No defense: Manti Te'o stiffed out of the Stiff Arm Trophy

Published Monday, Dec 10, 2012 at 2:49 pm EST
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The votes came in and the Super PAC supporting Manti Te’o called it a breakthrough. A defensive player almost won the Heisman!

The partygoers should feel like a Mitt Romney supporter on election night. For all the happy spin, the sobering fact is if Te’o couldn’t win the Heisman, no defensive player ever will again.

Manti Te'o's biggest (and perhaps only) knock was playing defense, David Whitley writes. (AP Photo)

Well, you never say never. A perfect defensive candidate could always come along.

He would have to play for a preeminent program that’s on TV every week. His team would have to be unbeaten and ranked No. 1.

He would have to be the best player and provide a couple of Heisman Moments. Like leading the charge on a last-ditch goal-line stand.

He would need to be team captain and an academic All-American. Not to be crass, but it would help if he had a tear-jerking personal story. Like a girlfriend and grandmother dying in the same week.

And it never hurts to have a catchy name. Maybe something that sounds like a nice Hawaiian cocktail.

Roll all those things into one player and you might have a campaign so impeccable, there’s no way the electorate could vote him down.

Will such a candidate ever come along?

Okay, enough sarcasm. And this is not a knock on Johnny Manziel. He deserved the trophy as much as Te’o. I wanted to vote for both of them, but I don’t live in Palm Beach County.

I ended up voting for Te’o because he’s a defensive player and I’m a sap. I’d read about a letter of support Te’o wrote to some parents whose child had died of cancer. Te’o didn’t do it for publicity, but the story got out.

I suspect Te’o did a lot of things like that. So did Romney, and we saw where that got him. As Te’o noted, there’s a reason the Heisman pose is a stiff arm. It’s an offensive move, so only offensive players win.

The fact a freshman like Manziel won doesn’t represent a sea change in electorate mentality. Voters showed they weren’t age biased five years ago when Tim Tebow became the first sophomore to win.

They’d have been open to a freshman candidate before now, but none came along to truly capture voters’ attention. Make that a freshman candidate who passed or ran the ball for a living.

It certainly didn’t matter that Te’o was the first player to win the Nagurski, Butkus, Bednarik, Lombardi, Lott, Maxwell and Walter Camp awards.

It doesn't matter that Te’o’s 321 first-place votes and 1,706 points were the most for a defensive player. This year’s contest was like the Republican primaries.

Matt Barkley turned into Rick Perry. Geno Smith was Herman Cain. Collin Klein was Newt Gingrich. All looked great for a while then crashed.

In such a diluted year, somebody had to get the votes. Come election day, there were only two viable choices. The weak field helped Jarvis Jones and Jadeveon Clowney get into the top 10, but don’t interpret that as a trend.

When Pitt linebacker Hugh Green finished second in 1980, UCLA safety Kenny Easley finished ninth. People thought that was a breakthrough, but no defensive player made a run for 17 years.

Charles Woodson made history that year, though his win comes with that all-purpose asterisk. When it comes inclusion, the Heisman is Augusta National and pure defensive players are, well, women.

Wait, we can’t even make that crack any more. Augusta National now has two female members. At this rate, a female quarterback will win the Heisman before a male defender does.

“I just felt that burn,” Te’o said when the results were announced. “I can’t really describe it. It’s that burn to say, ‘Hey, you just have to get better.’ ”

Yeah, maybe he could have been player-coach, won a Nobel prize and cured cancer. For a defender, it will never get better than this year.

All the stars were aligned. But in the end, we looked up and saw the same old constellation.

The Big Stiff Arm.