NCAA Football: 25 Heisman Trophy finalists who should have won in hindsight

1,304 to 1,276 points was the margin in which Toby Gerhart lost to Alabama running back Mark Ingram Jr. in 2009. The 28-point margin was the smallest winning margin for any Heisman Trophy winner.

So, of course, this win by Ingram has to be a sham. It was a foreshadowing of what was to come six years later with Derrick Henry and Christian McCaffrey: an Alabama running back questionably winning college football’s most prestigious trophy over a Stanford Cardinal player.

Gerhart led the nation in 2009 with 1,871 rushing yards and 28 rushing touchdowns. He won the Doak Walker Award, given to the nation’s top running back, and rushed for more than 200 yards on three different occasions while averaging 5.5 yards per carry for the entire season.

Ingram won the Heisman Trophy, despite having rushed for 200 yards less and having scored 11 fewer touchdowns than Gerhart. Yes, the Crimson Tide would go on to win their first national championship under third-year coach Nick Saban, but Gerhart’s penchant for coming up big in the season’s most important games seemed to have been forgotten by many Heisman voters.

The Cardinal finished the season with a middling 8-5 record, beating high-ranked opponents such as USC, Oregon, and Washington, yet also dropping games to mediocre squads like Wake Forest and Oregon State. This unquestionably affected Gerhart’s Heisman campaign — though perhaps unfairly so.

Gerhart, an outfielder on the Stanford baseball team, passed up the chance on an MLB career and played for six seasons with the Minnesota Vikings and the Jacksonville Jaguars before retiring in 2015. He still holds several Stanford and Pac-12 records, such as rushing touchdowns and total touchdowns in a season with 28.