by Kyle Golik
Channeling my inner Gerald Ford, “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over,” I can proclaim with the news Reggie Bush will have his Heisman Trophy restored. Arguably the greatest “Bush Push” was executed to perfection giving Reggie Bush his greatest victory.
“Personally, I’m thrilled to reunite with my fellow Heisman winners and be a part of the storied legacy of the Heisman Trophy, and I’m honored to return to the Heisman family,” Bush said in a statement to ESPN. “I also look forward to working together with the Heisman Trust to advance the values and mission of the organization.”
Since 2010, the topic of restoration of Bush’s Heisman Trophy has been a hot topic and one that I found annoying.
I wrote back in March that applying current rules to a period of time when those rules didn’t exist didn’t make sense. I analogized in the March column that if you got a speeding ticket for going 75 in a 65 in 2005 and you revisited the same road and the speed limit was now 75, you weren’t going to fight to get your money returned to you and if you did, the odds of winning was stacked.
To me, I feel like how fellow Southern California Heisman Trophy winner quarterback Matt Leinart pushed Reggie Bush past Notre Dame in their classic 2005 encounter, as I wrote back in March, Johnny Manziel pushed Bush past the NCAA and Heisman Trust.
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“We are thrilled to welcome Reggie Bush back to the Heisman family in recognition of his collegiate accomplishments,” Michael Comerford, president of The Heisman Trophy Trust, said in a statement. “We considered the enormous changes in college athletics over the last several years in deciding that now is the right time to reinstate the trophy for Reggie. We are so happy to welcome him back.”
In a statement released by the Heisman Trust detailing the process of how Bush got his Heisman Trophy restored, “The Trust’s decision to reinstate the Trophy follows a deliberate process in which it closely monitored the enormous change in the college football landscape, including the Supreme Court’s 2021 decision, which questioned the legality of the NCAA’s amateurism model and opened the door to student athlete compensation.”
The Heisman Trust was never going to say overtly the impact Manziel had on it, but if you watched the Netflix documentary Untold: Johnny Football, Manziel was brazen enough to detail how he broke rules and beat the NCAA.
The Trust had to consider how they could be okay with Manziel maintaining its status over Bush, and to me the term deliberate process described by The Trust was it could no longer justify Bush’s expulsion as a winner.
What cannot be denied is Bush did indeed break the rule at the time of his collegiate eligibility and that was proven. We can argue about intent all day, but it did happen. The bad part of this whole thing is Bush was brazen enough to break the rules, he wasn’t willing to pay the price for his actions, but somehow managed to find a way around it.
While that is the bad side of Bush being able to beat the NCAA and Heisman Trust, what is conflicting for me, and I am arguably the last person who should be asked to pick a side, because I feel equally as strong about maintaining and upholding the punishment as I do about how I am against the vacation of wins, championships, and awards.
As I mentioned in my previous column, I called Bush an antihero, I affirmed by recognition of Bush as the 2005 Heisman Trophy winner, and lamented my opposition to the vacation of wins, championships, and awards because we all watched the games and ceremonies and saw who won. No matter how much you want us to pretend they never happened, they did.
Reggie Bush won the Heisman Trophy in 2005. Southern California destroyed Oklahoma for the 2004 National Championship, Notre Dame had an undefeated 2012 regular season, Ohio State should have its wins restored from “Tattoo-Gate,” Louisville 2013 men’s basketball team won the national championship and so on.
The majority is celebrating today’s restoration and to me that is fine, there is a minority who is upset by this news, and then there is a weird subsection of the minority that I reside in that is plain conflicted.
In a way, there was no current result that would make me happy and I can recognize that.
I ultimately feel most of this disgust towards the NCAA and not Southern California and Reggie Bush.
The fact the NCAA felt compelled to destroy the efforts those 2004 and 2005 Southern California Trojans did and press for Bush’s Heisman to be stripped is what will always disgust me. If you are just going to restore it years later, why remove it in the first place?
Why marginalize the efforts of a team who worked to earn that distinction, a Heisman Trophy is not won by itself, but a team has to work to make it happen for the outstanding individual to shine bright.
The Heisman Trust and NCAA are realizing the magnitude of the Supreme Court decision on NIL. The NCAA for the foreseeable future will struggle to define what their amateur model is and what the parameters are of a student athlete. The Bush decision is just another log on that fire the NCAA doesn’t seem capable of extinguishing.
When it comes back to Bush, no matter how I feel, when I see the first Nissan Heisman House ads in the fall and how they incorporate Reggie Bush all sides of me will be in pure joy watching this.
Ultimately, no matter how conflicted I am about this 14-year situation with Reggie Bush, my rationale will lead me back to Bush getting his Heisman back and that is what should be celebrated today.
