Clemson’s Deshaun Watson finishes 3rd in Heisman Voting; Derrick Henry Wins

Henry, the first running back to win the Maxwell Award – given to college football’s player of the year – since 2002, was the SEC-record holder with 1,986 rushing yards this year, breaking Herschel Walker’s 1981 mark, and equaled the most rushing touchdowns by an SEC back with 23.

So I have some perspective on what it means for Derrick Henry to run for more yards and more touchdowns than either of those two greats did in a single season.

Henry is the second Alabama player to win the Heisman, six years after running back Mark Ingram captured it.

Alabama running back Derrick Henry capped his big award season with winning the 81st Heisman Trophy on Saturday in NY. His mother, Lisa McCaffrey, played soccer at Stanford from 1987 to 1990, and his father, Ed McCaffrey, played football at Stanford from 1986-1991, and then spent a majority of his 13-season professional career with the Broncos as a teammate of Cardinal legend, John Elway. McCaffrey was second with 1,539 points and Watson was third with 1,165 points.

Henry’s margin of victory was narrower than recent Heisman winners’, the Associated Press notes, but the contest wasn’t quite a squeaker.

Immediately after Henry claimed the statuette over two sophomores, ESPN on its website declared the front-runner for next year’s trophy: Not McCaffrey, not Clemson’s Deshaun Watson, but LSU’s Fournette.

Navy QB Keenan Reynolds also totaled 180 points and was the highest service-academy finisher in 52 years (Roger Staubach). In the Pac 12 Championship game alone, McCaffrey rushed for, threw for, and caught a TD pass. That’s ridiculously versatile and those achievements are why he’s deserving of the two points I awarded him.

Henry was born to teenage parents and raised with the strong influence of his grandmother, Gladys, in the small north Florida town of Yulee, which is just outside of Jacksonville, but very much country living.

AL.com was on the scene with 25 family members at Specialty Hospital Jacksonville, where Gladys was moved to a long-term care facility after first getting treated for fluid in her lungs eight weeks ago. Henry is also the first running back to receive the award since Ingram in 2009.

“I love you so much”, he said. This is a well-deserved win for Henry, seeing as he has accounted for 38 percent of Alabama’s offense this season. For the first time football wasn’t easy.

Henry came to Alabama as a five-star recruit, but he was a backup on a crowded depth chart as a freshman and thought about transferring.

The number of backs who could carry the ball 46 times in a rivalry game in late November, as Henry did against Auburn, is small. The Crimson Tide’s super-sized tailback is just the 3rd running back to take the Heisman up to now 16 years of time of time. The Crimson Tide rolled to a 10-0 record since Week 3 with Henry carrying the offensive load.