ACC Daily Fever: Conference Mediocrity to Blame For Spiller's Heisman Snub

Posted: Dec 14, 2009

The Heisman vote is in - the ACC's quality of play isn't up to par.

Not all from ACC country agree. With Clemson star C.J. Spiller not being invited to the Award ceremony, South Carolina columnist Bart Wright questioned the whole Heisman process. He also wonders why true “journalists” vote in the popularity contest that could potentially mean a ton of endorsements and money to the winner.

Here are his strong comments on the media as well as C.J. Spiller non-invite to New York:

Sorry, I’ve never understood why some think it’s perfectly acceptable to play a central role in these popular votes while maintaining a veneer of neutrality before and after the votes.

If you don’t vote for these awards, you have no personal stake in outcome, so it becomes a simple matter of an individual opinion to say, based on his statistics, Tim Tebow has no business being involved among the five finalists for the Heisman award and that Clemson’s C.J. Spiller surely was more deserving of being among the final five.

You’ve read Spiller’s accomplishments all season. He broke more career records than you can name, his abilities in the open field are singular, and shocking to behold, but he played on a team that lost five games, so he wasn’t invited?

We understand his point, but Spiller was obviously hurt by Clemson’s 8-5 record and the ACC’s national perception. Until both of those change, even great players like Spiller will continue to get overlooked for big time awards.

Spiller was clearly the ACC's most dominant player, but the ACC remains an underachieving conference. Spiller had a subpar game in Clemson's inexplicable loss to Maryland which hurt him. Worse, Spiller was almost completely shut down by in-state rival South Carolina from the more dominant SEC.

The qualifications of the five Heisman finalists were that they did great things and that they did these things at the right time against strong opponents. This seems to be the tipping point in Mark Ingram's win - having a dominant game in the SEC Championship. Ndamukong Suh's performance in the Big 12 game launched him into the final five Heisman grouping as well, likely taking Spiller's place.

(Memo to Bart Wright - it might have helped Spiller if Clemson had won the ACC Championship too.)

Spiller, like Kellen Moore from Boise St, was a victim of being a great player on good team in a bad conference. In that regard, the ACC is on the clock. It's time for this conference to make the jump. 2010 had better be the year or disappointments like Spiller's will be common place.

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