and the consensus I've been getting is that most conferences ask their coaches to nominate players for each award - one player for each award. Usually, when teams have multiple candidates, they try to spread the nominations to different awards.

For example, with Haws and Collinsworth, it would make sense that they nominated KC for DPOY and Haws for POY because there really wasn't anything else they could have nominated Haws for. Same thing with Pangos and Wiltjer. Since Wiltjer qualified for NOY, they were able to put Pangos for POY.

So, if it came down to Pangos vs. Haws, it makes sense that Pangos wins the award. If Wiltjer or KC were available to vote for, either one of them would have been the obvious winner.

As to why 10th-place teams nominated players for POY, teams don't have to nominated anyone for an award. So, I doubt the last place team's coach would do it - unless they had a senior who was a returning all-conference player that had a solid season but just ended up with a bad team. A career award type of thing.