NCAAF Pick: Sam Hartman to Win Heisman Trophy (+2500) at BetRivers (check our BetRivers Review)
The Heisman Memorial Trophy is awarded every year to the best quarterback in college football. Okay, that’s not technically true – the top QB gets the Davey O’Brien Award – but it might as well be. In six of the past seven years, and 19 of the last 23, the award for the most outstanding player in college has been given to a quarterback.
It happened again last year. Caleb Williams scooped up the 2022 Heisman after leading the USC Trojans (11-2 SU, 8-5 ATS) to the Cotton Bowl; as we go to press, Williams is the +550 favorite on the college football futures odds at Caesars Sportsbook (check our Caesars Sportsbook Review).
He might even be the right choice for your betting picks. Williams is in a very strong position to repeat, at least from a football perspective – but the field is still favored to win for many reasons.
Heisman Fatigue
To properly navigate the Heisman Trophy odds, you need to know what’s happening behind that voting curtain. At last count, there are 928 Heisman ballots to be cast, divided as follows:
- Sports journalists: 870
- Previous Heisman winners: 57
- Fan vote: 1
As with most of the top professional sports awards these days, the Heisman is now a regular fixture in the daily churn from the mainstream sports media. The same “journalists” (some of these 870 people are more qualified than others) that largely decide who will win the Heisman also spend the entire year getting paid to talk about it. Shenanigans are bound to occur.
Look at what happened in the NBA last year with Nikola Jokic. The two-time Most Valuable Player was as dominant as ever in 2022-23, but more than a few voters came right out and said they wanted a fresh face (Joel Embiid, as it turned out) for their new MVP. Williams will not be immune to this strain of voter fatigue.
Big Fish, Giant Pond
At least Jokic was able to win back-to-back MVPs. He doesn’t have nearly as much competition in the 30-team NBA as Williams has across the entirety of college football – even if the Heisman will invariably go to someone from the Power 5 conferences, or maybe Notre Dame. Fighting Irish QB Sam Hartman is indeed an intriguing +2000 outsider on the Heisman odds board at press time.
Back to Williams for a moment. There are so many more players in college football than the NBA, and the careers are so much shorter, it’s little wonder there has only been one back-to-back Heisman Trophy winner: Ohio State RB Archie Griffin, who did it in 1974 and 1975.
Even if we acknowledge how much quarterbacks have taken over the modern game, and exclude every other position from Heisman eligibility, there are still hundreds of quarterbacks out there in the FBS alone. Chances are one of them is going to outperform Williams in 2023.
The Riley Factor
Did we say there’s only been one back-to-back Heisman winner? That’s actually true, but USC head coach Lincoln Riley did lead both Baker Mayfield (2017) and Kyler Murray (2018) to Heisman glory when he was at the helm of the Oklahoma Sooners.
Now Riley is a three-time Heisman “winner.” And he’s got both Williams and the Trojans set up for success this year; WR Jordan Addison (now with the Minnesota Vikings) will be missed, but Williams – who transferred from Oklahoma in 2022 to be with Riley – will get to work with QB coach Kliff Kingsbury, fresh off his four-year stint as head coach of the Arizona Cardinals.
It’s no coincidence that Murray was Kingsbury’s quarterback in Glendale – nor that Kingsbury was Mayfield’s head coach with the Texas Tech Red Raiders in 2013, before Mayfield transferred to Norman. And well before that, Kingsbury and Riley both played at Texas Tech under head coach Mike Leach.
Perhaps you’ve already noticed the pattern here. It’s all about the Air Raid spread offense that Leach helped develop alongside Hal Mumme, and said Air Raid puts up the kind of video-game numbers that earned Williams the Heisman last year: an impressive 42 touchdowns with just five picks, and 4,537 yards on 333-for-500 passing (66.6%).
Too Much Competition
We’re still going to recommend someone else for your Heisman picks. USC’s defense might not be all that bad this year, which will put less pressure on Williams to throw the ball. And those 870 aforementioned sports journalists are divided evenly across six U.S. regions; the West Coast is the most heavily populated of the six, and therefore under-represented in the voting.
East Coast bias strikes again – bet accordingly.
NCAAF Pick: Sam Hartman to Win Heisman Trophy (+2500) at BetRivers
