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NCAAF Heisman Trophy 2025 live Updated 3m ago History is on the line as the 2025 Heisman Trophy will be awarded tonight in New York City. The four Heisman finalists are Indiana quarterback Fernando Mendoza, Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia, Ohio State quarterback Julian Sayin and Notre Dame running back Jeremiyah Love. Follow live for the latest news and real-time analysis from The Athletic’s college football staff leading up to and during tonight’s ceremony. Fernando Mendoza capped a 13-0 season, his first at Indiana after three years at Cal, with a 222-yard passing effort Saturday against Ohio State in the Big Ten Championship Game. The Hoosiers won 13-10 to earn the No. 1 seed in the College Football Playoff. A junior from Miami, Mendoza has thrown for 2, 980 yards this season on 71. 5 percent passing (226-of-316) with a nation-leading 33 touchdown passes and six interceptions. His 9. 4-yard average per passing attempt ranked second in the FBS. Mendoza directed the Hoosiers to three wins against top-10 opponents and won on the road against Iowa, Oregon and Penn State. He led an 80-yard drive in 1: 15 to beat the Nittany Lions 27-24 on a third-down throw to Omar Cooper with 36 seconds to play. Mendoza is also a finalist for the Manning Award, the Walter Camp Player of the Year and the Maxwell Award. Who should win the Heisman Trophy tonight? Let us know your thoughts by emailing us at live@theathletic. com, and we may include them in our coverage leading up to the ceremony. Following a breakout 2024 season after his transfer from New Mexico State, Diego Pavia filed an antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA in an attempt to return to Vanderbilt. He was rewarded when a federal judge in Tennessee granted an injunction allowing Pavia to play another season of college football because counting his year at a junior college, New Mexico Military Institute, against his eligibility infringed on his ability to earn NIL money. That ruling helped pave the way for the 23-year-old Albuquerque native to lead Vanderbilt to the first 10-win season in program history. When it came to his own Heisman candidacy, Pavia saved the best for last, passing for 268 yards and a touchdown and rushing for 165 yards and another touchdown to lead Vanderbilt to a 45-24 romp over in-state rival and longtime tormentor Tennessee. Overall, Pavia has 3, 192 passing yards, a 71. 2 percent completion rate, 27 touchdowns and eight interceptions, as well as 826 rushing yards and nine rushing touchdowns with an average of 5. 4 yards per carry. Working against him are Vanderbilt’s losses against Alabama and Texas. Pavia struggled against the Crimson Tide and led a furious but too-late comeback against the Longhorns, which kept the Commodores out of the College Football Playoff and forced Pavia to sit at home — well, not quite — while fellow finalists Fernando Mendoza and Julian Sayin got to add to their Heisman resumes during conference championship weekend. As a Heisman voter, I wish we could talk about our ballots leading into the show, creating a week of discussion and debate, building up the excitement. Instead, we are required to remain silent, so there is less public talk about the award until the night of the show, after the momentum of the regular season has stopped. In 2013, the Heisman Trust changed its rules, no longer allowing voters to reveal their ballot before the show. The reasoning behind the decision was that people could track the public votes and get a sense of who would win and therefore take away the drama of the show. “Heisman Pundit” Chris Hutson correctly predicted the winner for several years in a row. CBS Sports’ Dennis Dodd gave up his vote rather than abide by the policy. (I didn’t get a vote until 2020. Hutson now hosts the official Heisman Podcast, a show I appeared on in September). Instead of the new policy of silence helping, the ratings for the show declined over the next decade. Those ratings have rebounded a bit during the last two years, but we’ll see how a race between quarterbacks at Indiana and Vanderbilt impact that today. Meanwhile, we have betting lines and prediction markets trying to spoil the drama anyway. I appreciate the Heisman Trophy for the way it holds itself above so much else, as the Rose Bowl and the Masters golf tournament do. It remains arguably the most prestigious individual award in American sports. But in today’s attention economy, all attention is good attention, and the Heisman’s rules limit the eyeballs and attention it could be getting. I hope the rule changes in the future, so we can talk more about this award and the remarkable players competing for it, leading into the reveal. Julian Sayin, a native of Carlsbad, Calif. , won the Ohio State starting quarterback job in the preseason after the departure of Will Howard and most of Ohio State’s 2024 national championship-winning core to the NFL. But Sayin, who originally signed with Alabama before quickly transferring after Nick Saban’s retirement, was still left with the best wide receiver group in college football — and he took full advantage of having fellow former five-star recruits Jeremiah Smith and Carnell Tate to throw to. Sayin led the FBS with a 78. 