UC quarterback Desmond Ridder has been talked about recently as a legitimate candidate to win the Heisman Trophy, an award that no UC player has ever won. Here's a look at two other UC players who were in the conversation.
By Bill Koch
The last time UC had a Heisman Trophy candidate was back in 2009 when quarterback Tony Pike led UC to the Big East championship and a berth in the Sugar Bowl.
By the second week of October of that season, Pike’s national profile had risen to the point where ESPN.com rated him behind Florida’s Tim Tebow, Texas’ Colt McCoy and Notre Dame’s Jimmy Claussen on a list of leading contenders for the Heisman.
“It came out of nowhere,” Pike said in my book the 2009 season, ‘This Is What The Top Feels Like.’ “I was just trying to be the general of the team, understanding that I didn’t have to do everything. The Heisman stuff, if you let yourself get engulfed in it, it starts affecting your play. If you’re in the third quarter, you might be thinking, ‘OK, I need to throw some touchdowns.’ I was having fun doing what I loved to do for a city and a school that I loved, so anything that came on top of that was a bonus.”
While Pike tried to take the recognition in stride, Mo Egger of WCKY-AM looked around and saw how other schools promoted their Heisman Trophy candidates and figured he would have a go at it himself.
”I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if that kind of thing happened for Tony?’” Egger said. “I just thought it would be fun to have a Cincinnati kid playing for a Cincinnati school in that conversation. I thought, ‘If this kid continues to play like he is, who’s to say he can’t get to New York as a finalist?’ I remember thinking that somebody should undertake this effort. It should have come from the school, but if it didn’t, why not me?”
With a friend’s help, he designed and decided to sell “Pike for Heisman” T-shirts and donate any money he made to charity.
“I thought if it snowballed, people would really get excited,” Egger said. “We had a ‘Pike for Heisman’ website. We thought we’d sell them for $20 to $25."
Egger had just gotten his promotional venture off the ground when he received a call from Ryan Koslan, who was then UC’s associate sports information director.
“He said, ‘You’re going to make Tony ineligible for the game this week,’” Egger said. “'Under NCAA rules, you can’t use his likeness to make a profit. You can’t sell a student-athlete’s name or likeness. He’ll pay the price.’
“I didn’t want to upset the school, and I didn’t want to affect Tony, and I didn’t want Brian Kelly to never come on my show again, so we stopped selling the T-shirts. I don’t how many we sold, maybe a couple dozen. A couple of days later, I got a cease-and-desist order from the Heisman Trophy trust for using the name ‘Heisman’ for my own profit.’”
That was the end of the ‘Pike for Heisman’ campaign. But as it turned out, it would have ended the following week anyway when Pike suffered a serious injury playing at South Florida. That caused him to miss three games and parts of two others.
As a result, we’ll never know if Pike actually would have had a legitimate shot at the Heisman. Because UC was not considered a big-time football school well known by the Heisman voters, it seemed unlikely. The Heisman that year went to Alabama running back Mark Ingram.
But Pike’s short-lived candidacy is still fun to think about, especially now that Ridder is a legitimate candidate in his own right and UC football has received so much recognition for being ranked fifth in the country and beating Notre Dame on the road last week.
Before Pike, there was Danny McCoin in 1987. McCoin entered his senior season at UC statistically as one of the top quarterbacks in the country. He had the highest career completion percentage, the second-highest career efficiency and the fifth-most yardage among the nation’s returning Division I quarterbacks.
His prospects for the 1987 season were so promising that UC decided to promote him as a Heisman Trophy candidate on the cover of its media guide. McCoin knew at the time the notion was rather silly, but was willing to go along to bring national publicity to the program.
The campaign never amounted to much. McCoin hurt his knee against Louisville in the second game of the season and eventually underwent arthroscopic surgery. His statistics suffered and so did his position in the NFL draft. He played his final UC game in 25-degree weather with 30 mile-per-hour winds in UC’s 21-20 loss at Virginia Tech. He completed 11 of 24 passes for a pedestrian 121 yards and one touchdown.
McCoin grew up in Livingston, Tenn., a town of 3,372 people about 260 miles south of Cincinnati set in the lush foothills of the Cumberland Mountains. He spoke with a thick, Tennessee drawl that perfectly matched his laid-back personality. He was funny and always accessible. He drove a pickup truck and had a difficult time adjusting to life in the big city. He missed his hometown so much that during the winter, after football season ended, he would climb into his red Ford Ranger and drive home every other week.
During the summer before his senior year at UC, I made the drive to Livingston to have McCoin escort me around just before he left to return to Cincinnati so I could write a story about him and his hometown for the Cincinnati Post. He drove me up into the woods in neighboring Clay County where he hunted squirrels, past the house where his girlfriend lived, and down to Dale Hollow where he and his friends gathered on weekends.
“You’ve got to be satisfied with doing nothing here sometimes,” McCoin said. “There ain’t much to do here. It’s hard for some people to understand, but this is home.”
After McCoin's final UC game, the Enquirer’s Tom Groeschen and I invited McCoin to join us for a farewell beer at Barleycorn’s tavern downtown before he left for home. He accepted our invitatin.
But as we waited for him at the appointed time, we began to think he had either forgotten or had never intended to meet us at all. Five minutes passed. Then 10 minutes. Soon, a half-hour had gone by without a McCoin sighting. Just as we were about to give up on him, he came bouncing up the stairs into the bar.
He had just come from the football banquet where he had announced that he had married his girlfriend, Rhonda, before the season started and that they were expecting their first child. We had a beer or two together, but he couldn’t stay long. We shook hands and watched him go down the steps. He got back into his truck and headed back to Livingston.
