Bush, McAllister finding their groove in New Orleans

	Reggie Bush leads the NFL with 34 receptions and has rushed for 170 yards in five games. David Bergman/SI
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Reggie Bush and I had never been properly introduced before last Friday -- unless you count the invectives I was yelling from 60 rows up at the L.A. Coliseum during the 2004 Cal-USC game -- yet here he was in a hallway at the New Orleans Saints' training facility, unburdening his soul like a tormented artist.

"I've had a hard time getting my swagger back," the electrifying halfback said two days before the fifth game of his NFL career. "My first few games I was still finding my way, but last week against the Panthers I felt as prepared and ready after warmups as I can possibly be. But it just didn't happen for me."

Having gone four games without a touchdown, Bush was understandably pressing as he prepared for Sunday's meeting with the winless Tampa Bay Buccaneers at the Superdome. What surprised me was that he admitted it to someone he'd just met. "Yeah, I am," he said. "I'm a competitor. I want to be in the end zone every time I touch the ball, so it's pretty much on my mind every second of the day."

As I wrote in this week's Sports Illustrated, Bush had become so frustrated that he'd been blurting out swear words, sometimes in the middle of the night. On other occasions he'd cursed himself in front of others, "and the people I'm with ... look at me all weird."

The next afternoon, in the interest of equal time, I had lunch with Deuce McAllister, the sixth-year runner whom Bush is behind on the depth chart. Two days shy of the one-year anniversary of his right ACL tear, McAllister should have been celebrating his productive return to the Saints' lineup.

Instead, he grumbled, "My game has kind of gotten ugly. It's a bunch of two-, three- and four-yard runs, and then maybe I'll bust a 10- or 20-yarder when we're killing the clock."

McAllister wasn't so much complaining as acknowledging his current place in the ever-changing NFL landscape. "You've got to be able to adjust in this league, and if you can't adjust, you won't last long," he said, pausing to take a bite of his crab empanada at a restaurant on St. Charles Avenue. "In my third year I evolved more into a power back. We were a power team -- very physical up front, and we'd go downhill with inside-power or lead-draw or weak-lead. Even if you knew it was coming, that's what you had to be prepared to stop.

"Now it's more of a zone-blocking scheme, like Denver's. I can live with the 15- and 20-yarders as my 'big' runs. But when I watch clips of my younger days, or of when I was at Ole Miss, it's like, Wow."

The next day in the Superdome press box, I almost burst out laughing as the Saints' two-headed running machine began eliminating its glitches. Late in the first quarter, on second-and-7 from the New Orleans 40, McAllister took a handoff from quarterback Drew Brees and rumbled to his right, put a wicked inside-out move on Bucs safety Will Allen and raced downfield. He stiff-armed cornerback Ronde Barber before finally being dragged down from behind, 57 yards later, by linebacker Derrick Brooks.

"Deeeeeucccccceeee," the fans chanted.