NEW YORK — Jayden Daniels, a Californian who hopscotched to Arizona and then to Louisiana, where he built gobsmacking statistics as LSU’s quarterback, won the 89th Heisman Trophy on Saturday night and became the latest winner to epitomize this college football era of kinetic player mobility. When he edged runner-up Michael Penix Jr., the quarterback at Washington, in the closest vote since 2018, he became the fifth winner in the past seven to have transferred during their college years.
“You took a kid from the West Coast and brought me down to the bayou,” the smooth 22-year-old said to the LSU coaches in attendance during a speech rich in humility and full of thanks to everyone, including nutritionists and janitors. His varied path left Daniels moved to thank coaches and players at Arizona State, where he spent three seasons, and LSU, where he spent the past two. Later, at the winner’s news conference, he noted the value of transferring as “something where you’ve got to adapt” and about “really just challenging myself to the life that I want and for my future.”
Once that future reached the Heisman Trophy, he felt “a sigh of relief,” he said, “kind of like, ‘Dang, it’s here now,’ ” after weeks of becoming the betting-line favorite with “just the suspense, ‘Are you going to win it, [or] are you not?’ ” He spoke of “a different kind of feeling that I had, [about] everything I worked for in my life, everything I overcame.”
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His kind of multi-region relocation, routine nowadays in a sport with a bustling transfer portal, rang through the biographies among the four finalists. Penix is a Floridian who played four injury-haunted seasons at Indiana before reaching Seattle, and third-place finisher Bo Nix, the Oregon quarterback, is an Alabamian who played three seasons at Auburn before his two in Eugene. Only Marvin Harrison Jr., the Ohio State wide receiver who finished fourth in the balloting of 928 electors, had not switched schools.
The vagabonds to reach the Heisman podium in recent years, all quarterbacks, include Caleb Williams (2022), the Washingtonian who went west to Oklahoma and then farther west to Southern California; Joe Burrow (2019), the Ohioan who went to Ohio State and then LSU; Kyler Murray (2018), the Texan who went to Texas A&M and then Oklahoma; and Baker Mayfield (2017), the Texan who went to Texas Tech and then Oklahoma. In a quarterback era, Daniels became the 20th quarterback to win the Heisman Trophy among the 24 named since 2000. In becoming LSU’s second Heisman winner in the past five Decembers, Daniels became its third overall, placing the school in a seven-way tie for fourth after it spent the first 84 Heisman years with only Billy Cannon (1959) among the winners.
Daniels’s deluge of dual-threat statistics this season — a record 208.0 passer rating, 3,812 passing yards, 1,134 rushing yards, 40 touchdown passes, 10 rushing touchdowns, only four interceptions — lured another statistic: 503 first-place votes (to 292 for Penix). Penix gathered more second-place votes, 341 to 217, and more third-place votes, 143 to 86, until the closing points stood at a fairly close 2,029 to 1,701. That’s all despite the fact that Penix wound up with the bigger seasonal prize: He will take his Huskies (13-0) to the College Football Playoff’s Sugar Bowl in New Orleans against Texas (12-1) on Jan. 1, while Daniels’s No. 13 Tigers (9-3) go to Tampa for the ReliaQuest Bowl against Wisconsin (7-5).
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LSU’s three losses count as the most for a Heisman winner’s team since 2016, when the award went to Louisville quarterback Lamar Jackson, who was an inspiration for a fellow young Black quarterback watching on TV at the time: Daniels, then 15. Now that same Daniels, only bigger, received congratulations onstage from Andre Ware, the 1989 winner who noted the value of having yet another Black quarterback in the fold. The son of Javon Daniels and Regina Jackson, Jayden Daniels joked about how his father initially steered him toward cornerback, a thought long since buried especially in the presence of LSU Coach Brian Kelly, a quarterback maestro.
“He was intentional,” Kelly said during the ESPN ceremony of Daniels’s improvements, especially with deep passes. “He was thoughtful. And he was committed to doing this.”
“The word ‘perseverance’ is that kid, Jayden,” his mother said on the broadcast, soon adding, “It’s hard, really, to describe.”
Daniels had not dominated the Heisman chatter of the early part of the season. That kind of talk centered more on various others, including those two towers in the Pacific Northwest, Penix and Nix. The former passed for a nation-leading 324.5 yards per game, led his team to comebacks with his moxie and never did lose; the latter saw his career fatten to a record 60 starts, completed a stunning 77.2 percent of his passes and combined 40 touchdown passes with a puny three interceptions while losing just twice, both by three points to Penix’s Washington. All along, Harrison turned up in Heisman and NFL draft conversation while looking a tier above even great players and catching 67 passes for 1,211 yards and 14 touchdowns while leading the country in catches against nearby defenders.
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As the autumn wore on, though, Daniels soared on. He passed for 219 yards and rushed for 163 at Alabama before a hit from linebacker Dallas Turner with 12:54 left Daniels concussed and sidelined. The very next Saturday night, at home against Florida, he amassed yardage numbers that had never happened in the top tier of the sport: 350-plus passing and 200-plus rushing in the same game, his 372 and 274 adding up to 606 total yards — by one player. “Toward the end of the season,” Daniels said Saturday night, “it started amping up more, so [this] was a real possibility.”
By that point, the Tigers had three losses, so the Daniels-to-Heisman campaign helped energize a season that might have felt residual. “Certainly when we did not have that [College Football Playoff] opportunity after the Alabama game,” Kelly said, “you start to recalibrate, and certainly one [endeavor] was to rally behind the player we felt was the best player in college football.”
In that vein, Kelly said, players felt “motivated to play their very best.”
They had rallied behind somebody they liked, evidenced by their extension to Daniels of the most votes in captaincy balloting. “A transfer quarterback that comes into your program has to win the locker room,” Kelly said, and so four years after then-LSU coach Ed Orgeron praised how Burrow came to town and “kept his mouth shut,” Kelly lauded Daniels’s humility.
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That shined through in an answer to a question about a doctor who had proclaimed the kid Daniels too small to play football, roughly half his young life ago. “I’d have to say thank you, obviously,” the 6-foot-4, 210-pounder said as he looked back across the country he had hopscotched, but such thanks came not for the defiant reason you might expect of an athlete grown elite. “She was looking out for my best interests.”
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