Over the years, there has been substantial criticism of a regional bias, suggesting that the Heisman balloting process has ignored West Coast players. At present, the Pac-12 Conference (formerly Pac-10 and Pac-8) represents 12 of the 65 teams (roughly 18.5%) in the Power Five conferences. The Heisman can be, and has been, presented to players from other conferences, but a random sample over a long period of time might suggest that Pac-10/12 players might win somewhere close to 18% of the Heisman awards. In the 20 seasons between 1981 (Marcus Allen) and 2002 (Carson Palmer), not a single Pacific-10 Conference or other West Coast player won the Heisman Trophy. Three Southern California (USC) players have won the trophy in the early years of the 21st century and two won it subsequent to Palmer. Although Terry Baker, quarterback from Oregon State, won the trophy in 1962, and Gary Beban from UCLA won in 1967, no non-USC player from the West Coast had won between Stanford's Jim Plunkett in 1970 and Oregon's Marcus Mariota in 2014. Other than Mariota's win, the closest since Plunkett's wins have been John Elway, Toby Gerhart, Andrew Luck, Christian McCaffrey, and Bryce Love. All five were Stanford players who finished second in the Heisman balloting 1982, each year from 2009 to 2011, 2015, and 2017.