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On Saturday night, with the Midtown Manhattan skyline and Central Park providing a picturesque backdrop, one of the more storied traditions in college football will be carried out.

The Heisman Trophy has lost some of the relevance and mystique it once carried, but it’s still perhaps the most hallowed and ubiquitous individual award in all of American sports. Lifting up the iconic cast bronze bust of former New York University star Ed Smith stiff-arming an unseen opponent transforms its recipient’s identity. Regardless of what happens for the rest of their careers, whoever wins that trophy in a given year is forever associated with it.

This year, that person will be either Jayden Daniels of LSU, Michael Penix Jr. of Washington, Bo Nix of Oregon or Marvin Harrison Jr. of Ohio State. Any of the four would be a deserving recipient. Daniels put up the kind of dual-threat quarterback stats college football has only previously seen from the likes of Lamar Jackson and Robert Griffin III the past decade. Penix and Nix were maestros of two of the sport’s most explosive offenses and did so while competing in arguably the toughest and deepest conference. Harrison, the son of the former NFL receiver whose name I won’t mention out of consideration for my personal safety, is the best receiver in the sport and as close a thing to a surefire future NFL star as there is in the college game right now.

Beyond their individual excellence and talent, a common thread links the quartet – each of the four players represents not only a Power Five school, but one of the biggest and most decorated programs in the sport over the past quarter-century.

The qualifications for the Heisman are often nebulous and left open to interpretation for those who vote for it, but in recent years, certain prerequisites for winning it have emerged. It’s always been a primarily offensive-oriented award that has become almost exclusively a recognition of the sport’s best quarterback (of the 23 winners since 2000, 19 have been quarterbacks). The ultimate recipient not only has to play for a good team, but, more often than not, a national championship contender. Since 1986, only three Heisman winners have been on teams with three or more losses.

What appears to be one of the most basic parameters for entry into the opulent Manhattan room where the trophy is handed out annually is playing for a Power Five program.

It wasn’t always this way. While the award has, with few exceptions, gone to someone from one of the largest leagues in college football, the upper reaches of the final Heisman vote used to regularly feature players not just from what are now the Group of Five conferences, but the FCS (formerly Division I-AA).

From 1980-94, there were six instances of an FCS player finishing among the top five vote-getters for the Heisman. A number of those players graced national magazine covers and had dedicated public relations campaigns propping up their candidacy and exposing their name to a previously unsuspecting public. Though the fame was fleeting for all but a couple of them, their on-field success turned them into figures of national interest for a stretch of time.

Over the past 30 years, that has come to a noticeable halt. 

Not since Alcorn State’s Steve McNair in 1994 has an FCS player finished in the top 10 of Heisman voting, a trend that continued into this season. What was once a celebrated feature of the sport – that someone from college football’s proverbial shadows could share the spotlight with some of its brightest stars, if even just for a moment – has effectively disappeared.

A look at the list of all-time Heisman winners will reveal some unexpected schools.

The first winner of the Heisman in 1935 – back when it was known as the Downtown Athletic Club Trophy – was from the University of Chicago, which dropped its football program four years later before reinstituting it in 1969. Yale has produced multiple winners. Service academies Army and Navy have, as well. As recently as 1989, Houston quarterback Andre Ware managed to capture the award despite his team’s games not airing on TV as part of an NCAA punishment over previous rules violations.

In the years since some of the Heisman’s earliest honorees, college football has changed considerably, becoming more stratified and subdivided. As the financial demands to field a competitive team increased, some schools that once vied for national championships and sported some of the game’s best players decided the juice simply wasn’t worth the squeeze.

The reality has been reflected by the Heisman. Since the mid-1960s, very few, if any, programs that featured the award’s winner stand out as true oddities.

By the late 1970s, that began to shift. The Heisman’s ultimate winner was still a skill position player from the sport’s upper crust, but increasingly, players from otherwise obscure schools began to insert themselves into the conversation around the coveted award.

Though his team was at the Division I-A level for that season – the lone season it was in the program’s 86-year history – Grambling State’s Doug Williams finished fourth in Heisman voting in 1977 after throwing for 3,286 yards and 38 touchdowns for legendary coach Eddie Robinson. In 1980, Portland State’s Neil Lomax cracked the top 10, finishing fourth, and four years after him, an impressive young receiver at Mississippi Valley State named Jerry Rice finished ninth.

