Episode 49: Bo Knows Heisman: The Heisman Trophy Race of 1985.

Welcome to GenX Classic Sports, the podcast where we revisit the unforgettable moments that shaped our sports memories growing up. 

In 1985, the Heisman Trophy came down to one of the closest votes in college football history. Bo Jackson’s raw power and highlight-reel runs went head-to-head with Chuck Long’s precision passing and Big Ten dominance — and only 45 points separated them. 

On this episode of GenX Classic Sports, we revisit the season, the stats, the regional bias, and the debate that still divides fans decades later. Best player or best team leader? The answer depends on who you ask — and where you watched the games.

Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe for more nostalgia-packed content covering GenX retro sports, and the athletes who defined a generation. 

Production Credits:

Intro and outro music: Mason Enis

Narrator: Haylee Wolf

Copyright @ PineStreetProductions 2025. Any illegal reproduction of this content will result in immediate legal action.

Transcript

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Welcome sports fans to Gen X Classic Sports. We bring the nostalgia of our sports build you into the present day. Grab your favorite retro jersey, crack open a cold one, and let's scroll down memory lane together.

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Welcome back, everybody, to Gen X Classic Sports, and I'm your host, Sean Enos, and today we're going to talk about something from 1985, which is right in my wheelhouse age-wise for when I started uh had been paying attention to these kinds of things. And that was the Heisman Trophy race. We just gave the Heisman Trophy away a few weeks ago, and I honestly don't even remember who won it, and I'm not bashing the guy who won it. Who wouldn't want to be the Heisman Trophy winner, right? It's just that I don't know if guys our age think that the Heisman Trophy is as big a deal as it used to be. I hate to say that. I'm not bashing anybody, but it certainly feels that way. So let's go back to 1985 when guys like me who were teenagers, we watched the newspaper and we watched the sports segments to try to figure out who was going to win this thing every year, and we had a lot invested in it if we cared about college football whatsoever. And in 1985, and you know what I think about Bo Jackson, I think he's the greatest athlete in this uh entire generation, and I think he may be one of the top two or three athletes, if not the top one that ever lived. Auburn's Bo Jackson in 1985 edged out Iowa's Chuck Long, quarterback Chuck Long, by just 45 voting points for the Heisman Trophy race. That was the closest margin in Heisman trophy voting history until later in the 2000s, 2009, I think, to be exact. But up until 1985, no Heisman Trophy race had been this close. And I remember this. Jackson's season was one of resilience because he played through a bunch of injuries. And I, if I'm not mistaken, at some point, he broke some ribs and kept playing. Despite whatever he went through, he rushed for 1,700 yards, which would have been in 11 games and 17 touchdowns. And over on the other side, Chuck Long passed for almost three thousand, I mean really close to three thousand yards, and he had 26 touchdowns in the same 11 games, and he had powered uh and led his Iowa Hawkeyes team to a 10-in-one record. So those were the two favorites, and that's the way it turned out. But honestly, I remember it felt like it could be a coin toss, and that's kind of what happened. So let's talk about in 1985 the closest Heisman trophy voting race ever, Bo Jackson and Chuck Long. If you're like me, you were a big college football fan in the mid eighties. You remember a time when the sport felt a lot bigger and louder and maybe even more personal to you, and I attribute that to the limited television opportunities and our relationships that we had with journalists from newspapers and sports illustrated. That's just and sporting news and sport magazine and so forth. That's just my take on it. But remember how powerful the local newspaper was for local colleges. It made a huge difference in how people followed the game compared to now. My opinion. That's just not who I am. No social media back then, uh, no hot take shows where dudes are yelling at each other, just you know, Saturday afternoons and in 1985, college football gave us a good one with that Heisman trophy race. Bo Jackson, of course, was the physical freak from Auburn who looked like he was, you know, built in a secret lab somewhere. And Chuck Long was this cool laid-back, seeming, efficient quarterback from Iowa, and he led the Hawkeyes to one of the best seasons they've ever had in football. And so the the vote seemed to be, from what I remember, was going to be close anyway, but yet it was pretty divided among the people opinionated about who they thought should win it, and that's probably why it held as the closest vote until the 2000s. So let's go back and talk about those players, those numbers, maybe even a little bit of regional bias that was going on, and how 45 little voting points separated immortality from probably