This Party Is Missing Gesser of Honor

Five players received invitations to Saturday’s Heisman Trophy ceremony in New York and Washington State quarterback Jason Gesser was not one of them.

The knocks against Gesser, apparently, are:

* He went 10-2 for the No. 7 team in the nation.

* He beat UCLA last Saturday to clinch a Rose Bowl bid playing on a right ankle so badly sprained he could hardly walk. He had to take painkillers to take the edge off. Mike Price, his coach, pulled him out of the game at one point and Gesser just about flipped.

“I was [ticked] off,” Gesser said. “I told him ‘I’m fine.’ ”

Gesser limped back to the huddle, his ankle encased in a prosthetic brace, then finished the game with 247 passing yards, two touchdowns and a red rose clenched between his teeth.

Had Gesser pulled this stunt while playing quarterback at Notre Dame, the film of his life story would be in pre-production.

After the UCLA game, Price called Gesser “a legend” and said he would go down as the most beloved player to wear a Cougar uniform, more beloved than Drew Bledsoe.

“Even with Bledsoe, people got upset with him from time to time,” Price said.

What else has Gesser done to not deserve an invitation from the Downtown Athletic Club?

* His team won the Pacific 10 conference title.

* He shared Pac-10 MVP honors with Carson Palmer.

* He finished fifth nationally in pass efficiency, one spot ahead of Palmer.

* He threw 27 touchdowns to Palmer’s 32, and 3,169 yards to Palmer’s 3,639. He attempted 90 fewer passes.

* His team defeated USC, which boasts the quarterback, Palmer, who may end up winning the Heisman.

* Gesser lost one game on Sept. 14, at Ohio State, a school playing for the national title after defeating 12 other teams.

Gesser’s other defeat?

Well, no, actually you can’t hang that one on him. Washington State was ahead of Washington in the Apple Cup when Gesser got hurt. After he left the game, Washington rallied to win in triple overtime.

This turnabout, in the minds of Heisman voters, actually counts against Gesser.

There was talk earlier this year of an East Coast bias against Palmer, but there has never been such a thing. The nation caught wind of Palmer just as soon as he shook off two early losses and quit throwing interceptions.

USC is the one football school west of Denver people know about. It pains an East Coast writer little to scrawl “X” on a Heisman ballot next to a man from USC.

While it’s true the Trojans haven’t had a Heisman Trophy winner since 1981, they do have four trophies in their case. In fact, only Notre Dame (seven) and Ohio State (six) have had more winners.

If there is an East Coast bias it’s a bias against Gesser, Washington State, schools that can be reached only by access roads and ones that don’t have enough sugar daddy donors to fund Heisman Trophy campaigns.

Gesser is not going to New York because the Heisman is about clout, geography, tradition, ESPN, money and pedigree, and Pullman is about as far removed from those things as you can get and still have roaming cell phone access.

No one is saying Gesser deserves to win the Heisman over Palmer, Willis McGahee, Brad Banks, Ken Dorsey or Larry Johnson, but he earned the right to get on a plane, knot his black tie and have Chris Fowler say nice things said about him.

Truth is, Heisman voters gave Gesser one cursory glance, that road game against Ohio State, then wrote him off even though his team held the lead, 7-6, at the half and even though Gesser could not, in the second half, play defense against Buckeye tailback Maurice Clarett.

That, in a nut, is the difference between playing quarterback at Washington State and Notre Dame or Miami or USC.

Yet, the record books will note that it was the senior Gesser, not the senior Palmer, who led his team to the Rose Bowl in 2002.

Too Close to Call

Carson Palmer wins the Heisman!

Relax, it was only one survey, but Denver’s Rocky Mountain News has for the last 16 seasons conducted a weekly Heisman poll of 10 national college football writers, and this week’s final tally had Palmer claiming the Heisman by a narrow margin over Miami tailback McGahee.

Palmer received 39 points to McGahee’s 38, followed by Iowa quarterback Banks, Miami quarterback Dorsey and Penn State tailback Johnson.

If the newspaper’s survey is any indication, the awarding of the 68th Heisman Trophy in New York on Saturday could be as tight as a Florida election.

The closest Heisman race was 1985, when Auburn’s Bo Jackson beat Iowa’s Chuck Long by 45 points. Last year, Nebraska quarterback Eric Crouch edged Florida quarterback Rex Grossman by only 72 points in a race marred by the fact only 63.3% of the ballots were returned as compared to 80% most years.

