VICE Sports Heisman Watch: Navy's Keenan Reynolds Is Up Against History

There are 929 voters for the Heisman Trophy in 2015, which means that a single ballot essentially counts for next to nothing in the grand scheme of things. But this week, a brief controversy arose over one of those votes, in particular a corporate-branded "fans' vote" that is sponsored by both a major car company and a major sports-media conglomerate. This would not have happened if the fans' vote had favored Alabama's Derrick Henry or Clemson's DeShaun Watson, the two current favorites to win the Heisman; the only reason this drew any attention at all is because Navy quarterback and dark horse contender Keenan Reynolds, who was leading the fans' vote balloting, suddenly vanished from view, which allowed it to briefly burgeon into a conspiracy theory.

In this case, Occam's razor apparently kept its firm hold over Internet tin-foil hat outrage: Reynolds' disappearance was reportedly caused by a glitch in the system more than by an inexplicable attempt to bar a quarterback from a service academy from receiving roughly .001 percent of a vote he was never going to win anyway. In a way, I suppose, this was the best thing that could have happened to Reynolds, because at the very least, it called more attention to him heading into next weekend's Army-Navy game.

Maybe it'll garner Reynolds a few more runner-up votes in sympathy; maybe it'll even score him an invite to New York as a finalist, though it still seems highly unlikely, because while this whole brief attempt to uncover a vast anti-military cabal by two of America's largest corporations appears unfounded, it is true that Reynolds never really had a chance at the Heisman. And this is largely because he came along at the wrong time.

Seventy years ago, back in 1945, Army's Doc Blanchard won the first Heisman for a service academy. The following year, Blanchard's backfield mate Glenn Davis won the award. This came at a moment when Army was the most formidable football program in the country: From 1944-46 under coach Earl Blaik, Army went 27-0-1 and won a pair of Associated Press national championships, and should have won a share of a third in 1946. Twelve years later, in 1958, Army went 8-0-1 under Blaik and halfback Pete Dawkins won another Heisman, but by then, the service academies' place in college football was already waning: The Cadets finished third in the AP Poll that season, behind both undefeated LSU and 8-1-1 Iowa. And five years later, in 1963, Roger Staubach offered one last gasp for the service academies, winning the Heisman in a year in which Navy finished second in the country and lost to top-ranked Texas in the Cotton Bowl.

Some 50 years since Staubach's Heisman win, there is little room for a service academy as a major player in a sport that is so driven by television revenue. The Army-Navy game is a beauteous spectacle, a moment worth celebrating, largely because it feels set apart from the remainder of college football. But this raises the Heisman bar for a player like Reynolds, because it feels like he's competing in a separate division of football from candidates like Henry and Watson. Reynolds would have had to overcome all of that; he would have to had to set himself up to win the Heisman by performing through spectacular highlights, since so few of Navy's games are televised on major networks. And there's another obstacle, one that's less obvious: Reynolds is an option quarterback in an era when the option stands out as an anomaly.

In 2001, Nebraska's Eric Crouch won the Heisman Trophy. Crouch won because he happened to play in a year when no Heisman contenders stood out; he won it despite throwing seven touchdown passes and 10 interceptions that season; and he won it even though Nebraska got crushed by Colorado in its season-finale (and then somehow managed to get chosen for the national-championship game anyway, losing 37-14 in the Rose Bowl to Miami). It's odd, in retrospect, that Crouch won the trophy; it was even stranger that he won it as an option quarterback, which is something no one else has done before or since. Indeed, the closest analogue for Reynolds might be Air Force's prolific option quarterback Dee Dowis, who finished sixth in the Heisman voting in 1989.

These are the barriers Reynolds was up against heading into this season: He is the wrong kind of quarterback at the wrong kind of school to win a Heisman. His numbers are excellent, but they do not leap out at you in the way an Air Raid quarterback's numbers might; his best passing performance of the season (312 yards on 13-of-16 passing) came in Navy's 52-31 loss to Houston. Perhaps if the Midshipmen had gone undefeated and been locked out of the College Football Playoff (which seems as if it might have been eminently possible), Reynolds might have garnered the sort of sympathy vote that is given to movies that win Best Screenplay Oscars. But barring that sort of perfection, he never really had a chance in anything but a fan vote.

That's not to say that Reynolds won't get any other first-place votes—Staubach has already said Reynolds has his Heisman vote. Maybe he sneaks through as a finalist, but ultimately, he had far more working against him than a far-fetched conspiracy theory. And given that Reynolds and his teammates have far more important concerns in their future, I'm not it matters one way or the other.