heartbreak. And that's what happened in 1985 with the Heisman Trophy. To understand this, you really have to remember college football how it was in 1985. There was no BCS playoff situation whatsoever. There was no BCS bowl games that were arranged outside of conference um loyalties in order to pit the best ranked teams against each other. This was when everything was predetermined. This champion went to this bowl, this champion went to this bowl to play this other champion. That's the way it was. And you hoped number one met number two, but it didn't happen very often. So this was pre-all of that. And as far as polls and voting, reputation meant a lot as teams and as teams and individuals were voted into these polls. And the Heisman really was the same kind of deal. It wasn't necessarily about pure numbers, it had a lot to do with reputation, and even if you will give me this word, sort of the mythology around these guys, okay. In 1985, go look at the highlights, college football was dominated by the big physical running backs, the pocket throwing quarterbacks, and a lot of regional loyalty among voters, right? And the Heisman voters are journalists all over the country. I should probably mention that. The Heisman voting reflected this regional situation. Voters were split all over the country. You had East Coast voters who back then they saw different games than West Coast voters. I'm in the middle of the country and I'm guilty of that. I don't watch hardly maybe once or twice a year. Maybe I will watch what I call a West Coast game where someone from Colorado on out west to UCLA and USC. They don't come on until 9 o'clock Central Time or later, sometimes 10 o'clock Central Time. And I'm looking for the bet even on a Saturday night by 11 o'clock a lot of times. I don't watch those games. And you can bet two hours east of me, they don't watch those games either, unless they're super dedicated. So all of that mattered back then. East Coast, West Coast boaters seeing different action. Uh, Midwest, all those writers, of course, are going to be Big Ten supporters, correct? And in the South, we know who they're going to be behind. You got your ACC and your uh SEC, and back then the Southwest Conference and so forth. So all this loyalty was split around the country. And sitting right in the middle of all of that was the Bo Jackson and Chuck Long boat that year. Make no mistake about it, they were two absolute stars, two absolutely different styles because they played different positions, and there were two different arguments to make for them, and that's kind of what made it fun back then, right? So we know the most about this guy for sure, but let's start with Bo Jackson. If you're new to the show, I've done two episodes already about Bo Jackson, and it was a two-parter, and I really think he's the best maybe that ever played any anything because I think he's the best pure athlete that ever lived. That's just my opinion. I think it's hard to argue him outside of the top five, any way you look at it. But let's start with Bo. We all know the most about him. He didn't look like just a running back. We all know that. He looked like something like maybe out of a comic book. And I believe later on he was a comic book hero in um a cartoon. The one with uh Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretzky, right? He was 6'1, 230 pounds or so, and he had speed that defensive backs and wide receivers didn't even have. He was guilty of running the legendary 4.1, whatever it was, 40, 4.13 or something, 40 time at 230 pounds. Keep in mind this was back in the days. Um USC had dominated the Heisman with running backs in the 70s. And in the 80s, the early 80s, you had the Herschel Walker, big bodied type. You have good old Bo here, and it kind of continued on. Just keep in mind that's where the game was. The game was evolving a little bit, in my opinion, from the wishbone, which featured, of course, a fullback and two halfbacks, to more of an eye formation a lot of times, with a with a fullback helping block and a featured eye setback there in the formation, an eye um an eye back in the eye formation to uh get most of the carries. So Bo Jackson in the I formation, scary stuff with a fullback in front of him. And he was a legend already in 1985. That's why I remember this so well. He had finished third in the Heisman voting in 1983. He finished second in 1984, and so this should be his year, right? And at Auburn Bow, like I said, the I formation features the running back in the back of the formation. He was the entire offense, and everybody knew every week he was going to get the ball, and everybody stacked the box, and everybody put all their effort into stopping him, and for the most part, everybody failed. Okay. Let's take a look at some of his stats. Um, that year he had 278 rushing attempts. He had 1,786 rushing yards. He averaged 6.4 yards per carry, which is scary, scary stuff to be against a guy like that. He had 17 rushing touchdowns, and you say, some people might say, well, that doesn't sound like much. Well, this was back when 28 points was a lot in a football game, okay? So if you're my age, you remember