As a trend started to emerge, some of the most widely read national outlets began to take notice. In 1985, Sports Illustrated published a cover in which Joe Dudek from tiny Plymouth State, a Division III school in New Hampshire, appeared with a check next to his name on a fake ballot titled THE THINKING FAN’S VOTE FOR THE 1985 HEISMAN TROPHY, beating out Auburn’s Bo Jackson and Iowa’s Chuck Long for the honor.

Dudek produced at a remarkable rate. His 79 career touchdowns broke an NCAA record set by Walter Payton and he went on to hold NCAA records for career 100-yard rushing games (30) and games with two or more touchdowns (24). Beyond those figures, his personal story was irresistible. Dudek had taken out a $2,500 student loan all four years and told Sports Illustrated that he was "loaned out." In the spring of his sophomore year, he took a semester off from school to drive a van, delivering supplies for Blue Cross/Blue Shield to help pay his tuition.

That year, Dudek went on to finish ninth in Heisman voting, marking the last time a Division III player ever came close to that point.

In each of the next two years, one of the more mythical figures in college football history, Holy Cross’ Gordie Lockbaum, established a strong and compelling case for the Heisman, finishing fifth in 1986 and third in 1987.

A defensive back his first two college seasons, Lockbaum had running back and wide receiver duties added to his proverbial plate heading into his junior season, along with some special teams work. That year, he rushed for 827 yards on 144 carries, caught 57 passes for 860 yards and scored 22 touchdowns. Defensively, he had 46 tackles, two fumble recoveries and one interception, and on special teams, he returned 21 kickoffs for 452 yards. His name first generated significant mainstream media attention that year when he was on the field for 143 of 171 total plays against Army. The following year, he posted similar numbers, but finished a couple of spots higher in Heisman voting, likely because of the national reputation he had established and carried over from his junior season.

Lockbaum’s story was particularly gripping, albeit in a different way than Dudek’s. He was the first two-way college player in nearly 20 years and for an older generation of sports writers who covered the sport and voted on the Heisman who grew up watching players compete on both offense and defense, there was a welcome novelty to that. Lockbaum was a relic, the kind of figure many thought they would never see again. With that came persistent media coverage and a kind of visibility Lockbaum would have never achieved otherwise.

By 1994, a longshot Heisman candidate more in line with Williams than Lockbaum or Dudek emerged.

That season, McNair, who was recruited as a defensive back by Division I programs out of high school, pieced together what still might be the most impressive statistical season from a college quarterback at any level. Here’s a sampling of what he managed to accomplish:

• 5,799 yards of total offense – 4,863 passing, 936 rushing

• 44 regular season touchdown passes

• Six 500-yard passing games

• 527.2 passing yards per game. The next-closest player in the NCAA record books, Houston’s David Klingler in 1990, had 467.3 per game.

While guiding Alcorn State to an 8-3-1 record, he had no shortage of what are described today as “Heisman moments.” In one game, he led his team on a winning scoring drive despite facing a 2nd-and-40 from his own 25-yard line with less than a minute remaining. He engineered a comeback against Samford, who his team trailed by 29 in the third quarter, to earn a tie. Those results happened within just a month of each other.

"Steve has the intelligence of a Montana, the release of a Marino, the scrambling ability of an Elway," Rickey Taylor, Alcorn’s offensive coordinator, told Sports Illustrated. “He's got all that like I've never seen in an athlete before. This is my 19th year, and I've seen a lot of great players. I've been in 12 different pro camps, and I see what they have there. I haven't seen anybody yet I can compare this kid with."

McNair did all of this while facing sizable and systemic hurdles. For one, Alcorn State, an HBCU in rural Mississippi, didn’t have the resources to mount a lavish, unrelenting Heisman campaign, with the school’s sports information office consisting of two student assistants, a fax machine, and some postage stamps, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. The Braves lifted weights in a classroom, one that didn’t have a working water fountain nearby as the university didn’t have the money to fix a broken one. Through it all, he continued to put up numbers at a dizzying pace.