4-percent completion rate and recorded 3, 323 passing yards and a 31-6 touchdown-to-interception ratio in his first year as a starter. Sayin also became the first Ohio State quarterback since Justin Fields in 2019 to beat archrival Michigan, throwing for 233 yards and three touchdowns amid snow flurries to power a 27-9 win in Ann Arbor. But with a chance to gain ground on fellow Heisman finalist Fernando Mendoza in the Big Ten Championship Game a week later, Sayin and the Buckeyes faltered late. He led two fourth-quarter drives deep into Indiana’s red zone but failed to pick up the first down on a fourth-and-1 QB sneak on one trip and then saw kicker Jayden Fielding miss a 27-yard field goal as Mendoza’s Hoosiers pulled off the 13-10 upset. Jeremiyah Love, originally from St. Louis, rushed for 1, 372 yards in 2025 for the 10-2 Fighting Irish. His 18 rushing touchdowns rank third nationally, and his 6. 9-yard average per rushing attempt ranks first among Power 4 backs with 1, 000 yards or more. Love accounted for 1, 652 yards from scrimmage. He rushed for 228 yards this season against USC and gained 171 with three touchdowns on eight carries against Syracuse. Love is also a finalist for the Walter Camp Player of the Year, the Maxwell Award and the Doak Walker Award. NFL fans will recognize plenty of familiar names on our list of the 10 most recent Heisman Trophy winners. If we narrow that list to the quarterbacks, that group brings good signs for the three quarterbacks who are finalists this year if they win tonight. Among those seven quarterbacks, five (Caleb Williams, Bryce Young, Joe Burrow, Kyler Murray and Baker Mayfield) have been selected No. 1 overall in the NFL draft. Two (Murray and Jayden Daniels) have won the NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year award. The only player not to fall into either of those categories is Lamar Jackson, who has the only two NFL MVPs among that group. All of the quarterbacks except for Williams and Young have led their teams to the NFL playoffs, with Williams likely to do so this year — his Chicago Bears currently have a 70-percent chance of making it to the postseason, per The Athletic’s NFL Playoff Simulator. Here is the list of the positions to win the Heisman Trophy award, ranked by frequency. Data compiled from the Heisman Trust. *Hunter was listed at both positions in his Heisman candidacy. The last wide receiver-only Heisman winner was De Vonta Smith in 2020, while the last cornerback-only Heisman winner was Charles Woodson in 1997. Here are the past 10 winners of the Heisman Trophy, dating back to 2016: The 2025 Heisman Trophy ceremony will take place at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Appel Room in New York City. The venue has hosted the Heisman Trophy ceremony since 2021, continuing a longstanding tradition of similar venues hosting the ceremony since its inception in 1935. The most notable of these is the Downtown Athletic Club, which issued the trophy and hosted the ceremony from 1935 until its closure in the early 2000s. Who do you think should win the 2025 Heisman Trophy? What should Fernando Mendoza’s and Diego Pavia’s legacies be at Indiana and Vanderbilt? Will a running back ever win the Heisman Trophy again? We want to hear your thoughts on those questions or anything else relating to the 2025 Heisman Trophy race! Send us an email at live@theathletic. com, and we’ll feature our favorite submissions in tonight’s live coverage! Tonight’s Heisman Trophy ceremony will be broadcast by ESPN and hosted by Chris Fowler. You can also stream the ceremony on Fubo (Stream Free Now! ) Tonight’s Heisman Trophy ceremony is set to start at 8 p. m. ET, local time in New York City. Hello, college football fans, and welcome to The Athletic’s live coverage of the 2025 Heisman Trophy ceremony! After a year unlike any other in college football, the four finalists are set — two stars from heavyweight blue-bloods and two transfers whose legacies as change agents at one-time bottom-feeder schools are already secure. We’ll go over each finalist’s Heisman resume, give our experts’ thoughts on who should win and have full coverage leading up to and during tonight’s ceremony in New York City! So follow along as The Athletic takes you through the awarding of college football’s marquee individual for the 2025 season!