For what it’s worth, the Rocky Mountain News survey has correctly predicted the Heisman winner 13 of 15 times.

If Palmer does win the award, he might want to thank the Miami coaching staff, which may have eliminated both Hurricane candidates with a bonehead goal-line call last weekend against Virginia Tech.

With the obvious intent of getting Dorsey some Heisman love, at the expense of teammate McGahee, who already had scored six touchdowns, Miami sent in backup tailback Jarrett Payton with instructions to take a handoff and heave a toss-back pass to Dorsey.

This, we presume, was intended to be a reenactment of last year, when Crouch punctuated his Heisman push with a game-winning catch against Oklahoma.

Last week, though, Payton’s intended pass for Dorsey was intercepted and returned 96 yards for a touchdown.

“We went brain dead,” Miami Coach Larry Coker said of the call.

What If?

USC earned a guaranteed at-large major bowl bid by finishing No. 4 in the final bowl championship series standings, a scant 0.28 of a point ahead of No. 5 Iowa.

What if Iowa had jumped USC for the No. 4 spot?

Believe it or not, Trojan fans, you could have been packing for the Holiday Bowl.

The way things played out, the Orange Bowl still would have taken Iowa with its first pick, leaving the Rose Bowl in a quandary.

With USC no longer an automatic choice, the Rose Bowl’s selection choices would have been Oklahoma, Florida State, USC or ... Notre Dame.

It’s only hindsight to say what might have happened, but we know the Rose Bowl did not want a Washington State-USC rematch or it could have made that game.

For the good of the BCS and the Pac-10, the Rose could have taken Oklahoma and passed USC on to the Sugar or Orange bowls.

Or, the Rose Bowl could have taken Notre Dame and marketed the Irish’s first appearance in Pasadena since the 1925 game featuring the last ride of the famed Four Horsemen.

That move, however, would have knocked USC out of the BCS and into the Holiday Bowl.

We think, in the end, the Rose Bowl would have taken Oklahoma and let the Pac-10 cash its $18-million check.

We think.

Hurry-Up Offense

UCLA Athletic Director Dan Guerrero said his decision to fire Bob Toledo was based in part on “an evaluation of the environment,” as if he had first consulted Greenpeace. Let’s get this straight: Toledo was fired because he lost four games in a row to USC, the last two of which the Bruins didn’t even put up a fight.

“UCLA people expect to be competitive with USC and last two games weren’t competitive,” former UCLA coach Terry Donahue said this week. “That sent shockwaves through the UCLA community. You’ve got to beat your rival enough times to keep your job. If you don’t beat them, you’ve got to play competitively with them. This would have never happened if those last two games weren’t as lopsided. Last year was a shock, but this year it went even further.”

Donahue, one of UCLA’s greatest coaches, actually lost his first four games against USC, but recovered to post a 10-9-1 record in his 20 seasons as head coach.

Donahue acknowledges he might not have survived in today’s win-or-get fired climate.

“When football coaches’ salaries began to increase, I think the demand for performance went up exponentially,” Donahue said. “Demands on coaches began to change.”

How did Donahue survive 20 seasons at one institution? “It was harder than it looked,” he said. “Trust me.”

Seven years after he had to turn down the UCLA job, Washington Coach Rick Neuheisel appears smitten with the possibility of returning to Westwood. Of course, the timing couldn’t have been worse then or now. In 1995, Neuheisel had just finished his first year at Colorado when the UCLA job opened and he felt he just couldn’t bolt Boulder that quickly. Remember, this was before Dennis Franchione perfected the art form.

Now, Neuheisel has a different set of problems. First, he’s making too much money after recently signing an extension through 2007 that will pay him $1.8 million a year if he stays. It includes a $1.5-million loan that he doesn’t have to repay if he’s the Washington coach on Jan. 1, 2007 and a $600,000 buyout. That means it would cost UCLA $2.1 million just to get him out of Seattle. Neuheisel’s second problem: NCAA sanctions levied against him in the Colorado probation prohibit Neuheisel from recruiting on the road through May 31, 2003.

If UCLA is a school of balance and integrity, as it claims, doesn’t this make Neuheisel poison?

If hotshot Boise State Coach Dan Hawkins ends up getting the UCLA job, he’ll have some explaining to do back home. Hawkins signed a new five-year contract last weekend that will reportedly make him Idaho’s highest-paid state employee. “I have officially made my commitment to Boise State,” Hawkins told the Idaho Statesman.

Of course, the most recent coach at Alabama could tell you how fast commitments sometimes change.