THE JOKES ARE easy enough to make between “old man” Haynes King and his position coach, the oldest man to ever win the Heisman Trophy.
Twenty-five years ago, when Chris Weinke took home the award as a 28-year-old senior, his age became a nonstop topic of conversation. Today, older quarterbacks dot the college football landscape, their advanced ages met with a collective shrug.
“Sometimes I try and mess with him and say, ‘I couldn’t quite catch you on the age, but I tried. I gave it my all,” the 24-year-old King said of Weinke, his quarterbacks coach at Georgia Tech.
Older players have been normalized, thanks to the transfer portal and the pandemic, which granted freshmen an extra year of eligibility if they wanted it. Nearly 40 quarterbacks from the 2020 class came back this year for one more season at the FBS level. Plus, with NIL and revenue sharing, some quarterbacks are opting to stay in college as opposed to leaving school for the NFL draft. And sixth-year quarterbacks like King and Vanderbilt’s Diego Pavia entered the Heisman conversation this year. (Pavia was named a finalist.) Still, if more quarterbacks are 24 years old these days, nobody is quite as aged as Weinke was when he played.
“The landscape of college football has obviously changed,” Weinke says. “But that was a point of contention when I won it. When I walked into the room that evening when they were making the Heisman announcement, I didn’t think I was going to win it, because there was so much chatter that I didn’t deserve to win it because I was older.
“But I’ve got it now, and they can’t take it away.”
Perhaps the conversation around what Weinke did in 2000 at Florida State should be reframed. What made that season so remarkable had nothing to do with age, and everything to do with how he turned himself into a star after his college football career nearly ended. Twice.
