As the college football regular season winds down, the race for individual awards ramps up. Of course, the most prominent campaigns revolve around the sport’s most prestigious award, the Heisman trophy. The 2023 season has provided several worthy candidates for the award, but one player stands out from the rest. Jayden Daniels’ play has made the most persuasive case to win the Heisman trophy.
It’s beneficial to determine the criteria for a Heisman winner before comparing player profiles. We tend to see an odd, recurring coincidence of the most important factors for Heisman candidates changing along with the agenda of the talking head making the argument. The Heisman Trophy Trust calls it the “most outstanding college football player”. By definition, popularity and NFL projections should not factor into the decision-making process. This is a matter of who stands out the most.
Nobody stands out more than Daniels. He is first in the country in total yards, passing efficiency, and yards per attempt, all while facing the top-rated strength of schedule in the country. He has the third most rushing yards in the SEC and is the only quarterback in the top 15 SEC rushers.
Stats are good indicators of standout players but can go unappreciated in such an offense-friendly era of football. It’s so common to see 3,000-yard passing seasons that they’ve slowly become the expectation rather than the exception. The opportunities to see players do what has not been done before are rare, but Daniels achieved a historic feat against Florida. With 372 passing yards and 234 rushing yards, he became the first player in FBS history to pass for over 350 yards and rush for over 200 yards in the same game.
Daniels’s 408 total yards per game outpaces the next-best player, Michael Penix, by 58 yards. He leads the country in points per game with 23. Thanks to Daniels, the top-ranked LSU offense features both the leader in receiving yards and the leader in receiving touchdowns in Malik Nabers and Brian Thomas, respectively.
Daniels Among Former Winners
In fact, Daniels leads the country in so many categories that one might be better served to compare him to past winners instead of current players. His 71% completion percentage is higher than every other Heisman-winning quarterback in the past 10 years but Joe Burrow. If Daniels maintains his yardage average through his last three games he’ll finish with over 5300 total yards, which would be more than every Heisman winner besides Burrow and Kyler Murray. Note that both Burrow and Murray played more games in their Heisman seasons than Daniels will play.
At this point, there aren’t many legitimate cases to be made against Daniels as the frontrunner for the Heisman. LSU has obviously lost three games, so there has been an unwarranted underlying belief that Daniels couldn’t win the award without his team being a championship contender. Again, wins and losses should not influence the voting, but innately they do so to an extent. Regardless, several players like Robert Griffin III and Lamar Jackson have set the precedent of Heisman winners overcoming multiple losses.
The Forgotten Factors
An overlooked portion of the Heisman Trophy Trust’s mission statement specifies that the winner’s physical ability should combine with “diligence, perseverance, and hard work”. Last year, Daniels had a 7.5 yards per attempt average and threw 17 touchdowns with an efficiency rating of 144.5. In 2023 he’s averaging 11.6 yards per attempt, has thrown 30 touchdowns with three games left, and his efficiency rating is 202.1. These improvements have exceeded the expectations of even the most unreasonably biased of LSU fans. They’re also a direct result of diligence and hard work.
Daniels’ most impressive trait could be his perseverance. His former teammates ridiculed and villainized him after transferring from Arizona State. Opponents have delivered cringe-worthy hits in seemingly every game. Daniels willed LSU to a win at Missouri after a late hit knocked him out of the game. He responded to getting knocked out of the Alabama game with his most impressive game of the season against Florida. Teams can’t keep Daniels down, and it looks as though he fits the description of the most outstanding player in the country.
