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Why, oh, why, O'Brien?
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The Davey O'Brien Award
BYU quarterbacks have won the prestigious Davey O’Brien Award four times, the most of any school. Can you name them and the years they won before I reveal them at the end of this article?
Since 2007, the O’Brien Award, unlike the Heisman, involves and encourages fan input through a voting process, giving fans a small say in the award’s winner. Fan voting accounts for 5 percent of overall scoring, which means the O’Brien National Selection Committee – comprised of sports media members – still gets a 95-percent say in the matter.
I have a question: Why has the Davey O’Brien Foundation allowed the award to become tainted with fan input? I mean, fans are fans and the majority of them that take the time to vote are going to do what fanatics do: vote for their team’s quarterback as long as he remains a candidate.
By nature, objectivity and fanaticism do not go hand-in-hand.
Awards like these deserve to be 100-percent objectively decided, not 99 percent, not 99.99 percent, and certainly not 95 percent. One hundred percent. Period.
By allowing fans a 5-percent say in the award’s winner, the award’s prestige has been diminished. Sure, 5 percent really isn’t that much, but the fact that the fans now have their foot in the door and have any say is evidence that the award is headed for doom.
What’s next? A 20-percent say in the vote? 50 percent? Heaven forbid it eventually gets to where the award winner is decided entirely by fan voting.
The only reason I can think of for such a move by the O’Brien Foundation is to generate interest in its award. Perhaps the gap in media coverage between the O’Brien and the Heisman was widening? Or maybe fans simply weren’t showing enough interest in the award.
Whatever the reason, it seems that fan voting for the O’Brien Award is here to stay.
The redeeming point here is that the selection committee still mostly controls who wins the award.
In the preliminary round of voting, which is going on now, fans can vote for any of the 120 FBS schools’ quarterbacks. Following the first round of voting, which ends on Oct. 25, the selection committee will narrow the candidates to 12. Fan voting will resume in the semifinal round until Nov. 22. The committee will then narrow the field to three candidates and fans will be allowed to vote again until Dec. 6. The award winner will be announced on ESPN on Dec. 10.
BYU fans can still have some influence – albeit very little influence – in getting Max Hall into the next round of the voting process. Currently, Hall is in third place in the fan voting with 11 percent of the vote. Texas’ Colt McCoy is the vote leader with 25 percent and Florida’s Tim Tebow is second with 16 percent.
The Davey O’Brien Memorial Award was created in 1977 and was given to the top college football player in the old Southwest Conference, which consisted of schools in Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma.
Recipients of the O’Brien Memorial Award were Earl Campbell (1977), Billy Sims (1978) and Mike Singletary (1979, 80).
In 1981, the award was changed to focus on the nation’s top quarterback and was renamed the Davey O’Brien National Quarterback Award.
BYU’s Jim McMahon was the award’s first recipient in 1981 and former Cougars Steve Young (1983) and Ty Detmer (1990, 1991) round out the list of O’Brien Award winners from BYU.
We will now have a moment of silence for the award that has taken its first steps down the path to obscurity.
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