Close race? Yeah, right

Right man won Heisman, but by unexpected margin

Goodbye, Pac-10 trophy drought. Farewell, East Coast bias.

And so much for that closest race in history.

The Heisman Trophy got it right this year. It showed the best player in the country really can win college football’s most coveted award, regardless of his location or previous career achievements.

That Carson Palmer won the 2002 Heisman Trophy should come as no big surprise. That he won it by such a decisive margin is a tad stunning, however, because it reverses much of the past 20 years of Heisman history.

In beating Iowa’s Brad Banks by 233 points, Palmer not only carried the West Coast, he captured five of the six regions. No Pac-10 player since Marcus Allen in 1981 had won more than one. He also gained the most first-place votes (242) to go with the most second- (224) and third-place (154) votes as well.

Apparently, in a year with five highly qualified candidates, almost no one could craft a combination of three that didn’t include Palmer.

Obviously, the Trojan quarterback’s historic season-ending performance against Notre Dame won over a lot of voters. And he did carry into the campaign five years of name recognition, even if the first four didn’t approach Heisman quality.

But in the end, Palmer won because there simply was no argument against him. He did it all season long. He did it against the toughest competition in the country. And he did it without having to worry about someone in his own backfield competing for the same award.

Ken Dorsey and Willis McGahee, as it turned out, couldn’t say the same thing. Their plight was the most noteworthy of several other voting observations: