just so it can be first in line to bring these allegations to light, sooner rather than later.

Newton doing an interview with ESPN’s Chris Fowler was not the smartest idea in the world. All ESPN will do in the future is use the words he said during the interview when/if it is discovered that Newton indeed got a better deal at Auburn. Fire some advertising dollars into the corner of the bottom line and ESPN gets to make even more money off of Newton’s talents after he left the college game.

Scandal sells. Breaking news every 54 seconds keeps people watching.

Either way, casual observers will be dumbfounded after the national championship game trying to figure what they had just witnessed. Was it the greatest one-year phenom in the history of college football, or was it the biggest fraud in the history of college football?

On the field of play, Newton is only guilty of being the only college football player in 2010 worthy of what the Heisman was intended to mean. If you believe the Heisman Trophy belongs to the best college football player this season, Newton should be the only name on the ballot. Oregon’s LaMichael James, Boise State’s Kellen Moore and Stanford quarterback Andrew Luck are hardly worthy of the invitation they have received.

James, Moore and Luck had great seasons for their respective teams; all four of the teams in question finished in the top 11 of the BCS standings. James, Moore and Luck are all outstanding college football players that did everything with “diligence, perseverance, and hard work,” a direct quote from the Heisman Trust Mission Statement.

The Heisman Trophy rarely picks the right player and over the years has become an award for the best college football quarterback or running back on the best team.

Newton is the best quarterback on what could arguably be the best team in college football. It worked both ways in 2010 because Newton really was the best player, and there is no disputing that.

Behind the savvy Newton, Auburn came from being No. 22 in the preseason AP poll all the way into the national title hunt in Week 8 when Auburn crept into the top five.

We are talking about the potential of having both a national title and a Heisman Trophy vacated in the future when the NCAA, the SEC and Auburn could have done something about it prior to it happening. This for a team that is probably 9-3 or 8-4 at best without Newton at quarterback.

For what? Say Newton knew about money changing hands and it does come out in the future. What does that have to do with 49 touchdowns and the potential of a 14-0 season and the first national title for Auburn since 1957?

If somebody connected to Auburn did give the Newton family $200,000 in order for Cam Newton to go to Auburn, it could have been the single biggest steal in dirty backroom deal history for college athletics.

A national championship for just $200,000? Um, yes please.

The return on a BCS National Championship Game? $17,000,000.

(The fact that bowl money goes into a conference fund for distribution is noted.)

Not a math major, but that's a lot of profit.

If Newton did get paid, at least somebody got their rightful share of the profits in the deal.

That’s another subject for another day.

Newton was the best college football player in 2010 and should be allowed to keep the Heisman no matter what comes out.