Despite also getting the Sports Illustrated cover treatment, complete with the headline “Hand Him the Heisman,” McNair finished third, well behind winner Rashaan Salaam of Colorado.

It was a justifiable selection. Salaam rushed for 2,055 yards, making him only fourth player in FBS history to run for more than 2,000 yards in a season, and still managed to be efficient doing so, averaging 6.9 yards per carry. On top of all that, he compiled those numbers on a Colorado team that finished 11-1 and No. 3 in the final AP poll.

While Salaam wasn’t unworthy of the award, it raised an unavoidable and uncomfortable question – if McNair couldn’t come particularly close to winning the Heisman, who could?

An answer still hasn’t emerged.

The closest anyone has come to McNair in the 29 years since was in 1997, when Randy Moss, playing for a Marshall team in its first season at the FBS level, finished fourth in Heisman voting after catching 25 touchdown passes.

Moss, who was only at Marshall after disciplinary issues prevented him from catching on at Notre Dame and Florida State, is illustrative of the kind of special circumstances it takes for a non-FBS player to receive serious Heisman traction.

McNair and Rice, like Moss, were future NFL stars who attended smaller programs in their home states. Their talent was as obvious as it was undeniable, forcing people to pay attention who otherwise might not have done so. Dudek and Lockbaum both had captivating, unusual backstories that helped them earn recognition for an award that, at least at the time, was heavily narrative-driven.

It’s not just FCS players who need seemingly everything to break in their favor to even get a whiff of the Heisman’s bronze bust. Even FBS players in Group of Five conferences have struggled to consistently break through. Since Moss in 1997, there have been only five top-four finishers from a Group of Five program and none since 2013.

It’s not as if there haven’t been worthy candidates. San Diego State’s Donnel Pumphrey is the FBS career rushing yards leader, at 6,405, but he never finished better than tied for 10th in Heisman voting. Another San Diego State running back, Rashaad Penny, rushed for 2,248 yards in 2017, the fifth-most in FBS history in a single season, but he finished only fifth for the Heisman, one spot behind a Power Five running back, Penn State’s Saquon Barkley, who he bested in every major statistical category.

That extends down to the FCS level, as well. 

Brian Westbrook, a future Pro Bowl running back for the Philadelphia Eagles, became the first and only player in the history of college football at any level with 1,000 rushing and 1,000 receiving yards in one season as a sophomore at Villanova in 1999. As a senior, he had 1,000 rushing and 1,000 kickoff return yards, helping him win the Walter Payton Award, given annually to the best offensive player in the FCS. Appalachian State’s Armanti Edwards was a two-time Payton Award recipient and became the first FBS or FCS player to pass for 10,000 yards and rush for at least 4,000 in his career. He even had whatever name recognition came from being the quarterback who guided the Mountaineers to their famed 2007 upset of Michigan.

Neither player ever got close to the Heisman conversation, though, nor did a number of other Payton Award winners who went on to make names for themselves in the NFL, like Tony Romo, Cooper Kupp and Jimmy Garoppolo. Last year’s Payton Award winner, Incarnate Word quarterback Lindsey Scott Jr., racked up 5,369 yards of total offense – nearly 600 more than the top FBS player – and scored 71 touchdowns, but this sentence is likely the first time you’ve heard of him.

In theory, it should be easier for a player from a smaller, less visible program to win the Heisman in this day and age. The expensive PR blitz that was once required to alert hundreds of sports writers to a player’s existence is no longer relevant in a digital age. Plus, games are much more readily available, too. The guy at the tiny school in the tiny conference putting up monster numbers isn’t an urban legend. He’s someone you can watch with an ESPN+ subscription.

Yet the gap separating FCS and even Group of Five players from the trophy or its swanky New York ceremony is vast and only growing wider.

While speaking to Sports Illustrated for its piece on Dudek in 1985, former Cornell standout Ed Marinaro, the second-place finisher for the 1971 Heisman, expressed the frustration many like him felt.

"It's not a legitimate award," Marinaro said. "I was criticized because everything I did was in the Ivy League. I dominated the league, but I guess I didn't count."

Given what has unfolded in the nearly 40 years since that statement, it’s hard to say that skepticism wasn’t warranted.

(Photos: Sports Illustrated, Holy Cross Athletics)

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