Reviewing Memorable Heisman Campaign Moments

Heisman Trophies are won on the field. Eighty-eight men have won 89 bronze statues thanks to outstanding seasons that swayed hundreds and hundreds of Heisman voters to ink their name atop ballots bound for New York City.

But a little marketing buzz never hurt, right?

Sixty years ago, a Heisman marketing campaign was a mailer, some media pitches and a couple of phone calls.

Today, Athletic Departments can put the entire weight of their creative teams behind a player, harnessing marketing, video, social and communications departments into one multi-pronged campaign to boost their Heisman candidate in front the masses.

A player has to walk the walk while his Athletic Department can talk the talk.

Today, marketing efforts are all about viral moments. A 15-second highlight clip of a Heisman favorite spread around the internet can create far more impressions than the most slickly cut hype video.

2023 Heisman Trophy winner Jayden Daniels did his part, combining obscenely good offensive numbers with jaw-dropping plays that generated a ton of Heisman momentum despite the Tigers’ three-loss season.

LSU’s Athletic Department was ready to capitalize and coordinated a campaign with LSU’s School of Art, utilizing the departments’s digital art, virtual production and immersive media assets to help create the “That Kid Jayden” campaign. The name originated, simply enough, from Daniels Instagram handle.

Chances are Daniels was going to walk away with the 2023 Heisman Trophy with or without the full weight of the Athletic Department’s artistic resources, but every little bit helps.

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But let’s reverse back 60 years before Daniels to 1963 when the folks at Naval Academy’s Sport Information Department wanted to get the word out to the masses about their star quarterback Roger Staubach. More than three decades before email or the web, Navy Sports Info director Budd Thalmann mailed 1,000 four-page pamphlets to the nation’s sports media titled, simply, “Meet Roger Staubach.”

Staubach soon graced the cover of Sports Illustrated and Time en route to the 1963 Heisman Trophy. He was set to be on the cover of Life, too, but for the assassination of President Kennedy.

A year earlier, Oregon State’s Terry Baker became the first and only Beaver to win the Heisman and the first west of the Mississippi to claim the trophy. His Sports Information Director mailed Baker’s updated stats to media each week. 

Considering that Baker won by less than 100 points, it’s likely the hard work behind the scenes — keeping national sportswriters abreast of his weekly stats — may have put him over the top in the Heisman race.

OK, so there’s a bit of background to get us going.  We can’t cover all great Heisman campaigns but here’s a quick walk down memory lane of some notable efforts. Whether their players won or lost, it’s the promotional effort that counts, right?

Let’s start with talking about how BYU tried to make Ty happen. And did it ever. Ty Detmer had received enough votes to finish ninth in the 1989 balloting after throwing for a gazillion yards, but he wasn’t exactly a huge favorite heading into 1990.

But when Detmer starting totaling huge numbers again, heads turned and the sports media noticed. Historians can’t decide if BYU fans started wearing blue “ties” to support Detmer’s Heisman bid before or after the Athletic Department mailed to the media blue cardboard ties that said “The Official Heisman Ty” with his stats on a fold out. But whether it’s the chicken or the egg, it was a fun and successful campaign in a Heisman vote that was close.

Sporting a blue tie is one thing, changing the way you pronounce your name is on a whole other level.

But that’s what’s Notre Dame’s Joe Theismann did — or least agreed to do — in 1970. As the story goes, a reporter was watching practice and, while pronouncing Joe’s name correctly, said, “There goes Theesman!” … to which the Irish Sports Info Director replied, “No,  there goes THEISMANN, as in Heisman.”

And a campaign was born. Theismann was convinced to change the pronunciation of his last name to help promote the Heisman campaign, which saw him finish second behind Stanford’s Jim Plunkett. No rhyming options there for Plunkett, he just had to beat SC to seal the deal.

Though Heisman didn’t win, it still deserves a nod to a great idea in South Bend and a tip of the hat to Joe for changing his name forever.

Just like there are fantastic players that don’t win the Heisman, there are some great Heisman campaigns and Heisman promotional gimmicks – or ideas – that we’ve seen that didn’t produce a winner but are still great to look back on.

Among them are a few campaigns that would make toy collector proud.

Marshall QB Bryon Leftwich was jockeying for eyeballs and votes in a strong 2002 class of quarterbacks that USC’s Carson Palmer ultimately emerged from.

