Former USC running back Reggie Bush agreed yesterday to give back his 2005 Heisman Trophy , because it is wrong for a participant in the lucrative business of college sports to be paid for it, and because no one else among the nation’s top college football players has ever taken money or improper benefits.
USC has already retroactively forfeited its 2005 BCS championship and all its victories from Bush’s final season.
ABC has not yet announced whether or not it will return advertising revenues from the 2005 and 2006 Rose Bowls, in which Bush was the star attraction.
Will the 2005 trophy be retroactively awarded to runner-up Vince Young, the MVP of Texas’ Rose Bowl victory over Bush and USC? Los Angeles Times columnist Bill Plaschke is against it :
Not so thoughtful would be any move by the Heisman folks to award the trophy to the 2005 second-place finisher Vince Young. How do they know he would have won it if Bush were ineligible? Just a guess, but the winner for a second consecutive season might have been USC’s Matt Leinart, who finished third in the balloting and probably suffered by splitting the USC votes with Bush.
They can have a whole new ceremony and invite Leinart to pick up his prize. Like other winners of the fabled award—Jason White! Eric Crouch! Gino Torretta!—he’s
not all that busy
.
