Matt Barkley Snub Proves Once Again Why the Heisman Trophy Is a Joke

Matt Barkley should be a Heisman finalist. Period.

He fulfills every criterion that has ever come to be associated with the award.

Are the criteria completely insane and illogical? Yes. But he fulfills them.

Before we get into why Barkley is deserving of the award, let's review everything we've been told about the Heisman.

The Heisman has come to be known as an award for the best offensive player on one of the best teams. Somehow losing eliminates you from the discussion.

It's an individual award, evidenced by the fact that one person wins it—but you can only win it if your team does well. Football is a team game, and thus no one individual could be good without the benefit of being surrounded by teammates, but we're going to isolate one player that is better than everyone. But not really.

The formula is that you have to be on a winning team—but what about Tim Tebow? The quarterback won a championship as a freshman backup and as a junior starter. Yet it was in his sophomore campaign, one in which the Gators went 8-4, that he walked away with the Heisman.

Secondly, we have to obviously consider statistics. Only so much, though, as I'm sure every reader can think of a player who won the Heisman that did not have the best statistics that season. To be fair, Matt Barkley has better statistics than Andrew Luck this season.

Then, "Heismanologists" will tell us that it is making your team better. This is akin to MVP awards in professional sports debating the definition of the word value.

Did every Heisman winner make his team better? Would FSU have won the championship without Chris Weinke? Would Oklahoma have lost their last two games but played in the title anyway without Jason White?

If we're going to assign a WAR-type value (wins above replacement) to these players like they do in baseball, can we perhaps poke a hole in Trent Richardson's campaign?

Richardson plays on the second best team of all five finalists, and with all the talent that Alabama has, he could probably be the one that his respective team could most afford to lose. This shouldn't diminish anything Richardson has done, as he is a great back.

Finally, we're indoctrinated with a player needing to have a "Heisman Moment." The player needs to have that one highlight play or game that captures the nation's attention.

This is the most idiotic of all the criteria. It's a way of introducing a trump card to all other factors so the powers that be can ascribe the winner they want to the award if they had a big play.

If it's about Heisman moments, then why didn't Kordell Stewart win the award in 1994 following his Miracle at Michigan?

It also just assigns a level of laziness to picking the winner—"I can't process all the information and the entire season that has been presented to me, but I do remember that Charles Woodson returned a punt, so he wins!"

With all that criteria, who can win? None of the current finalists.

Luck doesn't have as good statistics as Robert Griffin III has, so Griffin should win. Griffin made his team better, but they went 9-3—that isn't a good enough record.

Montee Ball has better stats than Richardson, but Alabama is better than Wisconsin! And Mathieu has some Heisman moments, but he plays defense!

Confused? You should be.

The whole "process" of picking a winner isn't a process at all. It's an arbitrary selection of who people think should win.

I will say this, however. Barkley posted great statistics—better than Luck, not as good as Griffin III. He made his team much, much better.

He was on a winning team, No. 5 in the AP poll, higher than three of the five finalists. Finally, he had his Heisman moment with road wins against Notre Dame and Oregon and a 50 point trouncing of rival UCLA.

It should be clear by now that the Heisman Trophy is a joke. We're reminded of that every single year, and this one is no different. A better question would be to analyze why anybody cares about the award.

Do we have such hysteria over an award in any other sport? Did we start arguing who would win the MVP between Aaron Rodgers or Tom Brady before the season began? Are we currently saying, "You know if LeSean McCoy continues to play this well he could win the MVP next year"?

Why don't we do that? Because it's idiotic.

How many of the last 15 NFL MVPs can you name? What about NBA MVPs—or better yet, MLB MVPs? Probably around half, right?

Why is it, then, that most people can recite all of the Heisman trophy winners? Why is it that speculation into who is going to win the award begins before any games are even played, sometimes up until one year before the season begins?

I get that players have a limited window to win the award, making it more prestigious. Players have four years tops to win the award, whereas professional players have 10-15 years to win an MVP award. That's one reason I can see why the award is so popular.

Other than that, I would guess that the award is simply a beneficiary of hype and promotion.

Again, we don't discuss who is going to win NFL MVP at the beginning of the season. We don't track it every week, and after Tom Brady throws four interceptions against Buffalo, we don't throw our hands up in the air and say "that's it for his MVP campaign!"

The Heisman Trophy may have once been prestigious (although it was flawed, as it was rarely awarded to underclassmen), and it is living off of that hype. ESPN can promote the award because the award show annually runs on its network at the downtown New York athletic club.

Additionally, it's just good fodder—introducing all these criteria only makes it easier to argue and dissect who should win the "prestigious" award. After that, we're all just playing their game.

It's an honor to be nominated. All five men are deserving. Other players (not just Barkley) who were not nominated are deserving as well. No one man is more deserving than the other.

Any proclamation that it is any different than that is insulting to our intelligence.

Do yourself a favor and boycott this year's Heisman telecast. And then every one after that.