Betting on the 2021 Heisman Trophy Winner

The Heisman Trophy is the highest individual award given out in American college football, akin to an MVP award in the NFL. Since the award was created in 1935, 86 Heisman trophies have been awarded to 85 different players.

The annual event takes place soon after the conclusion of the college football season, about three months before the annual NFL draft. That timing has been good for Heisman winners, as all but one Heisman winner has been drafted by a professional team.

Betting on the Heisman Trophy requires patience and a long view. Real money college football sportsbooks release odds for each year’s Heisman Trophy winner in the early summer before the season begins. Bettors interested in placing a prop bet on the eventual winner should be paying attention to the lines available right from the start.

This post covers all the details you need to place a confident bet on the Heisman Trophy winner. We’ll start with a basic guide to placing a bet of this type, then look at the last quarter-century of Heisman winners to try and find trends to inform our bets.

Finally, we’ll analyze a real Heisman Trophy race for an example of how you can put this information to work for your betting strategy.

How to Bet on the Heisman Trophy Winner

The first thing you need to understand before you place a wager on the Heisman – the voting system.

The Heisman Trophy is awarded based on a points system. Voters are almost all sportswriters, 870 of them, broken up into the following six regions:

• Far West, basically from California to Utah/Arizona, with a few northern states thrown in.
• Mid-Atlantic, from South Carolina up through Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
• Mid-West, from Minnesota-Iowa east to Michigan and Ohio.
• North-East, the traditional New England states.
• South, from Louisiana to Florida and up to Kentucky.
• South-West, Texas-New Mexico north to Nebraska and east to Missouri.

All living previous Heisman winners are given a vote (said to be about 50 people) and public balloting provides one additional vote on behalf of college football fans. The player who receives the most votes out of those 930 or so cast is the winner. The Heisman Trophy announces the overall winner as well as the top three vote-getters.

That said, there’s only a handful of players in any given year with a real shot of winning the player of the year award.

How do sportsbooks propose these wagers? The layout is really simple. When you go to bet on the Heisman Trophy, you’ll see a list of player names and a simple odds number next to the name. It will look something like this:

Obviously, this is a completely made-up set of players and odds, just to show you how the odds will be presented.

The + number next to each player’s name indicates your payout for every $100 bet. For example, a successful bet on John Smith would pay out $300 for every $100 you wagered. The lower the number, the more likely the book thinks that player is to win.

To place a bet on a player, you’ll select the player’s name and go through with the bet as you would any other sports wager.

A big difference between placing a wager on the Heisman and placing more conventional types of sports wagers is the length of time between your bet and the payoff. If you were to bet on John Smith in early June, when the first odds come out, you’re looking at a wait of 7 months or so until the winner is named at the Heisman ceremony.

Analyzing the Last 25 Years of Heisman Trophy Winners

Let’s look at trends in the winners of the last twenty-five college football MVP awards to see if we can determine any useful patterns.

Positional Trends

Since 1995’s win by Eddie George, a running back from Ohio State, a quarterback has won the Heisman 18 times. That means 72% of Heisman awards since 1995 went to the quarterback position. This reflects the reality of the college game, where big passing plays are more likely to pay off than in the professional game.

In NCAA football, teams that “air the ball out” can be successful, while the pro game generally requires a more blended mix of run and pass plays.

Only one other position has even won a Heisman award – running back. No position outside of QB and RB have won the award since 1991, when Desmond Howard won as a wide receiver.

Clearly, the Heisman tends to go to quarterbacks and running backs.

Conference Trends

The last twenty-five years of Heismans have been concentrated in a few conferences. Here’s a list of the number of Heismans won by each conference since 1995:

• SEC: 8 awards
• Big 12: 8 awards
• Big 10: 4 awards
• Pac-12: 3 awards
• ACC: 2 awards

The conferences with the biggest TV presence over the past 25 years have also had the greatest number of award winners. This makes sense, as TV coverage and national game impact have a big say in who wins the award.

A player at a school with no televised games and a weak schedule may have an amazing season, but if none of the voters get a chance to see it, it’s unlikely that player will earn enough votes to claim the awards.

Clearly, players in the SEC, Big 12, and Big 10 are more likely to win the award than players from other conferences.

Geographical Trends

If you look at a map of all Heisman winners, you’ll notice some geographical tendencies to this award.

If you look at winners all the way back to the beginning of the award, you’ll notice clusters in a few areas of the country. Specifically, Texas-Oklahoma is a hotbed of Heisman talent, as is the Gulf Coast in general. There’s a big cluster of winners in southern California, and a cluster in the Midwest, around the Michigan-Ohio-Indiana area.

The Mountain West is basically a dead zone, as is the upper South, meaning Kentucky-Tennessee-West Virginia. The far north is similarly devoid of winners – Between Idaho and South Dakota and all points north, you won’t find a single winner.

This allows us to make some generalizations about potential winners. A surprise banner year by a quarterback in Montana carries less weight than a breakout year for a QB in the Lone Star State.

Obviously, these trends are historic, and more recent trends may be in play. But using geography as a basic guide to your Heisman bet isn’t a bad idea.

Handicapping Future Heisman Trophy Awards

It’s easy to use these trends and this basic information about the Heisman to inform your futures bets for any given season of college football.

My first step in looking at early Heisman Trophy bets is to cut the field down to a manageable size. Trend analysis helps out a lot here, but I also have a useful rule of thumb: don’t wager on any player with four-digit odds.

My reasoning is simple – longshots don’t win Heisman awards. I base that on the fact that nationwide media voting is the main driver of the award, and on the fact that it’s been decades since a lesser-known player shocked the country and won.

Once you’re able to focus on five or six players with realistic odds of winning, you can use what you known about positional trends, geographic trends, and other typical aspects of a Heisman race to zoom in on your favorite. Maybe you take a young quarterback out of Alabama over a seasoned veteran that’s likely to throw 50 TDs because you recognize that the veteran plays at UCF, an extremely unlikely home for a Heisman winner.

Be aware that these lines will change, some of them drastically, throughout the course of the season. Player injury, poor performance, and even league trends can sink a player’s chances even before they play a week of live games – the opposite is also true. Buying a guy in early June, long before full-day practices have even started, may be a weak move.

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Conclusion

Most years, the Heisman Trophy race is a race among elite QBs. Every now and then, situations will arise that make a WR or RB likely to win the award – generally when micro trends in the league have temporarily led away from pass-heavy offenses, or when a player is such a standout that he can’t be ignored.

These days, a bet on the Heisman Trophy is a way to keep players entertained over a long offseason, but since the award carries with it so many trends and so much tradition, picking a likely winner has become almost elementary.

Some years, you can bet on “the guy from ‘Bama” and do pretty well for yourself. If you’re looking for a prop or futures bet on college football that you can actually strategize around, a bet on the Heisman Trophy makes a lot of sense.