The Heisman Trophy is awarded annually by media voters to the season's most outstanding college football player. Voting is conducted using the Borda Count method; voters rank their top three choices, awarding 3 points for first-place, 2 for second and 1 for third. Generally, this is highly uncontroversial as most years the winner receives an overwhelming majority of the first-place votes. For example, in 2025 Fernando Mendoza received 643 first-place votes while runner-up Diego Pavia received 189. However, the Borda count winner does not necessarily have to receive the most first-place votes. Consider the 2008 voting below:
Tim Tebow received the most first-place votes and finished third, outraging Florida fans and much of the college football-watching public. These fans were shocked by the system, assuming that Tebow would win the award having won a plurality of the votes. Unfortunately, complete ballots are not released publicly and we cannot determine the Condorcet winner for the award. We can clearly see however that Bradford received only 9 fewer first-place votes than Tebow and dominated him in second-place votes by a margin of 108. Bradford had broader support across the rankings, but it would be interesting to check for Condorcet efficiency with full ballot access. Mueller Table 7.4 tells us that in a 3-candidate voting system (oversimplified compared to this case) a Borda Count is 90.8% efficient at selecting the Condorcet winner compared with 79.1% efficiency for plurality voting. While Borda Count voting may seem counterintuitive in the 2008 case, it is likely helpful in the identification of the player with the broadest support.
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