The Heisman Trophy that year went to Notre Dame wide receiver Tim Brown.
By Bill Koch
The last time UC had a Heisman Trophy candidate was back in 2009 when quarterback Tony Pike led UC to the Big East championship and a berth in the Sugar Bowl.
By the second week of October of that season, Pike’s national profile had risen to the point where ESPN.com rated him behind Florida’s Tim Tebow, Texas’ Colt McCoy and Notre Dame’s Jimmy Claussen on a list of leading contenders for the Heisman.
“It came out of nowhere,” Pike said in my book the 2009 season, ‘This Is What The Top Feels Like.’ “I was just trying to be the general of the team, understanding that I didn’t have to do everything. The Heisman stuff, if you let yourself get engulfed in it, it starts affecting your play. If you’re in the third quarter, you might be thinking, ‘OK, I need to throw some touchdowns.’ I was having fun doing what I loved to do for a city and a school that I loved, so anything that came on top of that was a bonus.”
While Pike tried to take the recognition in stride, Mo Egger of WCKY-AM looked around and saw how other schools promoted their Heisman Trophy candidates and figured he would have a go at it himself.
”I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if that kind of thing happened for Tony?’” Egger said. “I just thought it would be fun to have a Cincinnati kid playing for a Cincinnati school in that conversation. I thought, ‘If this kid continues to play like he is, who’s to say he can’t get to New York as a finalist?’ I remember thinking that somebody should undertake this effort. It should have come from the school, but if it didn’t, why not me?”
With a friend’s help, he designed and decided to sell “Pike for Heisman” T-shirts and donate any money he made to charity.
“I thought if it snowballed, people would really get excited,” Egger said. “We had a ‘Pike for Heisman’ website. We thought we’d sell them for $20 to $25."
Egger had just gotten his promotional venture off the ground when he received a call from Ryan Koslan, who was then UC’s associate sports information director.
“He said, ‘You’re going to make Tony ineligible for the game this week,’” Egger said. “'Under NCAA rules, you can’t use his likeness to make a profit. You can’t sell a student-athlete’s name or likeness. He’ll pay the price.’
“I didn’t want to upset the school, and I didn’t want to affect Tony, and I didn’t want Brian Kelly to never come on my show again, so we stopped selling the T-shirts. I don’t how many we sold, maybe a couple dozen. A couple of days later, I got a cease-and-desist order from the Heisman Trophy trust for using the name ‘Heisman’ for my own profit.’”
That was the end of the ‘Pike for Heisman’ campaign. But as it turned out, it would have ended the following week anyway when Pike suffered a serious injury playing at South Florida. That caused him to miss three games and parts of two others.
As a result, we’ll never know if Pike actually would have had a legitimate shot at the Heisman. Because UC was not considered a big-time football school well known by the Heisman voters, it seemed unlikely. The Heisman that year went to Alabama running back Mark Ingram.
But Pike’s short-lived candidacy is still fun to think about, especially now that Ridder is a legitimate candidate in his own right and UC football has received so much recognition for being ranked fifth in the country and beating Notre Dame on the road last week.
Before Pike, there was Danny McCoin in 1987. McCoin entered his senior season at UC statistically as one of the top quarterbacks in the country. He had the highest career completion percentage, the second-highest career efficiency and the fifth-most yardage among the nation’s returning Division I quarterbacks.
His prospects for the 1987 season were so promising that UC decided to promote him as a Heisman Trophy candidate on the cover of its media guide. McCoin knew at the time the notion was rather silly, but was willing to go along to bring national publicity to the program.
The campaign never amounted to much. McCoin hurt his knee against Louisville in the second game of the season and eventually underwent arthroscopic surgery. His statistics suffered and so did his position in the NFL draft. He played his final UC game in 25-degree weather with 30 mile-per-hour winds in UC’s 21-20 loss at Virginia Tech. He completed 11 of 24 passes for a pedestrian 121 yards and one touchdown.
McCoin grew up in Livingston, Tenn., a town of 3,372 people about 260 miles south of Cincinnati set in the lush foothills of the Cumberland Mountains. He spoke with a thick, Tennessee drawl that perfectly matched his laid-back personality. He was funny and always accessible. He drove a pickup truck and had a difficult time adjusting to life in the big city. He missed his hometown so much that during the winter, after football season ended, he would climb into his red Ford Ranger and drive home every other week.
During the summer before his senior year at UC, I made the drive to Livingston to have McCoin escort me around just before he left to return to Cincinnati so I could write a story about him and his hometown for the Cincinnati Post. He drove me up into the woods in neighboring Clay County where he hunted squirrels, past the house where his girlfriend lived, and down to Dale Hollow where he and his friends gathered on weekends.
“You’ve got to be satisfied with doing nothing here sometimes,” McCoin said. “There ain’t much to do here. It’s hard for some people to understand, but this is home.”
After McCoin's final UC game, the Enquirer’s Tom Groeschen and I invited McCoin to join us for a farewell beer at Barleycorn’s tavern downtown before he left for home. He accepted our invitatin.
But as we waited for him at the appointed time, we began to think he had either forgotten or had never intended to meet us at all. Five minutes passed. Then 10 minutes. Soon, a half-hour had gone by without a McCoin sighting. Just as we were about to give up on him, he came bouncing up the stairs into the bar.
He had just come from the football banquet where he had announced that he had married his girlfriend, Rhonda, before the season started and that they were expecting their first child. We had a beer or two together, but he couldn’t stay long. We shook hands and watched him go down the steps. He got back into his truck and headed back to Livingston.
The Heisman Trophy that year went to Notre Dame wide receiver Tim Brown.
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