Plenty of people complain about the Heisman trophy, and they’re right to. The award claims to recognize the “most outstanding player” in the sport, but what they don’t acknowledge is that that player must also come from a successful team in a power conference and play offense (I’m aware of the existence of Charles Woodson, but he was a kickreturner so shut up). Aside from having unstated and unfair requirements, the award’s parameters are non-existent. “Outstanding” is a colossally vague adjective so Heisman voters are forced to come up with their own criteria. The resulting vote has the objectivity and value of the election of prom queen. Here’s the thing, though: the college basketball awards are much worse.
Not as much fuss is made because college basketball isn’t as big a deal as college football and the awards don’t have a big primetime presentation ceremony. The biggest problem of all is that it’s not agreed upon which of the individual awards in college basketball is the most important: the Naismith award or the Wooden award. Regardless of which you want to refer to, in recent years, the awards have become an embarrassing glimpse into the racism of the awards’ presenters. For the purposes of this article I’m going to focus on the Naismith award since it’s been treated with greater reverence in recent years, but know that the Wooden Award (as well as the Oscar Robertson award and Adolph Rupp Trophy) is totally in step with the Naismith in terms of who has received the award since 1995.
Racism is everywhere in basketball coverage and leadership, from David Stern's denunciation of "hip-hop culture" to the frequent and patronizing descriptions of educated black men as "articulate." Basketball is the American team sport that, more than any other, is dominated by minorities, specifically black Americans. This might have something to do with the fact that it is third in popularity among the three major sports, and it certainly has something to do with the relative disdain with which its athletes are treated by the media and people of authority.
The Naismith Award, however, long stood as an independent. largely accurate arbiter of who the best player in college basketball was in a given year. The award was first granted in 1969 to Lew Alcindor (nee Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), arguably the greatest college player of all time. In the following decades, the award was granted to the likes of Michael Jordan, Danny Manning, Tim Duncan, and other legends of the game. It was an unbiased recognition of great college careers and a reward for hard work and brilliant talent. That's the way it was. Recently, however, things have taken a turn for the worst.
Racism is everywhere in basketball coverage and leadership, from David Stern's denunciation of "hip-hop culture" to the frequent and patronizing descriptions of educated black men as "articulate." Basketball is the American team sport that, more than any other, is dominated by minorities, specifically black Americans. This might have something to do with the fact that it is third in popularity among the three major sports, and it certainly has something to do with the relative disdain with which its athletes are treated by the media and people of authority.
The Naismith Award, however, long stood as an independent. largely accurate arbiter of who the best player in college basketball was in a given year. The award was first granted in 1969 to Lew Alcindor (nee Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), arguably the greatest college player of all time. In the following decades, the award was granted to the likes of Michael Jordan, Danny Manning, Tim Duncan, and other legends of the game. It was an unbiased recognition of great college careers and a reward for hard work and brilliant talent. That's the way it was. Recently, however, things have taken a turn for the worst.
Let me hit you with a statistic that, the more you think about it, the more ridiculous it should sound: four of the last seven Naismith award winners have been white: Andrew Bogut (2005), JJ Redick (2006), Tyler Hansbrough (2008), and Jimmer Fredette (2011). From 1969-2004, that is,the previous 35 years, there were a total of five white recipients of the award: Pete Maravich (1970), Bill Walton (1972-’74), Larry Bird (1979), Danny Ferry (1989), and Christian Laettner (1992). As you can see,it’s not that the quality of white play has improved.
Of the four that have won recently, Redick has the best argument. While a one dimensional player, he was the second leading scorer in the country for a team that won its conference and was a popular pick to win the tournament that year (although they were defeated by LSU in the Sweet Sixteen and Redick was shut down). Lamarcus Aldridge, Paul Millsap, and Brandon Roy have all proven to be much better players in the pros, but none distinguished themselves that year statistically. The other three are egregious.
The silliest of them all is Tyler Hansbrough’s winning the award in 2008. That year, Michael Beasley was third in the country in points per game with 26.2 and first in the country in rebounds per game with 12.4. Hansbrough was not in the top ten in either stat. Beasley put up those numbers in a major conference that included that year’s national champion. You could argue that Beasley didn’t play for as good a team as Hansbrough, but Kevin Durant had just won the award the year before with worse stats (25.8PPG/11.1 RPG) for a comparable Texas team, and I’m about to rip apart the whole “it matters what team they play for when it comes to white players winning the award” thing in a couple paragraphs anyway. Hansbrough winning the Naismith Award in 2008 was an embarrassment and it happened because he was the most high profile white player that season.