that. Not much of a receiver. Uh he only had four receptions that year, no touchdowns, but that's not what Bo got paid, uh I almost said got paid to do later in the pros. He did that while playing through injuries, like I said. He faced a lot of loaded defensive fronts. And he carried that whole Auburn team, in my opinion, that went eight and three that year. And that's something that's important to remember here, okay? There's always that debate with the Heisman about should it be the best player on the best team versus, you know, it's hard to ever imagine a time that a guy on a losing team is going to win the Heisman, but eight and three, still very respectable, right? But Auburn was not in contention for a national title. Okay, they just weren't. Um that traditionally hurt Heisman candidates. You you typically had to be on one of the top two or three uh teams, and hopefully you were playing in a bowl that at least gave you a chance to win a national champion. I'm not saying that's the way it was every year, but it seemed like that was sort of the all the different things falling into place for you. Auburn was ranked number 16 that year at the end of the regular season, so 11, uh 8-3. Um, they were uh headed to the Cotton Bowl to go against number 11 Texas AM. Now they went on to lose that game and finish 8-4, but that has nothing to do with the Heisman race because the Heisman is given away before those bowl games are even played. So going into the Heisman ceremony, he into the voting up for the Heisman. He was on an 8-3 team, very respectable, of course. And he was dominating, and of course, with uh the rise of ESPN, the highlights were out there of how he was such a visually stunning um specimen. And he's out there running over linebackers and running over defensive backs and outrunning defensive backs who have the safe, the have the angle on him, basically making other grown men look like they don't know what they're doing and that they're slow, right? And so for many voters, that was kind of the whole point of this thing. They believe the Heisman should go to the best player in the country, not just the best player on the best team, the best player in the country. That's always been the debate. This year was absolutely no different. Now let's take a look at Chuck Long, because if you're like me, you probably remember Chuck Long, but not a lot of details about him unless you're an Iowa fan, then that's understandable. So let's go up there north and talk about uh Chuck Long up in Iowa. And Chuck Long wasn't necessarily the biggest uh gunslinger in town with the huge arm, but he had plenty of arm and he didn't overwhelm you with flash. He beat you with precision and smarts. And Chuck was a big old dude. He was 6'4, 217 pounds, which is a typical or prototypical pocket passer. Of course, he played for the Iowa Buckeyes for legend, the legend himself, Hayden Fry. And Chuck was put in the college, voted in the College Football Hall of Fame in 1999. If you look back on his career, he he redshirted as a freshman, um, and then he started his sophomore year in a game, and then he was benched because it didn't go so well, but he got right back in there as a starter in the third game, and he never looked back. Okay, so at the time he had an NCAA record completing 22 straight passes in one game. He was seventh in the Heisman Trophy voting as a junior, and here's his record. Here are his different records as a starter at Iowa. In 83, he led Iowa to 9-2 regular season. In 84, they were 7-4. And then 1985, this season we're talking about right now, Iowa was 10-2, and they were heading to the Big Ten title. They had won the Big Ten title. They were heading to the Rose Bowl representing the Big Ten. And um that's you know, that's pretty much all you can ask for, right? Of a guy in that situation is to win the conference and go to the um to the tight to the Rose Bowl. So by the way, Bill Snyder, the legendary coach from Kansas or from uh Kansas State, Bill Snyder, he was the offensive coordinator um for Chuck Long. I found that interesting, and I did not know that. So in 1985, the season we're talking about, Iowa football was everything that the Big Ten typically loved, right? They were tough, they were disciplined, they were efficient. And Chuck Long was the man that made it all work. He was the straw that stirred the drink. That season alone, here's some stats for you. Chuck Long, 1985, in 11 games. He had 231 completions, he had 351 attempts. That's 2,978 passing yards. And maybe some of you are thinking that doesn't sound like a lot, and you'd be wrong in 1985 for sure. That was a heck of a season. 