Any Sportswriter Who Doesn't Vote For Rashaad Penny As A Heisman Trophy Finalist Should Have Your Voting Privileges Yanked

San Diego State running back Rashaad Penny leads the nation in rushing

On Saturday afternoon, ESPN posted the six players the network believes have the best shot at the Heisman Trophy, the vaunted award given to the young man who 870 sportswriters and 52 former Heisman winners believe is America’s finest college football player. And preposterously but not surprisingly, San Diego State's Rashaad Penny was not on the list.

Penny, a dominant athlete who can run around you, or through you, leads the nation in rushing, and all-purpose yards. On Saturday night, he ran for 234 yards and three touchdowns to lead San Diego State (8-2, 4-2 in the Mountain West) over San Jose State.

In the process, Penny, who's also a tremendous receiver and kickoff returner and leader on and off the field, passed Stanford's Bryce Love as the nation's top running back. Penny has racked up 1,592 rushing yards this season, 136 more than Love.

While Penny was wreaking havoc, Love and Penn State's Saquon Barkely, who are both virtual locks as Heisman finalists, were looking very average, very human against a couple of good defensive opponents. Love ran for just 69 yards in Stanford’s loss to Washington State, while Barkley had just 68 yards in Penn State’s loss to Michigan State.

But lest you think Penny only racks up big numbers against weak opponents, think again. Penny demonstrably outplayed Bryce when San Diego State defeated #19 Stanford in mid-September. Penny finished that game with 206 total yards on offense vs. Love’s 187 yards.

Penny has shown his greatness against Power Five teams. There is simply no disputing it: He has earned an invite to the Heisman Trophy announcement ceremony on Saturday, Dec. 9 in New York. But Rashaad won't likely be invited. Why? Because when it comes to the Heisman vote, there are absurd biases in favor of the usual suspects: players on the high-profile power conference teams that get all the publicity. 

There is a profound and lamentable lack of awareness among too many Heisman voters of who really is the best athlete in the land. This is supposed to be individual athlete award, not a team or conference award. But far too many sportswriters don't really know how to make that distinction.

Of course, this is all old news for San Diego State football fans. Marshall Faulk, the legendary NFL and College Football Hall-of-Famer, was easily the best football player in the nation when he was a running back at San Diego State in the early 1990s. 

Marshall was the greatest college football player I have ever seen in person. To this day. But he lost two Heisman votes that he should have won. One of them was to Gino Torreta, who quarterbacked a great Miami team that was ranked #1 before the Heisman voting but who in no way, shape or form was a better football player than Faulk.

When it comes to the Heisman, ESPN analysts, specifically, have been doing really dumb things for a really long time. ESPN college football analyst Lee Corso led a laughable, iindefensible campaign in support of Torretta for the trophy and left Faulk off his ballot. Lee, are you Faulking kidding me?

There wasn't a single sportswriter in the country who'd actually watched both Faulk and Toretta play who could say, with a straight face, that Toretta was a better football player. The Heisman went to the wrong man that year. Period. And even Toretta knew it.

A few years ago, Faulk told the San Diego Union-Tribune, "Without a doubt, I won the Heisman. If you call Gino Torretta and ask him right now, he'd be willing to give it (to me)."

But, Faulk continued, "The way I look at it now, not winning the Heisman was probably the best thing that happened to me. It gave me that extra drive, the drive that got me through college when people didn't think I could play running back. It got me through the NFL when people questioned whether I was going to be a good player because I didn't win the Heisman. It fueled the fire throughout my whole career.”

More recently, another exceptional San Diego State player got the royal Heisman snub from the royal Heisman hacks. Donnel Pumphrey was an unstoppable running back for SDSU who last season broke not only Faulk’s seemingly unreachable rushing record at SDSU but, even more impressively, Wisconsin great Ron Dayne's college football career rushing record.

Pumphrey had a phenomenal senior season, during which he became the top college running back of all time. But he wasn't even voted in as a finalist in the Heisman race. That's pathetic.

