What to expect from the 2022 Heisman Trophy vote

Caleb Williams will win comfortably, but how big of a margin of victory will the USC quarterback enjoy in the 2022 Heisman Trophy vote?

Everything is pointing toward Caleb Williams hoisting the Heisman Trophy come Saturday night in New York.

In the past 13 seasons, only four players have had better odds going into the ceremony than what the USC quarterback has at -2500, and since 2009 not a single favorite at the stage has lost the trophy. From that end, wow it plays out is a mere formality. The only questions that remain lie within the voting figures themselves.

Did the Trojans losing the Pac-12 Championship Game and missing out on the College Football Playoff impact the margin of victory? Did this go from a landslide to a narrow win for Williams … or was he just so far out ahead of this field going into the final days that it didn’t even matter?

We used to be able to look at the number of finalists making the trip to provide some kind of framework in forecasting how those vote totals would look.

When the Downtown Athletic Club/Heisman Trust began welcoming players to the proceedings in 1982, it capped the number at the natural break in the point totals. Add up each player’s points on a ballot that awards three for first place, two for second and one for third, and you’d get fields of finalists ranging from three players to six.

But going forward, that roadmap becomes a little tougher to read. The Trust is now inviting four players every year, no matter what, which has Williams joined this weekend by Georgia’s Stetson Bennett IV, TCU’s Max Duggan and Ohio State’s C.J. Stroud.

Historically, fields of four have been the stage for big wins, including four of the largest margins of victory all-time in LSU’s Joe Burrow (1,846 points in 2019), Michigan’s Desmond Howard (1,574 in 1991), Texas’ Ricky Williams (1,563 in 1998) and Alabama’s Bryce Young (1,357) last year. The four previous ceremonies with four players have resulted in an average margin of 1,264 points, more than 500 points higher than the averages across 40 years of finalists.

But now that four players are always making the trip, though, looking to that numbers as a guide is meaningless. Under the old system, there may be only three players in attendance this season, considering the way Stroud ended his regular season. We won’t know that for sure until after the votes are revealed.

There are going to be players who are robbed of the chance to be on that stage in celebration of their season because of this cap; there are going to be players put front and center that hindsight shows wouldn’t have been in the past. Ultimately, the powers that be are creating further buzz and anticipation, and considering this is basically college football’s original reality show, that buildup is kind of the point.

So, the number of players heading to New York may no longer help in forecasting the vote — but the odds certainly do.

Heisman Trophy 2022: Voting projections based on betting odds

Since 2009, Williams — at that aforementioned -2500 per BetMGM — is behind Oklahoma’s Baker Mayfield (-32500 in 2017), Florida State’s Jameis Winston (-15000 in 2013), Burrow (-12500 in 2019) and Young (-5000) in the odds going into the ceremony. He finds himself ahead of the -1500 Oregon’s Marcus Mariota was favored by in in 2017 and Louisville’s Lamar Jackson at -1345 in 2016.

Burrow turned that those odds into the biggest landslide win in history, while Mayfield had the lowest among that group in beating out Stanford’s Bryce Love by 1,098 points. The average among them (1,279-point margin) could be what Williams’ win looks like, but in reality that feels a little high given the way the season ended for the Trojans star.

In this era, Jackson is the only Heisman winner who capped his season with a loss, and he’s also the only one whose team didn’t reach the playoffs in the past eight years. Those nuggets make his case more in line with that of Williams, though Jackson did end his campaign on a slide, dropping the last two games of the regular season, while Williams took his team to the Pac-12 finale before getting hit with that loss.

Despite that rough finish, Jackson won his Heisman by 620 points over Clemson’s Deshaun Watson, the former taking 526 of the first-place votes to the latter’s 296, and the Cardinals quarterback won five of the six voting regions in the process.

Among this year’s finalists, Bennett was the only one who heads to New York coming off a victory. That’s not to knock Duggan — who was fantastic in the Horned Frogs’ overtime loss to Kansas State in the Big 12 Championship Game, a performance that changed the potential of his finish in this vote — but Williams was the unquestioned leader going into the final weekend before votes were due. Stroud was arguably the only other player over the final weeks that had a legitimate shot at winning, and he left voters to focus on his worst performance of the season.

Nothing that happened championship weekend was going to sway whose hands the Heisman winds up in, and this vote should reflect that.

Look for Duggan to come in second to Williams, which would be TCU’s best finish since Jim Swink in 1955, and a stunning climb for a player who wasn’t even getting odds this summer. Bennett should follow — and equal Garrison Hearst in 1992 for Georgia’s best place in the vote since Herschel Walker’s 1982 win — with Stroud in fourth.

The expectation is we get north of Jackson’s margin of victory for Williams, something in the 800-to 900-point range, and drawing 600-plus of the 928 possible first-place votes. Williams should have no trouble cracking the top 10 all-time in number of ballots he appears on — which would need to be 87.6 percent or higher — and taking five of the six regions — with the Southwest likely going to Duggan — for a voting total that surpasses 2,000 points.

This may not be the landslide win that Williams could have had if he’d punctuated his season with a playoff berth, but it’s not going to be close, either.

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