Hey folks, sorry for the late response. Bunch o' family stuff this weekend. A baby is a very formidable and extremely inconvenient obstacle to maintaining my Stanford fandom.
Yes, just to recap, during Toby's time, I organized a Toby For Voldemort Grassroots Campaign. Stiffarmtrophy.com had a 100% success rate in predicting the Voldemort winner based on publicly announced votes. I compiled their list of known voters
http://www.stiffarmtrophy.com/heismanvoters/ and put them into a spreadsheet divided into 366 units and assigned each unit a day of the year. I asked people to contact the voters listed around their birthdays to tell them about Toby's enormous contribution. And a lot of people shared some great talking points to highlight. The campaign snowballed wonderfully, and people really did pitch in and contact voters. We got written up at NYtimes.com
http://bayarea.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12...rt-trophy/ ; Toby's High School had a web page devoted to the campaign; and Toby even recorded a thank-you encouragement
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dn157kQYF3k (although the lack of media-savvy from the Stanford AD is painfully clear from that video).
We frequently got positive responses from the voters. It was wonderful to see Toby in NYC and painful to see him miss out on the award that he truly deserved by just a few points.
Oh yes, and the Nose-Punching campaign was launched during Andrew Luck's
first second Voldemort campaign. Whereas Toby had superior stats, he lost out because perhaps he wasn't on a contending team. So when Andrew Luck looked like he might not win because voters might vote for
Cam Newton RGIII (superior stats, non-contending team), the Nose-Punching Campaign was conceived, intending to take me all across the country to punch everybody in the nose who did not vote for Luck. An exhaustive endeavor, but one that was sorely needed for those Voldemort voters who deserved it.
I'm starting to believe that the bottom line for this repeated frustration is that outside of the West Coast, Stanford is perceived to be not as strong as SEC teams. So when a Stanford player does exceedingly well, it's dismissed for any reason that a voter feels like coming up with (weak defenses, inflated kickoff return yardage, more games, not enough touchdowns, whatever). It feels similar to the issue that minorities and women in college/workplace can face, where their presence and accomplishments are dismissed because of an inherit prejudice that they don't actually belong. As the cliche goes, they need to be twice as accomplished to be viewed as half as good. And what's the solution? I don't know, except for More. More winning, more wins against SEC opponents, more minorities and women in college/workplace. I feel like that sort of dismissive prejudice can't be logicked away, but rather gets slowly eroded with more positive examples. I want so badly for Stanford (and the rest of the Pac-12) to play and beat more SEC teams to counter this. I wanted so badly for Stanford to get a crack at Alabama in the playoffs this year.
I am happy that since Toby's 2nd place finish, Stanford has done a successively better job publicizing its Voldemort candidates. This year's McCaffrey's Voldemort campaign was very well done.
Honest question: do people think it might be worthwhile to do a grassroots campaign for McCaffrey next year?
It's possible that a campaign launched midway through the season might be able to bring more visibility to McCaffrey and in a more timely manner. And who knows, maybe working directly with Stanford's AD to coordinate things could help. If you have any thoughs (positive or negative) on the idea, please holler, thanks.