Bogut and Fredette should be lumped together because they’re both products of the same issue. Andrew Bogut had a tremendous year for Utah in 2004-2005, putting up 20.4 points per game and collecting 12.2 rebounds (although, as I’m sure you noticed, neither statistic is better than Beasley’s ‘07-‘08 numbers). Jimmer Fredette led the nation in scoring in the 2010-2011 season with 28.5 points per game. Based on these statistics alone, it appears that these young men were deserving of their awards until you remember something: both come from mid-major conferences.
Of the 42 winners of the award, 36 have come from major conferences. Aside from Bogut and Fredette, the list of mid-major winners consists only of Marcus Camby (1996), Larry Johnson (1991), David Robinson (1987) and Bird. The fact that Bogut and Fredette are not the game-changing talents that the other three are is obvious, but the main thing to think of in this case is not that all five of these players came from mid-major teams, but that only Bogut and Fredette came from mediocre mid-major teams. Camby’s UMass team, Johnson’s UNLV squad, and Bird’s Sycamores all made the Final Four and were all one seeds in their tournaments. Bogut’s Utah squad made it to the Sweet Sixteen after getting an at-large six seed, and Fredette’s BYU team made it to the round of sixteen also as an at-large three seed. Robinson's Navy team was an eight seed which lost in the first round, but he's one of the fifteen or twenty greatest players ever and had one of the strangest and most compelling paths to stardom of any college great ever. If either Andrew Bogut or Jimmer Fredette want to look me in the eye and tell me they belong in the same sentence as David Robinson, then either Andrew Bogut or Jimmer Fredette is going to get laughed at. Aggressively.
The Naismith Award functions like the Heisman in that if you don’t play for a national title contender you’re going to have to do something really remarkable statistically and there’s got to be a serious talent vacuum among the contenders for you to have a shot at contention. That was not the case Bogut’s year, when either Deron Williams (12.5 PPG, top five nationally in assists), the undisputed leader of an Illinois team that lost in the national championship game, or, better yet, Sean May (17.5 PPG, 10.7 RPG), who led UNC to the title that season fit the common mold of a Naismith winner.
In Fredette’s case, Kemba Walker clearly should have won the award because he averaged 23.5 points per game for the team that won the national championship, but let’s say for a minute that people took Fredette’s stats more seriously because people have started looking at mid-majors in a new light and because UConn caught fire at the end of the year. I don’t really buy this argument, because if that were the case then Kenneth Faried would have been a finalist for the award last year. He averaged 17.3 PPG and a nation-leading 14.5 RPG for a very good Morehead State team. Not only that, he broke Duncan’s record for most career rebounds with a month left in the season! But Faried received no attention for that accomplishment and no recognition for the award. It’s possible that you think that happened because rebounds aren’t as sexy as points, but consider this: Reggie Hamilton, a black player for a very good Oakland team, led the country in points per game this year with 26.2. But you haven’t heard of him. You’ve heard of the guy who’s third in the nation in scoring: Doug McDermott.
McDermott is this year’s offender when it comes to over-hyped white players getting a ridiculous amount of media attention even though they play for mediocre mid-major teams that never get talked about under other circumstances. He’s a First Team All-American and one of four finalists for the prestigious Naismith Award, beating out the likes of Jared Sullinger, Terrence Jones, Kevin Jones, and Scott Machado (all clearly superior players) for the spot in that final four. He likely won’t win the award, but his presence as a finalist shows that this new tradition of glorifying good white players at the expense of great black players is going strong.
I wondered why this trend started so recently, why the Naismith Award has gone from a strong (if major-program heavy) indicator of who the best college basketball player is in a given year to a racially biased embarrassment, so I started researching how the award is given. It turns out that fan voting constitutes 25 percent of the total voting. I called up Eric Oberman, an administrator at the Atlanta Tipoff Club, which oversees the Naismith award and asked him when fan voting began. Here’s the kicker: 2005, right when this trend began. So while the mainstream media and sportswriters are largely to blame, they’re the ones framing the conversation, it appears that college basketball fans themselves are the x-factor that changed things for the worse. So congratulations, folks, it appears you’ve gotten what you wanted: a forum to present the Best White Player Award year after year. You must be so proud.
