Marcus Mariota’s trophy case could start to become exponentially heavier in the coming weeks.
After continuing his torrid pace last Saturday in a 44-10 victory for the Ducks over Colorado, Mariota was announced as a finalist for both the Davey O’Brien and Maxwell Award  – honors that go to the best quarterback and best player in the nation, respectively –on Nov. 24.
The 2014 Home Depot College Football Awards will take place in Miami, Fla. on Dec. 11 and it will presumably be the start of a tour Mariota takes on the east coast in the week that follows the Pac-12 Championship game.
Although he won’t find out whether he is a finalist until Dec. 8, it is clear Mariota is the favorite to grasp, as far as individual awards are concerned, the most coveted honor in college football on Dec. 13 in Times Square. A one-to-five favorite to win the Heisman Trophy and the consensus leader on every weekly Heisman chart, the redshirt junior’s stock has never faded this season and his two remaining games could all but solidify his status as the nation’s best player.
Mariota received four more first-place votes than his counterpart, Wisconsin running back Melvin Gordon, in the ESPN Experts’ Poll this week and has been the leader in Daniel Heard’s Heisman Hype (Heirarchical Yearly Prediction Ensemble) forecast for the entire moth of November.
Heard, now a Quantitive Risk Analyst at USAA, began analyzing voting trends for the Heisman Trophy selection process as a graduate student at Duke University in 2010 and has continued to forecast Heisman voting by using his HYPE model ever since.
Based upon the fact that no other award has the buildup or geographical voting tendencies like the Heisman, Heard was merely enthralled by how much discussion surrounded the honor at first. It was clear then and it is clear now that the Heisman Trophy takes on much more notoriety than any other award Mariota is nominated for.
“Everybody knows the symbol of the trophy and that in college sports in particular, no award has the amount of hype and buildup around it,” Heard said. 
While incorporating player information, on-field performance and media information, he made conventional and somewhat unique findings when looking into the 2010 Heisman race, one which culminated with Cam Newton winning in a landslide victory.
Obvious variables included the fact that players in their specific region would receive more votes compared to the rest of the field in that area and that primetime match-ups in November would garner more weight than a non-conference game early in the season.
Yet, whom you lose to and the manner in which you lose, added with the strength of a team’s schedule, provided him with other factors for what voters mainly look at.
In Mariota’s case, this year set up perfectly for a Heisman campaign. With a non-conference matchup against seventh-ranked Michigan State in just the second week of the season and dates set with Stanford and UCLA, the signal caller clearly had every opportunity to seize the national spotlight and Heard believed he would.
Picking him as his favorite to win, Mariota hasn’t faltered on that prediction. With 3700 yards of total offense and a combined 41 touchdowns both through the air and on the ground, Mariota likely will continue to impact the game in a variety of ways when the Ducks meet Oregon State on Saturday in the 118th installment of the Civil War. 
In addition, Mariota’s been just as productive when its mattered most for Oregon. In the two games that carried the most weight – against Michigan State and Stanford – Mariota combined for 703 yards, seven touchdowns and no turnovers in convincing victories.
While 2013’s contest versus Stanford virtually ended Mariota’s Heisman run, this season signifies how much big-time performances in front of nationally televised audiences can matter.
“Performances in those types of games are much more influential to voters than other games,” Heard said. “Typically the people that end up being finalists will have one or two games that are really going to make or break their heisman campaign.”
The third-year starter can check that off the list. Gordon can too, however.
In spite of Gordon’s surge towards the record books though, Mariota still seems like the favorable pick at this point. Barring any dramatics, the third-year starter, which to Heard had the advantage of coming into this season already on everyone’s radar, has clearly set himself apart from this year’s barrage of playmakers.
With Gordon, the junior will have another chance for a breakthrough performance against Minnesota this week and if the Badgers can win, will have another opportunity in the Big Ten Championship. However, with Mariota having the same schedule, there’s no reason to believe he too won’t be making just as many impacts on the field.
“I think voters will have a hard time not voting for him,” Heard said. 
Follow Justin Wise on Twitter @JustinFWise