The folks at Marshall gave, in an effort to get some buzz going, unfurled the purse strings a bit to produce 1,000 Byron Leftwich bobbleheads that were mailed to Heisman voters. 

Three years later, Memphis went a similar route to promote talented tailback DeAngelo Williams. USC’s Reggie Bush was the favorite in 2005, but Williams was turning in similarly impressive highlight reel plays.

The Tigers Athletic Department tried to capitalize on that momentum and produced and mailed  2,500 die-cast model race cars featuring Williams’ No. 20, symbolizing the “race” for the Heisman. Word on the street it cost about $8 per car, but the department was able to recoup the expenses by selling another 1,500 cars to fans who loved the idea.

Leftwich finished sixth and Williams was seventh following their respective campaigns, both in years a USC Trojan won. But both players certainly got a boost out of their department’s creativity.

One more note on toys and Heisman campaigns. In 2007, Missouri’s Chase Daniels was a Heisman finalist, finishing fourth.

The Tigers’ Athletic Department kicked off a campaign for Daniels in 2008 by ordering 2,500 View-Masters with Daniels’ images to send to Heisman voters and other sports media at a cost of about $25,000.

He had another superb offensive year, but either the View-Masters didn’t hit right or there was just too much competition as Daniels did not crack the top 10 in voting that year. 

Ryan Leaf never panned out in the NFL, but he had a great college career at Washington State and the creative minds in Pullman, Wash., turned his last name into a great marketing plan.

Sports Info director Rod Commons kept it simple and built a campaign off of Leaf’s last name in 1997. To promote his strong-armed QB, Commons mailed envelopes with a single leaf to all of the Heisman voters. One solitary leaf, raked from the grounds of a local Pullman golf course by Commons’ sports info staff. Nothing else.

Commons sent these out in October and the buzz was well received.

Now, this was a packed Heisman race and Leaf was going up against eventual winner Charles Woodson and second-place finisher Peyton Manning. Leaf finished third, ahead of Randy Moss and in that quartet of finalists, that’s not a bad accomplishment.

Sometimes, Heisman campaigns are thrown together quickly. Johnny Manziel was having a great freshman season at Texas A&M in 2012 but his name recognition went into another orbit when he orchestrated the Aggies’ upset of No. 1 Alabama that November.

The folks in the Texas A&M quickly put their heads together and ramped up a campaign. They fast-tracked a web site to Manziel’s story in the Aggies’ first season in the SEC.

Because Aggie freshmen were not allowed to talk to media, Manziel was a bit of a mysterious commodity to voters, so the Aggies told his story through the web site.

They also heavily utilized the still relatively new social media site known then as Twitter and fully took advantage of the burgeoning buzz online. A month later, Manziel walked away with the Trophy.

The aforementioned Palmer had a similar moment in October of 2002, when the USC Athletic Department — without a Heisman winner for two decades— saw some grass root possibilities around their senior starting QB. They quickly came up with a campaign and in late October mailed a promo to media. It was a “V.I.P. Pass” to “The Carson Show,” with all the impressive bullet points on his season, playing off the then ubiquitous Johnny Carson.

Palmer’s play remained strong in November, he led USC as it rose in the rankings each week and following a huge performance in a win over Notre Dame, the Heisman was his.

In 2001, Oregon put a ton of resources behind promoting quarterback Joey Harrington. The Ducks department spent in the realm of a quarter million dollars on an 80-by-100-foot billboard of Harrington erected across the street from Madison Square Garden, dubbing him Joey Heisman.

Harrington made it to New York that fall, but as a finalist, finishing fourth.

Thirteen years later, Oregon finally got its Heisman winner in Marcus Mariota. But he asked the department to not promote him for the award, or at least do it in a much less splashy way. No matter,  Mariota’s play did the talking for him in 2014.

In 2017, USC QB Sam Darnold hosted his own podcast to help promote his Heisman campaign. His play, while strong, wasn’t quite up to his 2016-Rose-Bowl-winning-season and the podcast wasn’t enough to spur him onto a top 10 finish.

But podcasts have grown exponentially since then and now Heisman candidates have them, including one of this year’s Heisman favorites, Travis Hunter, as well as his teammate Shedeur Sanders. Ryan Williams, Alabama’s freshman wide receiver, also has one, among other players.

We’re not sure what affect a Heisman pod will have on voting, but we’re excited to find out!