Rise of the Generalist Athlete
What Travis Hunter's Heisman victory tells us about how sport is evolving to mirror one of life's greatest truths
Hey Everyone! 👋🏻
Happy Tuesday, and welcome back to The Gunn Show. Hope you all had a fantastic week as always.
In keeping with the theme of big milestones in the Gunn family of late, we had another very special one on our hands this weekend - Brooklyn’s birthday! It was an especially sentimental one this year as we are getting increasingly close to the due date for our little one, making Sunday the last time we were celebrating her as a party of two. In a season of life that has been increasingly about looking forward to what is to come, it was a great opportunity to step back and be appreciative of what we have in the here and now. There’s no other person I’d rather be walking into this next phase of life with and I know I speak for many of you when I say that I hope this was the best birthday yet. Cheers to you, Brooklyn, today and always.
Now, on to today’s topic.
While the rest of the college football world took a brief on-field pause this weekend in advance of the upcoming playoffs, Saturday night marked the official ceremony for the 2024 Heisman Trophy Award at the Lincoln Center in New York City. In what turned out to be a two-man race, Colorodo’s two-way star Travis Hunter edged out Boise State’s dynamic running back Ashton Jenty to become the second Buffalo to take home the award in school history. If you haven’t gotten a chance to watch his acceptance speech, I’d highly recommend it - I found it to be a great example of the value in remembering the people that stand behind you in the dark so that you can shine in the light.
As college football’s premier award, the Heisman naturally leads to spirited debate on a yearly cadence as to who is most deserving of taking home the coveted trophy. And while this year’s race was no different in this respect, I couldn’t help but see a conceptual underpinning to the discussion that differed starkly from any we’ve seen before. Because while this year’s Heisman ceremony crowned the “best player in college football” just as it has in all 89 years prior, Hunter winning the trophy represented something entirely unique:
For the first time since I can remember, the Heisman Trophy didn’t go to college football’s best specialist - it was given to its best generalist instead.
And in that decision, I believe, lies a powerful lesson for both sports and life.
Let’s talk about why.
- CG
Rise of the Generalist Athlete
Deep into the midst of MLB Winter Meetings this week, I found myself in the middle of a discussion with some co-workers about which of the four finalists we thought would take home the Heisman (yes - we may have been a little off topic in light of the week’s events, but sometimes you just need to talk a little college football…).
Like most, our group had come to the conclusion that either Hunter or Jeanty would be awarded the trophy come Saturday night. But we had some differences in opinion - while all each of us thought that Hunter would ultimately be crowned by the voters, a couple of us thought that Jeanty was actually the most deserving. Myself included - at least at the time.
The crux of the argument for Jeanty over Hunter was the following: while Hunter was surely doing something we’d never seen in college football in playing at a high level as both a wide receiver and a cornerback, he couldn’t claim to be the best at either of those positions in the same way that Jeanty could as a running back. Where Hunter was a ‘jack of all trades’, Jeanty represented the opposite - as college football’s leader in rushing yards, yards per carry, and rushing touchdowns, he is without a doubt a ‘master of one’ (if you disagree and would like to cite “quality of competition”, I’d encourage you to go watch the tape).
The conversation ended harmlessly (none of us have Heisman ballots, after all), but as I left and reflected back on the debate I started to re-shape my perspective. Namely, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d been talking out of both sides of my mouth when it came to the concepts that I believe each player represented - generalism (in the form of Hunter) vs. specialism (in the form of Jeanty).
I’ve been on record before as to the power I see in taking a generalized approach to life, a perspective I’ve shared before in articles like Talent Stacks and Unicorns. So much so that I even wrote the following in Unicorns:
To become a unicorn means opening yourself up to a world of possibilities, as the more skills you can combine in one domain the likelier you will be to have success in others. Problems will fall apart in front of you, and doors will open that you never possibly imagined. Because at the end of the day, people are endlessly fascinated by outliers, and for good reason - they are the people that drive the world forward, the ones that accomplish the things we priorly thought to be impossible.
And so, as I stepped back and looked at the Heisman debate through this lens, I started to view it differently. Yes, Jeanty had been the premier back in all of college football - a true master of his craft. But Hunter was the true outlier here, with a long list of ‘never-done’ feats to his name. Things like:
First athlete to win both the Bednarik (best defensive player) and Biletnikoff (best receiver) awards in the same year
First known FBS players with 150+ receiving yards and four pass break ups in a single game
Only FBS player to earn Power 4 Offensive and Defensive Player of the Week honors in the same season
Ashton Jeanty is a star. But Travis Hunter is a unicorn - and for that reason, he is the exact player I should have hoped would win the award for college football’s best player. And as it stands today, I’m glad he did.
This was a unique Heisman race because it captures a hidden truth I believe has long existed about the world: to the generalists frequently go the spoils.
This is not a concept with which many of us are familiar, as we often are led to believe that success - regardless of domain - comes from going as narrow as possible. Life places the stories of specialists front and center for us to behold, tempting us to believe that fame and success are the results of savant-like journeys taken from an early age. We hear endlessly about the Tigers and Mozarts of the world that began their path to mastery of craft at a time when they could barely walk.
But these stories are illusions at worst, and disingenuous at best. To center on specificity disregards the power of plurality, and it’s fair to argue that many of the world’s most successful people owe their feats to a generalist skillset.
In fact, this is the exact question that the author David Epstein looked at for his book Range, which serves as a counter-perspective to the infamous ‘10,000 hour rule’ often parroted in favor of early-specialization. In his studies of the world’s highest performers, he came to the following conclusion:
“The most successful people didn’t set out to become the best in a narrow domain; they tended to develop by dabbling across a range of pursuits first.”
