The story behind an already iconic photograph:
Sam Wolson is less of a football diehard than a photography buff. He is a senior at the University of Michigan, the co-managing photo editor of its student newspaper, The Michigan Daily, and he has been a photographer his entire life. Yesterday, without much prompting, he talked about the technical aspects of photography the way Rich Rodriguez might discuss the zone read. He mentioned the challenge of finding the critical play, about capturing, as he put it, that exact moment. On Saturday at Notre Dame Stadium, he did just that, and within a matter of hours a student journalist had become the accidental propagandist for an even more accidental Heisman campaign. ...
So [Wolson and his colleague, Max Collins] filed around 9 p.m., packed up their equipment, and walked to the car for their return drive to Ann Arbor. Before they reached the parking lot, Collins's phone rang. It was one of the Daily's football writers, demanding to speak to Wolson.
"He was, like, ‘Dude, you've got to put this photo up on the AP,'" Wolson said. "And I said, ‘Why? It's a cool photo, but it's not anything fantastic.' And he said, ‘No, you don't understand. It looks exactly like the fucking Heisman pose!'"
They stopped at a Starbucks on the road, quickly edited the photograph, and e-mailed the revision to an adviser, who sent the image to the wire service. "The next day," Wolson said, "the photo was all over the Internet." By Monday, when the Daily plastered it on its sports cover, Wolson's shot had already been published far and wide, the perfect way to illustrate the weekend's revelation: With one marvelously timed photograph—and, of course, two marvelous performances—Denard Robinson had become the darling of the Heisman punditry.
Well, that plus the fact that Robinson is averaging 442 yards of total offense per game so far.
For those unaware, here is the Heisman Trophy: