Youth Is Served

College kids certainly seem to be getting a better foundation in economics than they used to. Let's see: Work for room and board, or do pretty much the identical labor for $7 million a year. What to do? It's not quite that cut-and-dried; a diploma does come with the meal money. Still, a lot of kids today, it turns out, would rather have the $7 million instead of free textbooks. It makes you wonder. What are they teaching in these universities...capitalism?

For whatever reason, and we suspect it's often the $7 million, more and more juniors and seniors who would have once rushed for malt-shop glory on the campus gridiron are now rushing into the NFL marketplace to become miniature moguls. Did you happen to catch the story about second-year Cincinnati Bengals running back Ki-Jana Carter's investments in The New York Times business section recently? This is no slam against all you guys who promised Mom you would get your degrees first, but a senior football player is, almost by definition, a kind of failure. What in the world is wrong with him?

With pro prospects going to the NFL pretty much whenever they feel like it—oh, the hardship!—another trend has emerged. Look around, coast to coast, and notice how young this season's college running backs are. Theories abound: The scholarship limitations mean smaller teams and bigger opportunities for younger players; athletes are just better sooner; it's a big country, so there ought to be an 18-year-old here and there who can knock your socks off. In any event, the guys carrying the ball are babies. With no upperclassmen around to fill the jobs, freshmen and sophomores are increasingly being pressed into duty, often with spectacular results. There are now so many kids doing man's work that Kathie Lee Gifford ought to be weeping anew. (Her man of course did four-and-out, but that was a hundred years ago.)

Anyway, here's a little gallery of football precocity—nine ballcarriers coming off fabulous freshman years. Hey, we would love for them all to stay, get their degrees and become collegiate institutions, but it's not going to happen. So let's celebrate sophomores, the game's elder statesmen.

Hard to know who should head the list—they're just kids, remember, so they can be kind of unpredictable—but Texas's Ricky Williams should be somewhere near the top. Between his two seasons in baseball's minor leagues (he spent this summer playing outfield for the Class A Piedmont Boll Weevils in the Philadelphia Phillies' system), he rushed for 990 yards, breaking the Longhorns' freshman record, set by Earl Campbell in 1974. The comparisons between the two are apparently so vivid that the six-foot, 215-pound Williams is called Little Earl after Campbell, who was six feet, 210 pounds as a freshman. And, so far, neither seems to mind the comparison. "He could be great," says Ancient Earl.

Right up there, too, is Kevin (No Relation to Marshall) Faulk, who gained 852 yards last year at LSU, while sharing the position with, wouldn't you know it, another freshman, Kendall Cleveland, who rushed for 562 yards and 10 touchdowns. The 5'10", 192-pound Faulk is a shifty type who plays Lightning to the 6'1", 221-pound Cleveland's Thunder. Each lightning strike, by the way, was good for five yards last season.

Both Williams and Faulk were true freshmen, not grizzled red-shirts. These guys were so good, their schools couldn't wait for them, no matter what an extra year of maturity might have provided. Chris Fuamatu-Ma'afala of Utah was also a genuine freshman. A 275-pound bruiser from Honolulu, the man of many vowels and few years broke his boss's ankle during preseason practice in 1995, bowling over coach Ron McBride as he ran out of bounds. How good was Fuamatu-Ma'afala? He played every game anyway and gained 834 yards on only 141 carries.

Then there was Ahman Green of Nebraska. How good was he? Good enough, cynics say, for the Cornhuskers to afford morality and suspend Lawrence Phillips (for a little while, at least) after he pled no contest to battering his girlfriend. It's unfair to suggest that coach Tom Osborne wouldn't have disciplined Phillips without a phenom like Green, who rushed for 1,086 yards, on hand, but having another 1,000-yard rusher in the pantry must have made him more comfortable about the decision. Going into last season, only 37 freshmen in Division I-A history had gained at least 1,000 yards—and none had played for Nebraska. Imagine if Green, a six-foot, 210-pounder with 4.34 speed in the 40, had started before the sixth game of the season? No running back last year, no matter his vintage, had a better yards-per-carry average than Green's 7.7.

Green was one of three freshmen who gained more than 1,000 yards last season. Denvis Manns of New Mexico State, who played in near total obscurity on a losing team, might have gained much more than his 1,120 yards if Aggies coach Jim Hess, by his own admission, packed a few more IQ points. "Just plain dumb," says Hess, who didn't start the 5'9", 180-pound Manns until the fourth game. "I wanted to play some older players, but it just became apparent he had something very few have." Smarter than Hess was junior running back Ernie Montez, who started the first two games and then left the Aggies after Game 5. "Montez, I guess, saw [Manns's potential] faster than any of us," Hess says. Montez is back for his senior year but has lost his starting spot for good.

Hess wasn't stupid, not really. A coach's natural inclination is to tilt toward veterans. At Central Michigan, Silas Massey, who ran for 1,089 yards as a redshirt freshman, didn't get a start until the season's sixth game, when an upperclassman went down. Massey is a runt like Manns and produces yardage in similar bursts.