Burrow gives SEC its sixth Heisman Trophy in 13 years. So how did that happen?

For the first 50 years of the Heisman Trophy, the SEC won only six times. Things have changed.

Saturday night in New York Joe Burrow became the first LSU player to win the Heisman Trophy in 60 years (Billy Cannon, 1959). Burrow not only won college football’s most prestigious award, he won it by the largest point margin (1,846 points) and the largest percentage of first-place votes (95.03 percent) in Heisman history.

In short, it was a landslide.

It was also the continuation of an interesting trend between the Heisman Trophy and the SEC.

To explain we have to go back to the beginning of The Heisman Trophy in 1935. The first seven winners were from Chicago, Yale, Yale, TCU, Iowa, Michigan, and Minnesota.

In that seven-year span an SEC player didn’t even show up in the Heisman voting until Tennessee’s George “Bad News” Cafego finished seventh in 1938 and then finished fourth in 1939. Cafego was a great multi-dimensional player. And it certainly didn’t hurt that he played on two of General Robert Neyland’s greatest teams.

Tennessee went 11-0 with eight shutouts in 1938. Tennessee recorded 10 straight shutouts in 1939 before losing 14-0 to USC in the Rose Bowl. So yeah, people noticed Cafego.

The breakthrough for the SEC and the Heisman Trophy finally came in 1942, when Frank Sinkwich led Georgia (11-1) to an SEC championship, a national championship, and a berth in the Rose Bowl. Sinkwich accepted the Heisman Trophy in New York wearing his Marine Corps Uniform.

It would be 17 years before the SEC would get another Heisman Trophy winner in LSU’s Cannon. In that stretch there were two very deserving candidates: Georgia’s Charley Trippi, who finished second to Army’s Glenn Davis in 1946, and Tennessee’s Johnny Majors, who finished second to Notre Dame’s Paul Hornung in 1956.

So from 1942 to 1996—a span of 55 years—the SEC had seven Heisman Trophy winners or basically one every eight years: Sinkwich in 1942, Cannon in 1959, Steve Spurrier (Florida, 1966), Pat Sullivan (Auburn, 1971), Herschel Walker (Georgia, 1982), Bo Jackson (Auburn, 1985), and Danny Wuerffel (1996).

When Burrow picked up the Heisman Saturday night, he was the sixth SEC winner since Tim Tebow in 2007—about a winner every other year.

So what has changed?

A lot, actually. Here are some things that have led to more Heisman hardware coming to the SEC:

**--In 1992 the SEC added South Carolina and Arkansas to form a 12-team league which was split into divisions. An SEC championship game was created which put the conference on a larger national stage at the end of the regular season.

**--In 1996 the SEC struck a deal with CBS for the rights to the No. 1 game in the conference each week. That contract was renewed in 2008 and runs through the 2023 season. “You can’t overstate how important it was for our institutions and our players and teams to get that national exposure on a weekly basis,” said former commissioner Roy Kramer.

The SEC’s current deal with ESPN, which controls the rest of the league’s football inventory, was also crucial in getting exposure for the Heisman.

Consider this: Of Burrow’s last eight games of the 2019 season, four were on CBS and four were on ESPN. That’s pretty good exposure in front of the 900-plus voters on the Heisman.

**--And it certainly doesn’t hurt that the SEC won seven straight national championships from 2006-2012 and that since 1992, four different schools (Alabama, Florida, Auburn, LSU) have won a total 13 national championships.

LSU has a chance to make it 14 national titles when it takes on Oklahoma in the College Football Playoff on Dec. 28.

If LSU beats Oklahoma in Atlanta and wins again in the CFP title game in New Orleans, Burrow would become the fifth Heisman winner from the SEC to follow it up with a national championship. The others were Frank Sinkwich (Georgia, 1942), Danny Wuerffel (Florida, 1996), Mark Ingram (Alabama, 2009) and Cam Newton (Auburn, 2010).

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THE SEC’S HEISMAN TROPHY WINNERS

Year……………Winner…………………School

1942……………Frank Sinkwich……Georgia

1959…………….Billy Cannon………….LSU

1966…………….Steve Spurrier……….Florida

1971…………….Pat Sullivan…………….Auburn

1982…………….Herschel Walker………Georgia

1985…………….Bo Jackson………………..Auburn

1996……………..Danny Wuerffel…………Florida

2007……………..Tim Tebow…………………Florida

2009………………Mark Ingram……………..Alabama

2010………………Cam Newton…………….Auburn

2012……………….Johnny Manziel…………Texas A&M

2016……………….Derrick Henry………………Alabama

2019……………….Joe Burrow………………….LSU

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