Who is behind all those billboards demanding return of Reggie Bush’s Heisman Trophy?
Billboards demanding the return of Reggie Bush’s Heisman Trophy sprouted up across the city Wednesday, courtesy of a longtime USC donor who says he won’t stop until the NCAA clears the way for the College Football Hall of Fame running back to get his stripped award back.
“Enough is enough,” said Brian Kennedy, founder and chief executive of Regency Outdoor Advertising, whose name graces the USC football practice field.
Kennedy, whose company owns the billboards, said he didn’t tell Bush of his plans before launching 15 billboards peering out from freeways and busy intersections across Los Angeles for at least the next month.
Bush couldn’t be immediately reached for comment but the FOX analyst has mounted a campaign of his own in recent months, lobbying the NCAA and Heisman Trust to have his trophy returned.
That decision is in the hands of the Heisman Trust, which awards the trophy. The Trust has long held that it can’t recognize Bush’s Heisman, however, unless the NCAA were to reinstate his records from the 2005 season, when he captivated college football on his way to winning the prestigious award.
Whether the NCAA would reinstate those records is a much more complicated question, one with an answer equally political and philosophical.
Bush was stripped of the award after he was found by the NCAA to have accepted impermissible benefits while playing at USC. The school was stripped of its 2004 national title as part of major sanctions that decimated the program. Fourteen wins were vacated, while any mention of Bush was either erased or affixed with an asterisk.
USC’s Reggie Bush, whose 2005 Heisman Trophy was later vacated because of NCAA violations, is part of the 2023 College Football Hall of Fame class.
It wasn’t until June 2020 that Bush was allowed back on USC’s campus, thanks to a change to NCAA rules regarding lifetime dissociation bans. He hasn’t been shy about his desire to get the trophy back too.
“It is my strong belief that I won the Heisman trophy ‘solely’ due to my hard work and dedication on the football field and it is also my firm belief that my records should be reinstated,” Bush said in a statement in 2021.
Bush can’t apply for reinstatement with the NCAA, since he technically wasn’t sanctioned by the university. That means USC likely would need to handle that endeavor, lobbying to have the NCAA absolve it of the violations sanctioned in 2010.
For now, Kennedy is taking up the cause.
His first move, plastering the message all over L.A.: “Hey NCAA … Give Reggie Bush Back His Heisman!”
Go beyond the scoreboard
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