The Heisman Trust announced Wednesday that it will return the Heisman Trophy to former USC running back Reggie Bush, who forfeited the honor after a 2010 NCAA investigation found he and his family had received hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts from a sports agent.

Bush won the award in 2005 after rushing for 1,740 yards and averaging 8.7 yards per carry, but the NCAA vacated his college statistics from late 2004 onward as a result of its investigation. Because of that, the Heisman Trust said he was not eligible to win the 2005 award, leaving no winner that year.

Former Nebraska quarterback Eric Crouch, who won the 2001 Heisman Trophy, posted a photo of Bush receiving the trophy on X:

“We are thrilled to welcome Reggie Bush back to the Heisman family in recognition of his collegiate accomplishments,” Michael Comerford, president of the Heisman Trust, said in a statement. “We considered the enormous changes in college athletics over the last several years in deciding that now is the right time to reinstate the trophy for Reggie. We are so happy to welcome him back.”

In announcing the formal reinstatement of the trophy to Bush, the Heisman Trust cited “enormous changes in the college football landscape,” chief among them the right of college athletes to be compensated, which was established in a 2021 Supreme Court decision.

“Recognizing that the compensation of student athletes is an accepted practice and appears here to stay, these fundamental changes in college athletics led the Trust to decide that now is the right time to return the Trophy to Bush, who unquestionably was the most outstanding college football player of 2005,” the Heisman Trophy Trust said in a statement.

Bush and a sizable number of college football fans, commentators and fellow Heisman Trophy winners have waged a long campaign seeking the return of Bush’s trophy, which he mailed back to the Heisman Trust in 2012 (USC returned its copy of Bush’s Heisman two years earlier).

“Personally, I’m thrilled to reunite with my fellow Heisman winners and be a part of the storied legacy of the Heisman Trophy, and I’m honored to return to the Heisman family,” Bush told ESPN. “I also look forward to working together with the Heisman Trust to advance the values and mission of the organization.”

Bush will be eligible to attend the Heisman Trophy ceremony starting this year. USC also will get back the Heisman Trophy replica it received after Bush won the award.

Last year, Bush filed a defamation lawsuit against the NCAA for saying he took part in a “pay-for-play type arrangement” during his time at USC. The lawsuit stems from a statement made in 2021 by the NCAA in response to reporters’ inquiries about whether Bush’s statistics would be restored after the Supreme Court ruling that allowed college athletes to be paid.

According to online court records in Indiana, where the NCAA is headquartered and the lawsuit was filed, the NCAA has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, claiming that its statement was not defamatory, did not mention Bush by name and merely was about “the NCAA’s own views about enforcement of its own rules, none of which are or can be false.”

Bush’s legal team plans to fight the motion to dismiss in a hearing Monday. It also petitioned the NCAA to have Bush’s USC statistics restored, a request that was denied by the NCAA in October because it “neither establishes any new information directly related to the decision nor identifies procedural error in the processing of the case that impacts the vacation-of-records penalties,” the NCAA said in its response, which was obtained by The Washington Post.

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