The announced Heisman finalists are exactly who you thought they'd be: Cam Newton, LaMichael James, Andrew Luck, and Kellen Moore. But really, they only needed to send out one letter.
Newton will win this year's Heisman Trophy. Ignore the trolls and attention seekers who are gaining publicity for leaving Cam off of their ballots. I'm not even going to dignify them with a link. He's going to win, and it's going to be a landslide.
The handiest web site this time of year is StiffArmTrophy.com, which gathers as many public Heisman votes as possible and then projects the winner. Heisman votes are private when submitted, but plenty of voters reveal who they put on their ballots. Kari Chisholm, who runs the site, gets the help of the general populace and issues the projections. He's eight-for-eight so far after calling Mark Ingram's narrow win last year.
As of right now, he's collected information on 98 ballots. That's more than a tenth of all votes. Newton right now projects to win by something close to the largest margin ever. While Chisholm is not calling the race just yet, it's pretty clear that unless this sample is somehow wildly off from the whole, Newton is going to secure the SEC's third Heisman in the past four seasons. It really helps his case that the other three contenders are all from the West Coast, which splits the vote for anyone inclined to protest a perceived East Coast bias, go against the annoying SEC, or something else like that.
As of right now, several other SEC players have received votes that we know of. Patrick Peterson has a second and a third place vote; Marcus Lattimore has a second place vote; Ryan Mallett has two third place votes; and Nick Fairley has a third place vote. Notably missing as of now: Ingram, last year's winner.