Back Bonanza
November 29, 2006 01:07 PM | General
November 29, 2006
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Are you interested in watching two of the best running backs in college football? Well, head on over to Milan Puskar Stadium at about 8 o'clock on Saturday night and get a good look at West Virginia’s Steve Slaton and Rutgers’ Ray Rice. They are the real deal.
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| The Big East has two of the country's top two running backs in West Virginia's Steve Slaton and Rutgers' Ray Rice
AP photos |
WVU fans have to go back to the West Virginia-Miami game in 1998 when the Mountaineers had Amos Zereoue and the Hurricanes had Edgerrin James to find a comparable set of backs on the same field.
The thing is Slaton and Rice might be better.
“(Rice) reminds me as kind of a cross between Avon Cobourne and Quincy Wilson,” said West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez. “He’s powerful like Quincy but he’s shifty and has the quickness like Avon has. He’s a combination of those two and there is no question he’s one of the best backs in the country. He’s fun to watch except when you have to play him.”
The New Rochelle, N.Y., native, grabbed the Rutgers starting tailback job during the preseason of his freshman year and has never looked back, running for 1,120 yards last year and adding nicely to that with a 1,495-yard, 17-touchdown effort so far this year.
Rice has a rare combination of quickness, moves and power that has helped him run for more than 100 yards eight times this season and 13 times for his career. He put up 201 yards in the season opener against North Carolina, had 202 against one of the Big East’s best defenses in South Florida, and ran for a career-high 225 yards against Pitt.
And he gets better as the game goes on. Rice has run for 407 yards and is averaging 6.1 yards per carry in the fourth quarter of games this year, ripping off a season-long 63-yard run against Pitt and going for 75 fourth-quarter yards in the Scarlet Knights’ upset of No. 3-rated Louisville on Nov. 9.
The 5-foot-9-inch, 195-pounder was recently named one of three finalists for the Maxwell Award given to college football’s most outstanding player.
“The thing that is so good about him is that he’s not just good running the football,” Rodriguez said. “They’re throwing some to him and picking up protections and all that … he’s been a very solid (all-around) player.”
Rodriguez’s top ball carrier hasn’t been too shabby, either. Slaton has become one of the nation’s most lethal home run threats with 29 career runs of 29 yards or longer including 11 TD runs of at least 33 yards.
His 1,621 yards this year rank him second in the country and his 7.3 yards-per-carry average is the best among runners with more than 150 carries.
Like Rice, the Levittown, Pa., resident, is a productive fourth-quarter performer running for 314 yards and averaging 6.9 yards per carry. Yet Slaton has done most of his damage in the first half. Four times this year Slaton has gone into the locker room at halftime with more than 100 yards rushing, including 140 in the season opener against Marshall.
The sophomore had a streak of seven 100-yard games at home snapped last week against South Florida when he was held to a career-low 43 yards on 18 carries. Slaton has only failed to reach 100 yards in a game four times since becoming the starter against Rutgers in the fifth game of his freshman season – a 25-carry, 139-yard, one-TD performance.
Scarlet Knights coach Greg Schiano wasn’t surprised by Slaton’s performance having tried to recruit him to Rutgers.
“If you remember Jason Gwaltney was the guy,” Schiano said. “He was the story recruit – he was the guy who was going to change the running game at West Virginia. We were very aware of Steve Slaton because I sat in his living room with coach (John) McNulty and his parents and tried to get him to come to Rutgers when his thing at Maryland fell apart.”
Ironically, Rice was high on West Virginia’s recruiting list as well.
“We can remember recruiting him because we had him on our board but we had Steve,” Rodriguez recalled. “He committed to Syracuse early and then went back to Rutgers.
“It seems to me, although not having talked to him in the last couple of years, that he’s very level-headed and he’s handled his success very well as has Steve.”
So how do the two compare?
Both are roughly the same size though Rice is a little more compact. Slaton probably has the better straight-ahead speed and the ability to take it the distance. Slaton also benefits from having a quarterback in Patrick White that keeps defenses honest. The two are without question the most dangerous rushing tandem in the country.
“We have game tapes and then we break them all down – they’re in the computer divided by different personnel groups and different formations. I’ve never seen a set of cut-ups with that many big plays in 19 years of coaching and I asked one of our guys about it,” said Schiano. ‘You actually have a big-play cut-up made of 25-yard-plus pass plays and 15-yard-plus runs?’ Our video guy said, ‘No, that’s just a regular cut-up, Coach.’”
Rice has been more adept this year at getting past the line of scrimmage and moving the pile forward. Having a versatile and athletic fullback in front of him in senior Brian Leonard has taken some of the focus off of Rice.
Slaton sometimes hunts for the big runs and that has led to 109 negative yards in 11 games; Rice gets what he can and rarely loses yardage (only minus 30 this year).
“The thing that is very impressive is that they never lose yards,” Rodriguez said. “They’re always going forward and getting positive yards. Rutgers always seems to be in third and short and it’s because their backs are always going forward and making positive plays.”
Rice also carries the ball more frequently than Slaton, averaging 26 carries per game to Slaton’s 20.2 carries.
Yet Slaton has been a much more dangerous threat catching the ball out of the backfield, showing 22 catches for 303 yards and a pair of TDs to Rice’s four catches for 30 yards.
So who’s better? It’s a matter of personal preference.
“I think if they traded spots they could both be very successful in the other team’s offense and that says something about both of them,” said Schiano.
