Oklahoma football: Who is Sooners’ best Heisman candidate for 2018?
By Chip Rouse
Over the last 20 years, Oklahoma football has been a breeding ground for winners of college football’s most prestigious individual honor.
Three Sooners have won the Heisman Trophy over that time frame, the most of any college team (USC also has won three, but Reggie Bush’s 2005 award was later vacated because of NCAA violations).
Seventeen of the last 20 Heisman winners have been quarterbacks, and three of them were Oklahoma Sooners. Jason White won the award in 2003 and was the second runner-up in 2004 (Adrian Peterson was second in the voting that year). Sam Bradford was the winner in 2008, and Baker Mayfield dominated the Heisman voting in being named the winner of the Heisman last season. All three players were recruited by Bob Stoops.
OU has produced six Heisman winners overall (Billy Vessels in 1955, Billy Sims in 1978 and Steve Owens in 1969 are the others), which ranks behind just two other schools (Notre Dame and Ohio State with seven each) for the most all-time.
Life-size bronze statues of five of the Oklahoma Heisman winners (the one of Baker Mayfield is coming soon) appear in Heisman Park, located just east of Gaylord Family-Oklahoma Memorial Stadium.
The Heisman preseason watch list for 2018 is already well underway. In fact, conversations about the likely front runners and potential candidates were going on about the same time the trophy was being handed to OU’s Mayfield in New York City last December.
Mayfield was on the Heisman watch list all three years he was at Oklahoma, and by midseason a year ago, the consensus All-American and No. 1 overall pick in this year’s NFL Draft was sitting at the top of the list.
His junior season, in 2016, both Mayfield and teammate Dede Westbrook were invited to New York to attend the Heisman ceremony as finalists. Mayfield finished third in the voting that year and Westbrook fourth, but it represented the second time in 12 years that two players from the same school were among the Heisman finalists invited to New York.
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Bryce Love, a running back at Stanford, has jumped to the front of the line among the Heisman favorites for this season. Love finished well behind Mayfield, second in the balloting last season. Las Vegas oddsmakers have Love at 5:1 odds to win the 2018 Heisman. Close behind the Stanford running back is Jonathan Taylor, a sophomore RB for Wisconsin, at 6.5:1.
The next five players with the best odds to take home the Heisman this coming season, according to a recent article published at Forbes.com, are all quarterbacks, and one of them is Oklahoma’s Kyler Murray. Murray is given 20:1 odds of winning the Heisman this season, the worst odds of the five QBs, but the same as Will Grier of West Virginia, Trace McSorley of Penn State and Alabama’s Jalen Hurts among the next wave of quarterback Heisman hopefuls.
We should point out that Murray’s 20:1 odds were established before he was taken No. 9 overall in this month’s MLB Draft and it became known that he would only be playing one more season at Oklahoma.
Historically speaking, quarterbacks are more likely to win the Heisman than any other position. Seventeen of the last 20 Heisman winners have been quarterbacks.
Aside from Murray’s potential Heisman candidacy in 2018, the next most likely Sooner to earn Heisman consideration is redshirt-junior running back Rodney Anderson. In 2017, Anderson became OU’s No. 1 running back among a deep and talented group of running backs. He led the Sooners in rushing, running for 1,161 yards and 13 touchdowns, and averaged 6.2 yards per rushing attempt. The betting odds on Anderson winning the Heisman are 25:1.
It probably isn’t realistic that an Oklahoma player will win the Heisman this year. Only three times in the 83 years the award has been presented, have two different players from the same school won it in back-to-back years.
That doesn’t mean, however, that the Sooners won’t have another strong season. The 2018 OU roster is loaded with experience and talent and a top-10 recruiting class and should reach double-digit wins for a nation-best 39th time in program history.