Alabama football: Mark Ingram's 2009 Heisman Trophy win a lesson for Trent Richardson fans as voters seem to favor candidates who save their best for last

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. -- The statue with its leather-helmeted player and stiff-arm pose evokes memories of the game as it was.

The Heisman Trophy is timeless -- easily the most recognizable symbol of individual success in American sports. But as the bronze embodiment of that achievement remains frozen in time, the process of carrying it home is evolving.

The very makeup of the five finalists heading to New York for the Saturday night ceremony shows how much times have changed. And like most transformations these days, technology plays primary and secondary roles.

Votes have been cast by email the past three seasons, thus allowing the 900-plus with ballots to watch every snap of every game before submitting their choice. No longer is there a fear of the post office losing the envelope before votes are tallied the Monday before the ceremony.

Three of the five finalists played the final Saturday of the season, while Alabama running back Trent Richardson and Stanford quarterback Andrew Luck sat idle. In the course of a few hours, Wisconsin running back Montee Ball scored four touchdowns and LSU cornerback Tyrann Mathieu gashed Georgia’s punt defense twice. Both were fringe contenders before winning conference title games and finalists.

Then there is current front-runner, Baylor quarterback Robert Griffin III. His team (9-3) likely wouldn’t have played in a Big 12 title game if it still existed, but his four-touchdown performance in a regular-season game with Texas vaulted him to the top of most projections.

A week earlier, he trailed Richardson, who led nearly every poll of voters after running for a career-high 203 yards at Auburn.

Kari Chisholm, an Oregon political media analyst who runs StiffArmTrophy.com, said it’s impossible to ignore the impact of the final impression.

Player of the week award?

“It’s troubling to me that this is basically a player of the week award as opposed to a season-long award.” Chisholm said. “That said, Robert Griffin performed well all season. It’s just interesting to me that Andrew Luck led the entire season, then lost in the end.”

Richardson trailed in the StiffArmTrophy poll after the Iron Bowl, but led on HeismanPundit.com while Griffin was third. Site publisher Chris Huston sees both sides of the last-minute voting trend.

“It’s a good thing in the sense that everyone is watching the games,” he said. “It conceivably can be problematic that it really makes for volatile voting. Someone might forget Trent Richardson had 200 yards the week before because what they just saw is the most recent thing in their mind. It makes for more of the flavor of the moment kinda thing.”

Ingram benefitted from surge

Interestingly, Richardson’s former teammate Mark Ingram benefitted from a Week 14 surge. He trailed in polls after running for just 30 yards at Auburn in 2009, but he exploded for 189 all-purpose yards in the SEC championship win over Florida.

A week later, Ingram won the closest vote in Heisman history (1,304-1,276 over Stanford’s Toby Gerhart) in the first year ballots were submitted electronically.

Late-season surges made an impact even before computers played a factor.

Chisholm remembers the first season of StiffArmTrophy.com tracked Carson Palmer’s successful campaign in 2002. The USC quarterback completed 32 of 46 passes for 425 yards and four touchdowns in a season-ending win over Notre Dame.

That came two weeks after runner-up Brad Banks finished his season as the Iowa quarterback. In the final voting, Palmer won by a margin of 1,328-1,095. Only fourth-place finisher Willis McGahee played a game after Palmer’s regular-season finale.

That race is similar to the current one, Chisholm said.

“It’s also true that Andrew Luck and Trent Richardson both had really good seasons but neither really had that Heisman moment that everybody can point to as being a turning point for their team in the season,” he said, “whereas Robert Griffin had a whole lot of can-you-believe-that-just-happened moments. Certainly, Robert Griffin would be a very legitimate Heisman Trophy winner. Certainly, without him, Baylor would be nowhere.

“It’s just fascinating to watch it shift so dramatically over the course of the final weekend.”

The expanded use of electronic media also made an impact this season, Huston said.

Baylor’s sports information department was proactive from the beginning of the season in the effort to keep its quarterback in the spotlight. It mailed playing cards to voters, held teleconferences for national media and set up an interactive website with video, stats and facts about the candidate.

Stanford coach David Shaw did a PowerPoint presentation for reporters and voters to make his case for Luck.

Wisconsin compared Ball to Richardson, though it wouldn’t refer to the Alabama running back by name. The Badger program sent an email to reporters comparing Ball’s résumé to “the other guy.”

Alabama took a more indirect route to Richardson’s campaign. Coach Nick Saban regularly dismissed talk of individual awards, and a midseason question about the Heisman drew an angry response. Richardson, who made weekly appearances on “Palmer & Pollack” on ESPNU most of the season, liked to defer all Heisman hype to his offensive line.

The school also launched a website for Richardson and seven other award candidates, featuring a highlight video and the candidates’ accolades and stats.

“Alabama probably was the least interesting of the bunch,” Huston said. “Of the five, Baylor and Stanford had probably the best campaigns.”

It’s all part of the modern era for the 76-year-old Heisman Trophy.

Jay Berwagner didn’t have much of a campaign when he became the first to strike the pose in 1935. The running back didn’t gain 1,000 yards, and his University of Chicago team didn’t have even a winning season.

But, by Saturday night, he will share a legacy with a 20-something-year-old who navigated the 21st-century route to winning the same ageless bronze statue.

This story was originally published December 8, 2011 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Alabama football: Mark Ingram's 2009 Heisman Trophy win a lesson for Trent Richardson fans as voters seem to favor candidates who save their best for last ."