A standout season on both sides of the ball pushed Colorado Buffaloes two-way player Travis Hunter above the competition to win the 2024 Heisman Trophy. Hunter received 552 first-place votes and 2,231 total points—just 214 points ahead of Boise State Broncos running back Ashton Jeanty, who finished second with 309 first-place votes and 2,017 total points. Oregon Ducks quarterback Dillon Gabriel and Miami Hurricanes quarterback Cam Ward were third and fourth, respectively.
Sports Illustrated’s Pat Forde and Bryan Fischer are Heisman voters. Here are their ballots.
Pat Forde
As previously noted, this Heisman Trophy race was a ton of fresh fun. This was not just a blueblood quarterback competition; instead it was a battle of some historically productive players doing great work at programs slightly off center stage.
I filled out my ballot as follows:
- Travis Hunter, Colorado
- Ashton Jeanty, Boise State
- Bryson Daily, Army Black Knights
In a more “normal” year, I would have had no problem putting Jeanty or Daily at the top of my ballot. But what Hunter did was so amazingly abnormal that he had to be the top choice. He is truly elite at two different things, earning Sports Illustrated All-American first-team honors on both sides of the ball.
Hunter is considered one of the top two cornerback prospects in the 2025 NFL draft, along with Michigan’s Will Johnson. He also is second in the nation in touchdown catches (14) and in the top six in receptions (92) and receiving yards (1,152). He has said he wants to play both ways as a pro, too, and whatever franchise drafts him would be foolish not to let him try.
Hunter has simply shattered the ceiling of what a player can do in major college football. His workload has been Herculean: 1,360 scrimmage plays, an average of 113.3 snaps per game, with full-out sprinting on the majority of those plays. Hunter has also thrown his body into harm’s way a lot for a perimeter player—he’s a physical tackler on defense and is willing to absorb hits in pursuit of catches on offense.
And Hunter absolutely elevated his team (along with fellow Heisman top-10 finisher Shedeur Sanders). Colorado’s nine wins are its most since 2016, snapping a streak of six straight non-pandemic seasons with losing records. The Buffaloes tied for first place in the Big 12, only missing out on the league championship game via tiebreakers. The year before Hunter, Sanders and coach Deion Sanders arrived in Boulder, Colorado was 1–11 and the worst power-conference program in the nation.
That’s why he’s the first defensive player to win the Heisman since 1997, and the most versatile player to win it since ’56.
Jeanty was brilliant in his own right, nearly becoming the first Heisman winner from a non-power conference since Ty Detmer of the BYU Cougars in 1990. The gravitational pull of the sport toward massive conferences with massive revenue advantages created a narrative that those outside the elite programs and leagues simply cannot compete. Yet here is 12–1 Boise State and awarded a No. 3 seed in the College Football Playoff, powered by Jeanty.
He is putting up numbers that have conjured memories of Pro Football Hall of Famer Barry Sanders’s epic 1988 Heisman season—perhaps the finest individual season a running back ever had. At this point, Jeanty’s 344 carries exactly equals Sanders’s total that year. Sanders was more productive in those 344 carries: 2,628 rushing yards to Jeanty’s 2,497; 37 rushing touchdowns to Jeanty’s 29. But Jeanty has at least one more game to go, and could eclipse Sanders’s single-season FBS record. (He’s currently fourth, and moving up to second will require only 91 rushing yards.)
I also felt strongly about including Daily on my ballot. He powered Army to an 11–2 record and dominant first season in the American Athletic Conference, serving as the tireless point man in the nation’s most productive ground game. Daily is seventh nationally in rushing with 1,532 yards and tied for first (with Jeanty) with 29 rushing touchdowns. If he had enough passing attempts to qualify, his 183.42 efficiency rating, entering Saturday, would lead the nation.
Daily finished sixth in the balloting, the highest for an Army player since Pete Dawkins won it in 1958. It would have been nice for him to be a finalist and go to New York, but he had other things to do Saturday—namely, play against Navy for the last time in his career. That was an honor in its own right.
Bryan Fischer
Most years, you just know. This season, though, was unlike most.
The decision between my first choice for the 2024 Heisman Trophy and the second was as close as I can remember since at least ’11—when I agonized over putting eventual winner Robert Griffin III of the Baylor Bears in the top spot over Stanford Cardinal quarterback Andrew Luck. This year felt similar between a clear-cut top two in Colorado corner/receiver Travis Hunter and Boise State tailback Ashton Jeanty. Both were completely deserving, and I certainly had to go back over just about every statistic while remembering how excellent each was over the course of the season.
In the end, I went with the unicorn.
Much is made about Hunter’s snap count on both offense and defense. While that is part of his story, it almost underplays that he’s truly one of the savviest cornerbacks in the country while ranking in the top five in receiving yards and touchdowns. His body control is unbelievable whether he’s picking off a pass (he has four) or leaping for an incredible catch in between opposing defenders. He is a true top-five pick at either position. It’s been jawdropping to watch the physical stamina needed to play better than anybody all game, but it’s the mental aspect of playing both sides of the ball at such a high level that cemented his status as the most outstanding player to me.
That’s no slight to Jeanty, who has been a workhorse and is chasing what I had long considered to be an unbreakable record in Barry Sanders’s single-season mark of 2,628 yards. He has figuratively carried the Broncos into the College Football Playoff as the improbable three-seed and literally carried three or four defenders on his back just about every game on his way to 2,497 yards and 29 touchdowns. It’s a shame he had this season during this year where the competition was incredibly strong. Jeanty probably would have earned my first-choice vote seven times in the past decade.
It’s also worth noting that finding candidates to place behind Hunter and Jeanty was easy, but figuring out who to write in was splitting hairs to the 50th degree. Oregon Ducks quarterback Dillon Gabriel was phenomenal and became the all-time leader in touchdowns to lead Oregon to a perfect regular season. Miami Hurricanes quarterback Cam Ward was electric, throwing for more passing touchdowns than anybody and leading so many memorable comebacks for the Canes to even keep them in the CFP conversation until the very end. I thought long and hard about Cam Skattebo, the Arizona State Sun Devils’ battering ram who isn’t a secret anymore after sparking the biggest year-over-year turnaround for a program.
I went with Army signal-caller Bryson Daily, who led his team to a conference championship for the first time ever (ever!) and is tied with Jeanty for the national lead at 29 rushing touchdowns despite playing two fewer games. He ran that option like he was conducting an orchestra while barrelling over—and through—defenders at the same time. Throw in the incredible effort it takes to be a football player on and off the field at West Point, and it sure seemed like an outstanding campaign to me.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Colorado’s Travis Hunter Wins Heisman Trophy. Here’s How Sports Illustrated Voted..
