By David Ramsey

I blew my chance. The chance to gather bribes from friends and even enemies who attended Texas A&M, Kansas State and Notre Dame.

If you know anything about ACU tuition – and most of my readers know far too much about the subject – you know I could use a sweet stack of cash right now.

Instead, I cast an untainted vote for the Heisman Trophy. Sorry, I can’t tell you who earned my vote. That would get me in trouble with the extremely wealthy members of the New York’s Downtown Athletic Club.

No doubt, this was a fun process for someone who has followed college football since 1967. Back in those ancient days, I was an 8-year-old thoroughly confused by voters who handed the Heisman to a lightly talented quarterback from UCLA named Gary Beban over an immortal, and later infamous, running back named O.J. Simpson.

Examining the past is nearly as much fun as watching games in the present. Actually, it’s more fun if you’re talking about watching the current Cowboys.

This examining of yesterday leads me to several troubling questions.

How did Notre Dame’s Paul Hornung win the Heisman in 1956 over Syracuse’s Jim Brown? Brown is only the greatest football player ever to walk our earth.

And, even worse, why did Miami quarterback Gino Torretta win the Heisman in 1992 over San Diego State’s Marshall Faulk? For the young people reading these words fortunate enough to have never seen Gino throw a football, let me assure you he was not nearly as talented as ACU’s Mitchell Gale.

So, I took my vote seriously. No one wants to give this great honor to someone as unworthy as Gino.

I would love to tell you my vote required an exhaustive process.

It did not.

I examined the statistics of the leading candidates – A&M’s Johnny Manziel, Kansas State’s Collin Klein and Notre Dame’s Manti Te’o – and then signed on with my secret password to the Heisman Trophy voting site.

Five minutes later, tops, my first-ever Heisman vote was cast.

Again, the vote cannot be revealed. But allow me to express disagreement with several of my sports writer brethren. They say a freshman should not be given the highest honor in college football.

And I ask:

Why not?

(David Ramsey served as sports editor of The Optimist in 1980-81. He is the sports columnist of the Colorado Springs Gazette. His sons, Luke and Caleb, are students at ACU.)