From athletes to scientists, artists to technologists, Epstein found countless examples of high performers that owed their success to their ability to bring multiple skills to the table. People like Roger Federer, who played soccer, badminton, and basketball as a child before ultimately choosing to focus on tennis. Or Leonardo Da Vinci, who had varying interests across the domains of art, engineering, anatomy, and more. Elon Musk serves as a great example, too - many have founded space companies, others electric car companies, and yet others payment companies. But there is only one person that has helped build a successful company in each of those domains like he has with SpaceX, Tesla, and PayPal.
The polymaths, it seems, thus frequently have an advantage in life when compared to the monomaths. But can the same be said when it comes to sports? I think so, and let me explain why.
In sports like basketball and baseball where you are required to play both offense and defense, there is a concept called the “both sides of the ball player”. The terminology describes the athletes that are capable of impacting the game in multiples ways, like the shortstop that possesses both an elite glove and bat, or the wing that is an elite shooter and lock down defender.
Both sides of the ball players are their respective sport’s version of “generalized specialists” because while they may specialize in a specific sport like all their opponents, they are also masters of multiple skills within it.
And as such, they frequently find themselves in the highest demand. They are the players taken at the top of the draft, like NBA superstar Victor Wenbanyama (‘The Alien’), and the ones that ink the largest free-agent contracts, such as Shohei Ohtani and Juan Soto in Major League Baseball. A simple look at the dichotomy between pitchers (single-sided) vs. position players (doubled-sided) in professional baseball serves as an exclamation point on the value of generality in sport - of the 15 free agent deals signed for $300M in the sport’s history, 13 of those have gone to position players and only 2 to pitchers.
And while I believe this has been true of sport for as long as it has existed, I think the trend towards generalism is only becoming more prevalent. Consider the following developments across sport in recent years:
“Dual Threat” quarterbacks in football (eg: Patrick Mahomes & Lamar Jackson)
“Positionless Basketball” in the NBA (eg: Nikola Jokić & Lebron James)
“Two-Way Players” in Baseball (eg: Shohei Ohtani)
“Power & Precision” golfers (eg: Scottie Scheffler & Rory McIlroy)
One sport alone could be considered an anomaly, but to see this trend across multiples at the same time suggests that there is a pattern at play. Sports, like life, are evolving to favor the generalists. But why?
There are a number of factors at play, ones that arise from a blend of both new challenges and old.
First and foremost, what hasn’t changed: versatile athletes are a god-send to teams who find themselves constrained by competitive balance mechanisms such as salary caps and roster sizes. With every dollar and spot precious, team builders are thus tasked with finding creative solutions to optimize their financial allocations across a select group of players. And as it turns out, there is no better bargain in team building than the “many things for the price of one” option that the generalist athlete brings to the the table. Because why pay two separate players - and lock up the roster spots in the process - if an option exists to blend their respective talents into one?
Yet while this versatility advantage has always existed, there is another constant in sport: change. And as sport has continued to evolve, the value of the generalist athlete has only continued to grow.
With pace of play and the complexity of on-field strategy at all time highs, the modern sporting arena is now one of increasing complexity. Borrowing again from Epstein, sports are now much more akin to the “wicked” environments common to life itself: settings and fields in which rules are unclear or incomplete, feedback is delayed or missing, and patterns are hard to identify or non-repetitive.
And as the games change, so too must the people that play them. The modern athlete is now tasked with more than at any point before in the history of sports. All at the same time they are being asked to compete against counterparts that are bigger, faster, and stronger than we have seen to date. Add all these factors up and you will find an environment that is not only ripe for generalism but one that demands it - the messier the games get, the more solutions one needs to possess in order to play them. And so, as the traditional boundaries of sport continue to fall to the way-side, the one-trick pony seems to be on its way out the door. The more dynamic and versatile the player, the better.
This is generally true across all of sport, but football serves as a particularly interesting case study. Because as one of the few sports that puts players solely on one side of the ball or the other, it would appear to be one of the last strongholds in athletics where specialization still reigns king. You either play offense or defense, but you don’t do both.
At least until Travis Hunter came around. And that is exactly what made this year’s Heisman race so utterly fascinating: in a sport that has hung its hat on specialists competing against specialists, the generalist took home the crown. Hunter broke the mold, and in a rare turn of fate, he was appropriately rewarded.
And in doing so, it is entirely possible that he may be the force that pushes the game of football back in lock-step with its sporting counterparts as it relates to the value of the generalist. Why? Because when someone does something for the first time, the rest of us start to view that same feat as something we can be capable of ourselves. Which in turn leads us to do the most important thing of all: try.
I can promise you this: all over the world on Saturday night, there were kids watching as Travis Hunter - college football’s ultimate generalist - was honored with the sport’s most prestigious award. For the ones that were, what they saw was a unicorn standing at the podium in the flesh, a walking representation of the fact that artificial boxes and labels need not exist. And I’ll be damned if at least one of them didn’t think to themselves that they wanted to do something like that too.
Now, that is not to say that there will be a bevy of Travis Hunter’s to come in the future of the sport - he is a generational athletic talent, after all, and few are likely capable of reaching the heights he rose to in the 2024 season.
But regardless of who may or may not follow in his footsteps, Hunter’s win on Saturday night was a shining example of one of the world’s core truths: the world need not belong solely to the specialists.
The generalists get a say, too - in sports, just as in life. And when they get the chance to speak with their play on the field we’d all do well to pay attention, because their voices might carry more power behind them than you’d initially think.
