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NIU's Wolfe no longer a secret
October 6, 2006
By Tim Cronin Daily Southtown columnist
Garrett Wolfe's secret is out.
The nation's most elusive running back revealed it this week, almost off-handed, during a telephone chat with reporters. Now we know how the Northern Illinois senior tailback finds holes where there are none and escapes the clutches of those who wish to do him harm.
He sees the game evolve in slow motion.
All the great ones do. On the ice, Bobby Orr and Wayne Gretzky could deduce what was happening and what would happen next more quickly than anyone else. At the plate, Ted Williams could see the rotation of the seams on the ball as it came to him, soon to be belted to a distant outpost over the center fielder's head. Gale Sayers had the gift on the football field, and how he ran with graceful ferocity at Kansas and with the Bears has never been duplicated.
Wolfe, whose favorite football player is Jim Brown, is moving in that direction, and swiftly. He doesn't have Sayers' freakish ability to take one step and thence be going full speed in another direction. So far, doing that at 75 percent with prompt acceleration to 100 percent, has been sufficient. Wolfe sees the opposition coming, does the geometry in his head and finds an escape route more easily than those watching him find their way to the fridge for a cold one.
Last week, Wolfe ran for 353 yards in Northern Illinois' 40-28 win over Ball State. That's his career single-game high, but it's early. There are seven games, maybe as many as nine, left in his senior season.
The next one is Sunday night, when the Huskies visit Miami (Ohio) in a Mid-American Conference game. ESPN has lined it up against NBC's NFL telecast, but make no mistake, the most electrifying player on any field Sunday will be wearing No. 1 for Northern Illinois. He'll be the one who is blurry most of the time, the camera straining to catch up.
Joe Novak, the head coach who has an affinity for finding great running backs, assures all concerned there are actual plays in the Huskies' offensive playbook. When Wolfe runs, the Huskies' running game is pure improv. When quarterback Phil Horvath hands Wolfe the ball, it's like Ella Fitzgerald singing scat. You didn't know how she'd get to the finish, but the trip would be grand.
That's Wolfe. He darts like an eel en route to the line, one direction, then another, picking his way through the moving maze built of 285-pound men intent on crushing him. That he's 5-foot-7 and 177 pounds is a help, not a hindrance. He can sneak under the line if necessary, bursting into daylight the way a train roars out of a mountain tunnel.
In the open, Wolfe doesn't move the chains. He renders them superfluous. Give him a step and he's gone. Not gone for 15 yards. Gone as in gone. End zone gone. Set off the fireworks gone.
Heisman Trophy gone.
Really. Wolfe is the best running back in the country not playing in the NFL. He may be the best college football player in the country, ahead of quarterback Troy Smith at Ohio State, with whom he converses on the phone, and ahead of quarterback Brady Quinn at Notre Dame and all the rest of those whose spotlight is brighter, by virtue of whom they play for.
The gaudy numbers Wolfe is putting up -- 1,181 yards in five games, a record for yardage at that stage of a season in Division I-A -- only begin to tell the story.
Those aren't stat-padding yards. Novak pulls Wolfe when the game is out of reach, one way or the other. For example, the Huskies were summarily crushed by Ohio State 35-12 in the opener. It was over five seconds into the second quarter. Wolfe didn't play much past the middle of the fourth quarter. He still gained 171 yards on 26 carries, plus caught five passes for another 114 yards, including a touchdown reception in which he escaped two tacklers and ran over a third at the goal line.
He's tough, this Wolfe. He's a team guy on a team of team guys. He can throw blocks when called upon, but that's like taking a Rolls-Royce to a drive-thru. Something's out of kilter. Better that he has the football in hand, securely protected, driving through the line, arm out front.
Like, say, the statue of the Heisman.
All this, the 4,417 career yards, the 45 rushing touchdowns, the 176.7 yards-per-game career average, has not gone unnoticed by opponents. As might be expected, they're loading up defensively, going from the standard seven men assigned to the run to eight and nine. That loading of the box gives Horvath a wealth of passing options, but with Wolfe able to beat the odds, not handing off would be like telling Baryshnikov to dance flat-footed.
"I'd love to see Garrett Wolfe win the Heisman Trophy, but if they're going to line nine men up in the box every play, it's going to be tough for him to get his 200 yards," Novak said earlier this week.
Maybe not. As Novak and Wolfe noted, once Wolfe is through the traffic, only two men are left to beat him. More often than not, they're mere pylons on the way to the end zone.
"Those safeties can't catch him to weigh and measure him," Novak said.
Such grand success was hardly expected when Novak visited Holy Cross High School on Chicago's North Side and looked at film. Even for a high school back, Wolfe was small.
"I saw a kid who was tremendously productive," Novak said. "Gaining 200, 180 yards a game. What everybody was concerned about was his size. I didn't think I was going to hand it to him 30 times a game. I thought he'd be a 10-15 time a game guy."
But Novak also saw the per-game average, and that negated the concern over size. He offered a scholarship, Wolfe accepted, also expecting part-time duty. Then he turned out to be as unstoppable in college as he was in preps.
"I saw the speed of the game change," Wolfe said. "I hit the weights harder. But carrying 10-15 times a game, that was the idea going into my sophomore season."
Now, the idea is to run as often as necessary to win, and if any postseason baubles come his way -- say, a trip to New York for the Heisman announcement -- well, O'Hare's an hour from the cornfields of DeKalb. Meanwhile, Wolfe will keep running, even as the defense stalks him, moving in slow motion as he rockets by.
