POY vs. MOP

I’ve always heard that the Maxwell Award winner is often times the Heisman Trophy winner; therefore the theory is that the former is a predictor of the latter since the presentation of each award is seperated by merely a day and (I think) Heisman ballots have already been cast and counted by the time the Maxwell is awarded (confirmed – “The deadline for receipt of the (Heisman) ballots is 5:00 p.m., Wednesday, December 10, 2008.“).  There’s a lot of punctuation at the end of that sentence, some of which may be wrong…anywho, let’s test this theory.

The Maxwell Football Club awarded their first Maxwell Award in 1937 and defines it as the award given to college football’s player of the year.  The Downtown Athletic Club defines their award as one given to the most outstanding college football player and awarded their first Heisman Trophy in 1935.

Last night, Tim Tebow of Florida was awarded his second straight Maxwell Award.  And tomorrow (Saturday), Tebow will be joining Sam Bradford of Oklahoma and Colt McCoy of Texas as the three invitees to the Downtown Athletic Club for presentation of the Heisman Memorial Trophy. 

Hmmm; “player of the year” and “most outstanding player” should be one in the same, right?  As I always say, when you don’t know enough information to make something up that’s beleivable to somebody that may or may not know any better, check the facts.  Since there’s 70 years of overlap between the two awards, there’s plenty of data.  Here’s the results:

Maxwell Winner = Heisman Winner:
34 / 70 = 48.6% 

Maxwell Winner = Heisman Runner-up:
13 / 70 = 18.6%

Here’s the last 20 years of each award:

As you can see, the “player of the year” is also either the “most outstanding player” or what I like to call the “second-most outstanding player” at a rate of only 67.1%. 

So, what does this mean?  It means that these awards agree that the “player of the year” is also the “most outstanding player” at a rate slightly less than every other year.  Therefore, my conclusion is that since this alignment has happened once already for Tim Tebow, it will not happen again.

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