26 passing touchdowns, only 15 interceptions. I say only. That's a little high, but you know, he had 26 touchdowns. I think the 65.8 completion percentage, I'm a big completion percentage guy. I'm a proponent of thinking highly of quarterbacks when they have good completion percentages. Um, he was clearly one of the nation's top quarterbacks with his 3,000 yards and 26 TDs. And more importantly, like I said, he led his team to 10 wins that season, a Big Ten championship, and a spot in the Rose Bowl. Um his his career record was 35, 13, and one for 10,461 yards, 74 TDs, and 782 completions. So the guy knew what he was doing when it came to running an offense and when it uh when it came to throwing a football. He wasn't just good, he was always in control. And Iowa won a lot of games because of Chuck Long and what he could do at the position, make no mistake about it. So the voters, of course, they know all of this. So those are the two guys you're talking about in this showdown. And let's let's look at something else going on with um with Chuck Long. He also won the Maxwell Award that year, the Davey O'Brien Award, and those are given to guys that are the best um top player and top quarterbacks in the country. And a lot of voters thought this was just simple math that he won all this stuff. He was an all-American, he was the Big Ten athlete of the year, the Big Ten MVP, the Big Ten co-player of the year, a three-time first team, all Big Ten quarterback, and the Big Ten network later on, uh, when it became the Big Ten network in the 2000s, named him on the Mount Rushmore of Iowa football. So Chuck Long was not uh anything to be uh to be overlooked as a candidate for the Heisman Trophy for sure that year. So the debate raged on. Should it be the best player on one of the handful of best teams in the country? Or should it be the best uh most dominant player period, regardless of record? That's kind of you know where it falls. And remember, Iowa was 10-1, Auburn was eight and three, and really Iowa had only they only had a nine-point loss on the road at Ohio State. They were nine points away on the road to Ohio State from being undefeated. And by the way, Ohio State was ranked number eight at the time, I believe. Going into their bowl game, um, they were ranked number three in the coaches' poll and number four in the AP. And I think I told you a minute ago, Auburn was ranked number 16 going into their bowl game. So the number 16 team had the most dominant weapon in the game, probably, and the number three or four team, depending on the poll, had the most um brilliant quarterback play in the nation that year. So, you know, you can look at it either way, it's up to you. And so, what did the voters decide? The Bo Jackson's side was hey, you can't punish a player because his team lost three games. Um, the Chuck Long supporters, they were kind of like, well, quarterbacks lead teams, and Chuck led a championship team in the Big Ten. And of course, neither side is wrong in that debate, right? Bo was physically the most dominating guy in college football, and Chuck Long was the most accomplished leader on a top contender. It's hard to argue with either guy. And of course, for weeks, this debate played out in newspapers, radio shows, bar rooms all across the country. And really, it comes down to that whole thing about regionalism and how different people define greatness. One thing I want to tell you before we move on any farther is that Bo didn't even have the most yards of the Heisman contenders. Uh there was a guy in the Heisman race named Um Napole, who was it? Lorenzo White. Lorenzo White had White from Michigan State, he had more yards rushing that year than Bo. Not a lot, but he had more yards. So there was that. And so how did the voting actually end up? Bo Jackson had 1,509 points, they call it in the voting, which and 317 first place votes. I can't talk. 317 first place votes. Chuck Long had 1,464 points and 286 first place votes. That's a difference of 45 whole points. At the time, it was the closest Heisman race ever, as we've established. And I think only one or two since then have been that closer, closer. Uh one in 2009 and one since then, I think. Regional voting showed that the country was indeed divided along the lines that I've mentioned. Bo dominated in the South and the Southwest with the voters uh down there, meaning the media. Chuck Long, of course, carried the Midwest, and he actually carried the Northeast, which is kind of interesting. So it was kind of a perfect split there. Um really just inches in football terms separating these two guys, right? Now, let's talk a little bit about the aftermath of this. Of course, when you vote for the Heisman, you don't care what people did in high school, and you don't care about what might happen in the pros because you have no way of knowing what happens in the pros. The Heisman is all about what happened that season in college football. But having said that, after the fact, it's always a fun exercise to go back and look and see what happened to the individuals later on. Because we all know, if you're my age, you're well aware that there is a long list of college Heisman Trophy winners that did absolutely nothing in the pros. That's just the way it is sometimes. A lot of times I blame it on the schemes and the systems and so forth. And you certainly had that era of wishbone, dual threat type running backs or quarterbacks, and that did not translate into pro style offenses at the time. So, guys in that position that had to go to the pro ball or had a chance to play pro ball often were backups or they switched. There's a lot of different weird things going on about the wishbone and the option