By Mike DeCourcy

updated 12:38 a.m. ET Sept. 16, 2006

Mike DeCourcy

pagebreaktrue - If you look at the fellow on top of the Heisman Trophy, he looks an awful lot like Reggie Bush.

He has the football tucked under his arm, and it's obvious he is going somewhere important. The difference is that the statue is motionless, which rarely is the case with Bush.

Given the news from Yahoo! Sports that Bush and his family allegedly accepted benefits from sports marketing agents while Bush was preparing for his junior season at Southern California, there is debate about whether Bush and his Heisman Trophy will become estranged in the near future.

That'd be absurd. We all saw Bush last year. There was no question he was the best player in college football. He looked more like a Heisman Trophy winner last year — even if there was cash falling out of his pockets — than nearly all the Heisman winners of the past two decades.

Bush's greatness gave new relevance to what had become a joke of an award. I was a Heisman voter for about a dozen years, from 1984-96, and I'm pleased to say that although I was there for the decline, I got out before the collapse.

In fact, I participated in what I believe to have been the first element in pushing the Heisman toward the cliff: the Heisman Watch poll run by the Rocky Mountain News and disseminated by the Scripps Howard News Service. I'm reasonably certain that's where it all began, this week-by-week obsession with who's in the horse race and who's out — much the way we choose our presidential candidates nowadays.

Bush — Reggie, I mean — charged through all of that nonsense last year to win the award for the purest of reasons. He won because he was sensational. Isn't it a little silly when you look on the list of Heisman winners and see that Jason White, Chris Weinke, Danny Wuerffel and Rashaan Salaam are on there with a player who rushed, caught passes and returned kicks with the flair of Bush?

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Yahoo! certainly has the goods on Bush. The reporters who did the work turned up more documentation of their claims than you'll find at a congressional hearing. USC will have to answer for that, I imagine. But the Heisman was won on the field, where Bush proved a worthy successor to Roger Staubach, Tony Dorsett, Doug Flutie and Tim Brown — the guys who won before it became almost exclusively about numbers.

To remove Bush's Heisman at this point would not correct an injustice. It would be an exercise in revisionist history. If the Heisman folks wish to enter that field, they should start by raiding Gino Toretta's trophy case and getting back the 1992 trophy. Where did anyone get the idea he was worthy?

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