Front-runner

On a recent afternoon at Millard North, Petito recounted the fateful summit that occurred in his office. After rummaging through a cabinet, he pulled out a videocassette. It was Crouch's highlight tape from his junior year in high school—the one he sent to colleges. There's Crouch, returning six punts for touchdowns. "After a while people stopped kicking to him," says Petito. Every other player on both teams, it seems, is running in slow motion—Crouch is that fast. At a football camp at Notre Dame the summer before his senior year, he ran a 4.3 in the 40. The Irish coaches told him they were recruiting him "as an athlete" rather than a quarterback. Goodbye, Golden Dome. "Eric is probably the fastest quarterback we've ever had," says Osborne over the phone from Washington, where he's a freshman Congressman.

"There he is, kinda nasty," says Petito, as the videotaped Crouch bowls over a would-be tackier. "I've never seen him slide or angle for the sideline," says Nebraska senior rover Mic Boettner, who played with Crouch at Millard North. "He'd rather meet a guy head-on than go out-of-bounds."

On another taped play Crouch fakes a handoff to the fullback, seems to consider pitching to his tailback and then tucks the ball away for a 30-yard gain. Even in high school he ran the option with precision and panache. Crouch has no peer in the college game at running the option, which is the main reason why he's the leading candidate for the Heisman Trophy. Iowa State coach Dan McCarney says that Crouch is the best offensive player he's ever coached against. Adds Kansas State coach Bill Snyder, "If you get just a little bit out of position, he makes you look like a fourth-grader."

Going into Nebraska's final regular-season game, at Colorado on Thanks-giving Friday, Crouch has rushed for 57 touchdowns, an NCAA record for a quarterback. His 7,555 yards of total offense (3,272 yards rushing, 4,283 passing) are the most ever by a Cornhusker. His 95-yard carnival ride of a run against Missouri on Sept. 29—the longest by a Nebraska player—actually went for 103 yards. After having taken the snap at his own five-yard line, Crouch dropped back into the end zone and barely missed being sacked for a safety before zigzagging his way to one of the most remarkable plays of the season.

Crouch has won 35 games, another Nebraska record. None of those games, however, has brought a national championship. By that yardstick he falls short of the two quarterbacks who preceded him: Tommy Frazier, who helped the Corn-huskers win national crowns in 1994 and '95, and Scott Frost, whose '97 team shared the title with Michigan. One reason Crouch has amassed such gaudy numbers is that he's had to. Frazier and Frost were surrounded by far more talent. An astounding 13 players from Nebraska's '95 Blackshirt defense went on to play in the NFL. No disrespect to Dahrran Diedrick, who has quietly piled up 1,205 yards this season, but Crouch has never had an I-back anywhere near as talented as Ahman Green, whose final college season was 1997 and who's tearing up the NFL for the Green Bay Packers. Says Frost, a backup safety with the Cleveland Browns, "I had [current Arizona Cardinal fullback] Joel Makovicka and Ahman Green running behind a great offensive line. There's no question Eric's had to carry the team at times."

This season, though, Nebraska's defense has been solid, and its running game, behind Diedrick and Thunder Collins, potent. Moreover, for the first time since his freshman year at Millard North, Crouch is pain-free in mid-November. Last year he suffered from chronic back pain, inflamed bursas in both elbows and a torn labrum in his right shoulder that affected his passing and required offseason surgery.

That operation was performed last January. While Crouch's rehab went smoothly, little else in his life did. Shortly after the surgery, he learned that James Brown, a radiologist and a longtime family friend and mentor to Crouch, had suffered a stroke. Crouch spent hours at Brown's bedside in intensive care. "It meant a great deal to me," says Brown, who has recovered and is practicing again.

Sanchez, Eric and his younger brother, Kyle, would drive from one hospital in Omaha, at which Brown was convalescing, to another across town, in which Sanchez's mother, Madeline, lay gravely ill. Having divorced Ron Crouch when Eric and Kyle were young, Susan raised the boys as a single mother. (She remarried, to Corey Sanchez, in August 2000.) Madeline babysat often, and the boys' bond with her was uncommonly strong. As her mother's pulse faded last April, Susan told her sons to leave the room. She wanted to spare them the sight of their grandmother's passing, but they refused to go. "We're here for you, and we're here for her," said Eric.

Madeline died moments later, and her grave is marked not by a headstone but by a marble bench into which a football has been cut. Carved into the ball is NEBRASKA. "She loved visitors," says Susan, "and she loved Cornhuskers football."

Madeline would have been thrilled by the events of Oct. 27, when Eric's 63-yard touchdown reception on a beautifully executed trick play sealed Nebraska's 20-10 victory over previously unbeaten and top-ranked Oklahoma. "What impressed me the most," says Gil Brandt, a renowned former scout for the Dallas Cowboys who now scouts for the NFL, "was that he caught it clean, caught it in his hands." Brandt is a Crouch fan and believes there's a place for him in the NFL. It could be at receiver, could be at safety, could be at quarterback. "Every year, you're seeing offenses go a little bit further, become a little bit more creative," says Brandt. "Maybe you bring Crouch in as a third-and-one quarterback to run the option. Maybe you put him in the shotgun on the goal line. He'd scare the heck out of people."