Again, a reminder: the Heisman Trophy is supposed to be given to the best individual player in the country. It is not a vote for the best team. It is not a vote for the best player on the best team in the best conference with the best TV deal. 

Cynical? Yes, very. The Heisman seems to be reserved for a guy who has the best chance to to well in the NFL, for a guy who meets the cliche' criteria of a college football player (the right size, weight, looks, back story, etc).

Bottom line to the sportswriters who vote for the Heisman: Stop making yourself look foolish. Stop making the Heisman a joke. 

Anyone who doesn't vote for Penny this year as Heisman finalist, please, for the love of all that is good and decent, stop covering college football. I hear the obituary section has an opening.

Stop the Presses: More Juicy, Shocking Details on Hillary and the Uranium One Mega-Scandal

Am I a big fan of Hillary Clinton's? Nope. I alternately admired and admonished her throughout her political career. And now I kinda wish she'd just take up the ukulele, buy an island in the South Pacific someplace, and go away. 

But the breathless, hyperbolic claims from the mainstream right-wing media that Clinton gave 20 percent of our country’s uranium to Russia in some sort of high crime just don't hold up. They are laughably false. This is treason without a reason, folks. Another bogus Clinton scandal. 

There were no secret midnight meetings with Putin. No collusion with Russia. No quid pro quo, as far as I can tell. And actually nothing inappropriate went on. But you are of course free to believe all the preposterous hype. 

This all started when Rosatom, Russia’s nuclear power agency, bought a majority stake in a Canadian company that has mines and land in the US that account for 20 percent of the US uranium capacity, not actual produced uranium. The State Department approved the sale in 2010.

The uranium in question is not for building nuclear bombs, it is for nuclear power. The US has nuclear power plants and of course nuclear weapons, but 90 per cent of the uranium used in the US is imported from countries like Canada and Kazakhstan, according to the Department of Energy.

The sale of the Canadian company was actually approved by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CIFUS). Its nine members unanimously approved the deal. This interagency group actually includes the following departments: State, Defense, Treasury, Commerce, Energy, and Homeland Security. 

The US attorney general’s office also has a say, as does the US Trade Representative, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy. The purchase was ultimately approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which is also a member of CIFUS.

Clinton's State Department was one of nine federal agencies and several independent federal and state regulators that agreed to this deal. And only Obama, not Hillary, could have formally nixed it, and there was no reason to.

Since Russia doesn't have legal rights to export uranium, its goal with this buy, some experts believe, was to gain access to the company’s uranium assets in Kazakhstan. But there is no security threat here, folks. This was not collusion. It was a business deal that literally no one at any of these many  departments opposed.

The Clinton Foundation did receive some money from at least one Uranium One investor, but the claims made by Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and other reactionary blowhards that this is a quid-pro-quo scandal is nonsense.

The fact that President Bill Clinton was paid $500,000 to give a speech to a conference in Moscow in 2010 is interesting. And I have stated before that some of the Clinton donors are scoundrels and are troubling. 

But in the Uranium One deal, there is no evidence of any sort of returned favor. The primary Uranium One donor to the foundation, Frank Giustra, divested himself from his stake in the company three years before it was sold, and 18 months before Clinton became secretary of state.

There is no evidence that the donations to the foundation or the speaking fee had any influence on the approvals granted by the NRC or the Committee on Foreign Investments. This is just another example of the desperate right-wing media's effort to get folks to pay attention to something/anything other than this profoundly corrupt president.

We are seeing it with the "dossier" business, as well. That's simply a candidate paying for opposition research. Every candidate does it. The difference? The people Clinton paid to find dirt on Trump are legitimate political operatives who were in fact first hired by a Republican opponent of Trump's.

However, the people the Trump campaign apparently sought out for dirt on its opponent were the Russians. That's collusion, with a hostile foreign power, to influence an American election, any way you slice it, and it's despicable and un-American.

The Uranium One business is a non-scandal perpetrated by a desperate, ethically challenged handful of conservative media pundits who are trying to move the negative attention away from Trump, who's wholly corrupt presidency is hanging by a thin thread.