Saints Sideline Blog

HEISMAN TRUST BUSH LEAGUE

Thursday, September 16th, 2010      Email Print

Reggie Bush returning his Heisman Trophy is a gesture he never should have been made to feel necessary and one which shows the many flaws at USC and at the Heisman Trust.  There is no question that the violations involving Bush were wrong and the punishment received by USC was appropriate, but the Heisman should have been left out of the controversy.

Not to excuse anything Bush did while with the Trojans, but we should not forget that he was a teenager when he committed his NCAA crimes, ones which were obviously encouraged by his parents and accepted by looking the other way by his school.  Bush has been accused and convicted by the NCAA of accepting monies from an agent, monies, in part, spent to move his parents in to a luxury townhouse while Bush was in school.  The way athletes like Bush are recruited there is no question Pete Carroll and the USC coaching staff was well aware of Bush’s family living arrangements from the time he was a junior in high school and beyond.. and no there is no question they knew where the parents were living while Bush was in school.  Not only did no one in authority at USC do anything about that, but no one raised an eyebrow when his parents kept attending road games.  After years of recruiting, any number of coaches and athletic staff members should at least have been curious about who was paying for the parents’ transportation to road games, let alone their housing or Reggie’s car.

USC was complicit by its silence before and after the allegations came to light.  The school for which Bush practiced and played for, training throughout the calendar year, the school for which Bush and the other football players helped profit by tens of millions of dollars has left Bush to stand as if he was the only player at USC taking inappropriate gifts.  Anyone who believes that is more naïve than a teenaged star athlete who thought taking money his parents wanted him to take so they could improve their way of life would go undetected.

Then there is the matter of the so-called Heisman Trust.  This is the group that let Bush twist in the NCAA wind publicly, forcing Reggie to cave in to pressure and return the Heisman before the Trust made his the first to be taken away.  This Heisman Trust is the same one which never took away the Heisman Trophy of accused double-murder O.J. Simpson, currently imprisoned for other crimes.  The Heisman Trust never took the Trophy of LSU’s only Heisman winner Billy Cannon, who went to prison for counterfeiting, or the Heisman of Nebraska’s Johnny Rodgers who went to jail after robbing a gas station, or the Heisman of Paul Hornung who was involved in illegal gambling.

The once-great Heisman Trophy has diminished itself by making it very clear that printing your own money is fine with them, but taking some under the table as a teenager at the request of your parents is more dastardly than murder.  Reggie Bush deserved better guidance from his parents, better support from the money-making machine at USC and much better from the Heisman Trust.

Bush may have given it back, but that doesn’t mean his performance on the field that year didn’t happen.  Every time we see “2005-Vacant” we can think of all the people who let Reggie Bush down after he took care of all of them as best he could.  

What Bush did at USC was wrong.  So was returning the trophy.

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