The smart money says Mariota will take home the Heisman. As long as he doesn’t get greedy enough to upload a crapload of signed merchandise to eBay, Oregon will have its first Heisman winner*. Thankfully, Nike will not be given the option to custom-design Mariota’s trophy.

*Tangent alert: back in the day, I once vehemently argued that Oregon QB Joey Harrington should have won the Heisman over Eric Crouch, Ken Dorsey, Rex Grossman, and David Carr. I think I can safely say that nobody won that debate. Let’s just move on and try to forget that any of those names were ever the best the NCAA had to offer.

The general lack of debate inspired by the winner of this year’s award, plus the need for 24-hour news networks to fill space, means we will probably soon be treated to more than a couple “Melvin Gordon didn’t deserve his nomination” #HotTakes from the usual talking suits. Heck, I could even write that formulaic don’t-thinkpiece myself.

They’ll point out how Gordon’s team lost, like, three whole games this season. They’ll make passing mention of the two-headed monstrosity that was Wisconsin’s quarterback situation this season, and subtly insinuate that Gordon is, in actuality, to blame for things going awry. They’ll drone on about the Ohio State game and how, the one time his team needed him to be there, to put them on his back … he couldn’t even carry them past the line of scrimmage. And maybe, if they’re feeling really ambitious at this point, they’ll delve into some pedantic diatribe about how Mariota’s superior performance on that one, isolated afternoon definitively proves for all eternity that he is the better football player.

Truth is, Gordon’s turd in the Big 10 Championship Game likely killed his Heisman hopes, but that doesn’t discount the undeniable fact that his season was nevertheless wholly deserving of the nomination. We still need three guys at the ceremony, and Gordon is the clear-cut best rusher in the country. He ranks first in the nation in rushing yards and touchdowns, and if you limit your choices to backs with 200 carries or more, he is first in yards per carry. Unless you wanted to completely shut out the ground game from the nominations, Gordon is the only one who makes sense.

And it is because of his, and his team’s status as a run-heavy team that his nomination is even more useful in its largely ceremonial purpose. In today’s “maximize our offense by going pass-heavy” era of college football, Wisconsin has made its mark by doing the exact opposite. And why not? Caretaker quarterbacks Joel Stave and Tanner McEvoy each averaged fewer than seven yards per passing attempt. Gordon averaged 7.6 yards per carry.

The big-play potential of the spread has been seen as the appeal to its adoption. But when the writing on the wall suggests that your school would be wise to do things backwards, well, your school does things backwards if it wants to win.

Against Nebraska earlier this year when Gordon set the then-FBS record with 408 rushing yards, Wisconsin’s 11 total pass attempts would have been a curiously low number even by the standards of Knute Rockne. But with Gordon playing like a video game that has the sliders set to Ultimate Cheese Mode, there was no need to throw. At several points in that game I caught myself trying to instinctively go to the pause menu and crank up the computer difficulty a bit, just to make things interesting.

Growing up, I watched Wisconsin teams that featured one or two key players and a bunch of filler. Now? Even a lot of the filler guys are getting NFL tryouts, which speaks volumes to the growth of the program. To get the rock for the Badgers is to all but assure yourself of a shot in the NFL. Of the players to lead Wisconsin in rushing for at least a season since 2000, only Anthony “Two ‘Brows” Davis and PJ Hill didn’t go on to record an NFL carry.

Clearly, the ground-and-pound approach works for the Badgers — even if it’s shown itself to be a boom-or-bust proposition against great teams. The Nebraska and Ohio State performances are perfect reflections of the successes and failures, respectively, inherent in this approach. You either get the blowout win, or the offense never makes it out of the garage. This is endemic to all non-balanced offensive approaches.

In this sense, Gordon is the true barometer of his team more than anyone else in the country. And sure, an argument can be made as to whether his success is borne from his otherworldly talent or is largely due to to the work of his monster offensive line, but if we’re talking about Heisman guys benefiting from the system they play in, it’s hard to ignore Mariota and his glove-like fit in Oregon’s blur offense.

Basically, there are two surefire strategies to get the Heisman: either play in a system perfectly tailored to your talents, or be close to 100% of your team’s offense. Gordon nailed both, but but he did so for a team that committed the cardinal sin of being merely good in a power conference (during a season that featured a supposedly great player on a great team) — an uphill climb even before the B1G Championship implosion.