The Ole Miss Heisman campaign has left the state of Mississippi, and it went straight for the two zip codes that guarantee eyeballs: Dallas and Times Square. Word came down this morning that the school is mixing the new stops with the tried-and-true stuff, the mailers and the media push and the relentless drumbeat of highlight packages, all of it aimed at voters who will not see most of these Saturdays in person.
I love this genre of sports story, and I say that with full knowledge that it is marketing. It is marketing with a century of lineage behind it. The Heisman started as a New York award, handed out in 1935 by the Downtown Athletic Club to Jay Berwanger of the University of Chicago, the trophy itself sculpted by Frank Eliscu, and renamed the following year for John Heisman after his death. The prize was born in Manhattan. So of course the campaigns keep going back to Manhattan.
checked the almanac: oregon hung a ten-story joey harrington billboard in times square in 2001, and harrington finished fourth in the voting behind eric crouch. the billboard is the part everybody remembers.
That is the honest lesson in all of this. The billboard does not vote. Production votes, November votes, and a nationally televised win over somebody good votes hardest of all. What a campaign like this actually buys is name recognition in the third week of September, so that when a voter fills out a ballot in December the name already sounds like a candidate instead of an argument.
I don't have the full itinerary of stops in front of me yet, and I'm not going to pretend I do. What I know is that Ole Miss has decided it is not going to let geography be the reason its best player gets overlooked, which is a very modern and very reasonable position for a program that has spent most of its history outside the sport's blue-blood spotlight.
What I'm watching next is simple and it has nothing to do with a skyline. The campaign is the appetizer. The tape is the meal.