attacks affecting a guy's ability to be seen as a pro quarterback. All that's thrown out the window now. It is. You know as well as I do that this uh the offensive now reflect greatly what we see or what we saw in college until they finally all made it into the pros. So it's different now. But at the time, Bo Jackson, of course, went on and became one of the most iconic athletes we've ever seen. He he was a Nike guy, all the bono's campaign and so forth. He wasn't even just the uh a great athlete. He was really a cultural phenomenon, really. Like I said, if you share a cart a Saturday morning cartoon with Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretzky, I think you've done something significant. Of course, he was the two sports star in the NFL and Major League Baseball. He he was just a cultural phenomenon that we all know how great he was, but we all scratch our heads and worry about the fact that he did get hurt. And man, we wonder what would have happened had he not hurt that hip. I mean, you just have to wonder what would happen. He didn't make the Hall of Fame in either professional sport, but anyone who ever played with him and lined up with him on either sport said, hey, if he just played our sport, he'd have been a Hall of Famer. So Chuck Long, on the other hand, he was he was always, well, he's sometimes remembered as the guy who lost to Bo Jackson. And that means he's the second best player in college football that season, which most of us sitting here right now think that's pretty cool in itself. Um, but Chuck Long had an outstanding career. Any anything anyone says detrimental about Chuck Long as a quarterback, it they're just they don't know what they're talking about. It's not fair to him whatsoever. He had an outstanding career. He absolutely did everything right, and everything I was possibly could have squeezed out of him in his career, they did, and he answered the bell at every opportunity. He just ran into a once-in-a-generation force of nature, man. I mean, it's just bad timing. It really is. You know, poor Chuck. I mean, he's he's around. Chuck Chuck Long has been a coach for a long time. He's coached in the college, he's coached in the pro. He played Pro Ball for four or five years, if not more, um with the Detroit Lions, and then I think he played a little with the Rams, maybe. Uh, he he stayed around a while. I hope he got his I hope Chuck got his pension from the NFL. So it was close, and I guess, you know, Bo got the nod because he was just such a uh you know hard to believe athlete to see with your own two eyes that that someone could do what he did on a football field. And that takes nothing away from what Chuck Long did. Also, this was this was one of those races w that involved stuff we don't see anymore, like players staying multiple years out of school, Chuck Long being four years um at Iowa, um, and Bo never transferring. Um rivalries mattered a lot back then. Players stayed in place, awards were debated back and forth and voted by mind and heart by journalists, and algorithms on television shows didn't get involved, and simulations and video games didn't get involved. And so Bo Jackson and Chuck Long was as good of a Heisman year as you can ever, ever expect in college football. And it's fun because it's such a philosophical argument about what color college football should be when it comes to rewarding its players, and that's why we still talk about it, because in the end, yes, Bo Jackson won the trophy, Chuck Long won the respect of an entire generation. I can't imagine if you're an Iowa fan, I can't imagine how high this guy must be on your list of favorite players. I mean, it's got to be through the roof, right? And um I was just not privy to getting to watch Chuck Long play a whole lot because of the way regional television worked back then. But I've seen highlights. He's the guy, he looked like the real deal to me. And this turned out to be just one of those great stories in college football. At the time, that was kind of the magic of the whole Heisman trophy, you know, vote anyway. And just like in the game that it represents, sometimes the margin is so thin that history could have gone either way, right? And that's what makes it fun to debate, and that's what makes it fun to reflect back on. And so we Gen X fans, we love this stuff. And hopefully you've enjoyed strolling down memory lane with me today, back to 1985, when the Heisman Trophy vote seemed to actually mean a lot to uh football fans. I'm not sure it does anymore, but it certainly did back then, and I've enjoyed talking about it, and as usual, I appreciate you giving me around 30 minutes of your life to go through this with me. And um, hey, if you like what we do here, give us a like, give us a comment, give us a subs, click subscribe, and tell somebody else about us, and uh we'll try to pick up more of uh you know the old Gen X guys who still like debating all of this stuff. So I appreciate you listening, and we'll be back with something else hopefully interesting to you next week. This is Sean Enish, your host, and we'll talk to you in a week.

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