Indiana quarterback Fernando Mendoza was the star of the show on Saturday, winning the 2025 Heisman Trophy after leading the No. 1-ranked Hoosiers (13-0) to an undefeated season and first-round bye in the College Football Playoff.
An absolute force in the Big Ten this season, Mendoza beat out fellow quarterbacks Julian Sayin (Ohio State) and Diego Pavia (Vanderbilt), as well as Notre Dame running back Jeremiyah Love for the highly prestigious award.
Here are my four takeaways from the 2025 Heisman Trophy ceremony.
1. Ohio State WR Jeremiah Smith is getting robbed for being young
How long are we going to keep allowing the best player in college football to play without winning a major individual award? At least one more year, it appears.
Smith, the only wide receiver to receive enough Heisman votes to finish in the top 10 (sixth) this year, didn’t win the Biletnikoff Award for the best wideout in the sport. Now, for the second year in a row, Smith — the player who the NFL has been salivating over for the past two years and the one most aficionados in the sport, including me, believe is the best player in college football — has once again not been voted to be a finalist by the bloated and stodgy group of Heisman electors.
“Your readers might not remember Andre Johnson,” an NFL evaluator told me. “But both of them were big and they both were ridiculously athletic to be that big.”
“What if your guy, Adrian Peterson, played receiver?” a Power 4 player personnel director asked me. “To be that strong [and] that young is what really gets me out of my seat when I watched the film.”
Smith is young — just a sophomore. Historically, Heisman voters do not like awarding young players, and they do not like to give the award to a player more than once. If this was a participation award, that’d be just fine, but it’s not. The award is for the most outstanding player in the sport, and for two years that has been Smith, regardless of whether he can legally toast himself with a glass of champagne.
In the lead up to the Big Ten Championship Game, most conversation centered around dueling quarterbacks and 2025 Heisman finalists Mendoza and Sayin. However, it was clear to almost everybody, including Hoosiers head coach Curt Cignetti, that the best receiver in the country was on the Buckeyes’ sideline. Smith is an absolute force.
“You cover him as well as you can and hope the ball is not placed well,” Cignetti said. “He’s a great player — the greatest at that position that I’ve seen at that age. He’s a weapon.”
Smith, who just recently turned 20 last month, notched his second consecutive 1,000-yard receiving season, already has four more catches this year (80) than he had all of last year (76) and absolutely scorched then-No. 2 Indiana in the Buckeyes’ 13-10 loss in the Big Ten title game with eight catches for 144 yards.
“Look, they (Indiana) kept that dude (Smith) out of the end zone,” an NFL scout told me. “That’s a great team effort. But with that kid, it’s not a question. He has been the best college player I’ve seen for two years now. I would have given him the Heisman … last year. You don’t see them that good [and] that put together that young.”
If Smith doesn’t win the Heisman next year, that won’t be news. If he does, it’ll be one more reason NFL teams will be falling over themselves to select him. Isn’t a player like that supposed to be the Heisman winner?
2. Indiana QB Fernando Mendoza did it first and did it best
Until earlier this season, Indiana was the losingest program in FBS history, had not won a conference title of any kind since 1967 or an outright one since 1945 and had never finished a regular season undefeated or seen itself ranked No. 1 in any poll — let alone every credible college football ranking in America, including my own top 25.
His win, and his class in winning, is exactly what the best is to many — and he’s a worthy ambassador for it. What’s more? He could be the first Heisman winner to win a national title since former Alabama wide receiver DeVonta Smith.
3. Jeremiyah Love can blame Notre Dame for not winning
It’s easy to forget Love entered the Heisman contest in earnest after he made a 94-yard house-call against Boston College on Nov. 1. After crossing the goal line, he struck the Heisman pose. Two weeks earlier, he absolutely destroyed USC with 228 rushing yards on 24 rushes. And, even now, most folks have forgotten he needed just eight carries to record 108 yards — including one rush for 98 yards — against Indiana in the first round of last year’s CFP.
In a season where he rushed for 1,372 yards (6.9 yards per clip), accounted for 1,652 yards from scrimmage, set the Notre Dame single-season record for all-purpose touchdowns (21) and led the Fighting Irish to a 10-2 season, his chances to win the Heisman Trophy were outdone by Notre Dame being, well, Notre Dame.
Unlike some, the Fighting Irish did not push Love as an early-season Heisman candidate, nor did they move to try to invite national media to engage in helping tell the story of their best player since Josh Adams and their first Heisman finalist since Manti Teʻo. That’s a marketing blunder for Notre Dame.
Every Fighting Irish player loses the opportunity to add more to their statistics — numbers most Heisman voters weigh heavily — and the chance to claim a league championship because Notre Dame is independent. However, this season the Fighting Irish took the unprecedented step of opting out of the postseason entirely because they were so disappointed about being left out of this year’s 12-team CFP field.
For some, that’s a step too far. Notre Dame believes it can — and should — operate unlike any other major college football program, and this move to forgo a bowl game has been met with derision from most fans and media outside Indiana. I have little doubt that decision did not help Love in his pursuit to become the school’s first Heisman winner since Tim Brown in 1987.
4. Ohio State QB Julian Sayin and Vanderbilt QB Diego Pavia fell a win short
The Heisman is a great award, but Heisman voters aren’t always great about selecting who should win it. Sayin and Pavia are two of the latest examples as to why. Generally, the award goes to the best player on the best team when there’s but one team left at the Power 4 level with an undefeated record. In years when that hasn’t been the case, the individual performance of any player needed to border on otherworldly. Unfortunately for Sayin and Pavia, that’s exactly what their single-season efforts would’ve been a few years ago.
Sayin, who set the single-season FBS record for completion percentage this year that subsequently made him the most accurate passer in history, is limited by former Oregon signal-caller Bo Nix setting that mark in 2023. Nix finished no better than third in the Heisman voting on a team that was 11-2 when voting closed and out of the CFP. Heisman voters simply don’t value unprecedented accuracy above winning.
Pavia put together the best all-purpose performance the sport has seen since former LSU quarterback Jayden Daniels. He threw for 3,192 yards, rushed for 826 yards and accounted for 35 total touchdowns with just eight interceptions. Those numbers include two games with more than 500 yards of offense. By comparison, Daniels recorded more than 3,800 passing yards, 1,100 rushing yards and 50 total touchdowns.
Still, Pavia did what no other quarterback has in history. At Vanderbilt, a perennial doormat in the SEC, he led the Commodores to their first 10-win season in program history and first winning record in SEC competition since the league expanded in 1992. Measured against history, Pavia’s feat is rather amazing, but not enough for Heisman voters.
RJ Young is a national college football writer and analyst for FOX Sports. Follow him @RJ_Young.
Want great stories delivered right to your inbox? Create or log in to your FOX Sports account, follow leagues, teams and players to receive a personalized newsletter daily.
About the Author
