Best Moments in Big Ten Football History #6: Desmond Howard's Heisman Pose, 1991

FanHouse is counting down the 10 best, 10 worst, and 10 weirdest moments in Big Ten football history.

There ought to be a unit to measure cockiness in athletes. There should be some means of comparing one athlete's self-confidence with another's. Yes, there should be such a unit, and if there ever is, it should be called the Howard. One Howard would be equal to the amount of cockiness displayed in the photo above, the infamous moment towards the end of the 1991 Ohio State-Michigan game when Desmond Howard struck the Heisman pose, knowing--knowing--that he had just locked up the award.

I remember seeing this moment on live TV. At the instant Howard struck his pose I had never admired nor loathed an athlete so much. He was arrogant, and he was right. Howard didn't just win the 1991 Heisman, he claimed it. Howard scored 138 points for Michigan that season, becoming the first receiver ever to lead the conference in scoring.

It wasn't just what Desmond Howard did that earned him the Heisman, though. It was how he did it. He caught 61 passes for 950 yards that season. That's more than respectable, but those aren't dizzying numbers. Last year Texas Tech's Michael Crabtree caught 134 passes for 1,962 yards. Crabtree even outdid Howard in touchdown receptions, 22 to 19. But did you catch something in those numbers?

The key word, of course, is "catch." Michael Crabtree caught twice as many balls as Desmond Howard. Howard found the end zone one out of every three times he caught the ball.

I mean, that's just not natural. A really good receiver finds the end zone once every eight to ten times he catches the ball. One out of three? That's batcakes, just completely batcakes.

Howard won his Heisman by the second-largest margin ever at the time. He had some competition, but seldom is the Heisman winner as clear as it was in 1991, because seldom is there one player who is clearly the most outstanding in all of college football. (The rest of your top five from 1991: Casey Weldon, Ty Detmer, Steve Emtman, and Shane Matthews. Go ahead, Noles fans, state your case for how Casey Weldon got jobbed.)

So in the end I can't begrudge Desmond Howard his Heisman-pose moment. He earned it, and there's something peculiarly American about about becoming an icon by appropriating an already-existing icon, after all. But I think I have to take back my suggestion that the Howard would be an appropriate unit to measure cockiness. The more I think about it, the more I realize that even a Chad Johnson press conference would have to be measured in milliHowards.