Tom Luicci, the chairman of the New Jersey Heisman voting chapter, said any voter who had made up his mind already “isn’t being fair.”

“We should wait to see what the next couple of weeks tell us,” Luicci, who writes for The Star-Ledger of Newark, said. “The Reggie Bush situation is branded in the brain of every voter. We don’t want to be caught looking silly twice.”

(Company policy does not allow New York Times reporters to vote for athletic awards.)

There is no comparable precedent in Heisman history to what the voters are faced with this year. The trophy, first awarded by New York’s Downtown Athletic Club in 1935, has few candidacy guidelines. Voters are charged with selecting “the most outstanding player,” according to the original ballot 75 years ago. Wording has since been added to require that the winner be compliant with N.C.A.A. eligibility bylaws, and be a student in good standing at an accredited college or university.

Although good citizenship, personal integrity and principled behavior were never official guidelines for winning the trophy, in the first 30 years of the award, such virtues were valued by the voters. Newspaper accounts of the candidates’ lives on and off the field shaped voters perceptions since many of them  in an era before nationally televised games  had never seen some top candidates play.

This began to change in the mid-1950s and into the 1960s, even though Heisman winners continued to be chosen, at least in part, because voters admired something about their personal story. The award almost universally went to a running back or a quarterback from a prominent team and the voting was like any other election  it had elements of a popularity contest. But when more games were broadcast in the 1970s, and with the explosion of games on cable television after the late 1980s, the Heisman race evolved into much more of an assessment of football accomplishment.

There were a few unusual circumstances. Johnny Rodgers of Nebraska was the leading candidate in 1972, but a few years earlier, when he was 18, he had been at the wheel of the getaway car in a gas station robbery. He received probation for the crime but that did not make him N.C.A.A. ineligible. Still, many voters kept Rodgers off their Heisman ballot because of his past, though he won the trophy in a relatively close vote.

Multiple Heisman winners have run afoul of the law after winning the trophy, most notably O. J. Simpson. But the list also includes the 1959 winner, Billy Cannon, who was jailed for counterfeiting, and the 1978 winner, Billy Sims, who served jail time for failing to make child support payments.