Living the Dream
January 11, 2007 10:18 PM | General
January 11, 2007
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – You’ve heard all the stories about Owen Schmitt. The broken face masks (five and counting) sitting in Coach Rich Rodriguez’s office. Someone supposedly asking Schmitt’s girlfriend if he ever lifted a car over his head and the 60 chicken wings he once ordered (both not true – others at his table were welcome to join in on the chicken wings).
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| Owen Schmitt ran for a career-high 109 yards and scored two touchdowns against Georgia Tech in the 2007 Toyota Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Fla., on Jan. 1.
AP photo |
There's the story of the dog biting clear though his hand when he was eight, his grandfather dumping half a bottle of alcohol on his wound, slapping a couple of extra band-aids on it, and telling him to suck it up and go to school instead of taking him to the ER.
He was the chubby kid who wore Coke-bottle-thick glasses in grade school before transforming himself into the circus-freak-of-an-athlete that he is today.
And he was the guy who stumbled onto campus carrying a couple of game tapes having the misguided notion that he could actually play major college football when others flatly told him he couldn’t.
Remember that sappy movie about Rudy, the scrub walk-on who realized his dream of playing football for Notre Dame? Well, this story is much better because Owen Schmitt is a former walk-on who can actually play the game – perhaps better than anyone else at his position right now in college football.
For those 30-somethings out there like me who spend their afternoons trying to stave off adulthood by dreaming of scoring the game-winning touchdown or running over the mouthy linebacker, fullback Owen Schmitt is living the dream for all of us right now.
Rodriguez says he watches every tape he gets from players, but even the man who invented the spread offense had to rub his eyes in amazement the first time he saw Schmitt blowing people up on the football field. Rodriguez had to be thinking to himself, I feel like the bird-dog scout who discovered Ted Williams playing sandlot baseball.
Well, not really.
“We’re very lucky he fell into our laps,” Rodriguez laughed.
Yeah, sort of like buying what you thought was an ordinary painting at a flea market and finding out later that night when you got home that it was actually a Rembrandt after you tore off part of the canvas getting it through the doorway. Owen Schmitt has become that valuable to West Virginia University football fans. As the students like to say, “Schmitt happens.”
Running backs coach Calvin Magee calls Schmitt “the best player no one talks about,” referring to those esteemed members of the Fourth Estate – not you the astute college football fan.
Of course it’s easy to forget about Schmitt when Steve Slaton and Patrick White are in the same backfield. And as good as White and Slaton have been, it was only when the injuries really began taking their toll on Schmitt that the offense became ordinary by West Virginia standards in season-ending games against South Florida and Rutgers.
“The fullback’s a forgotten player,” said Georgia Tech coach Chan Gailey before the 2007 Gator Bowl. “That guy’s a good football player.”
At the end of the season Schmitt was nursing -- in no particular order -- knee, heel and ankle injuries with the ankle being the most severe.
“It’s hard to rest your ankle,” Schmitt says, “because you walk on it every day.”
Of course, and ninety percent of Schmitt’s game is half-mental.
He’s the guy you want in the fox hole when things aren’t looking too good. Just like Greenfield Jimmy, the good-mouth no-hit old-time baseball player Frank Deford once wrote about in Sports Illustrated, “All right you so-and-sos, I’ll fight you one at a time or in groups of five.”
Schmitt was overheard telling someone before the Georgia Tech game that if his ankle didn’t start feeling better soon he’d break his arm so he wouldn’t notice the pain. Schmitt wound up hurting his back instead. Problem solved.
“I don’t know,” he shrugged. “It’s like a rib that connects to your spine and it was like out of joint.”
A deep thigh contusion rendered All-American Steve Slaton ineffective for the Gator Bowl, leaving the bulk of the ground work to White and backup tailback Ed Collington.
“I thought Ed Collington was going to come in and get a lot of time,” Owen said.
But Rodriguez gave Schmitt the football on West Virginia’s very first play from scrimmage and he ran 52 yards to the Georgia Tech 28 yard line. Three plays later he was hugging his buddies in the end zone. Perhaps that 52-yard gallop caused Rodriguez to alter his game plan?
“Maybe,” says Schmitt. “I don’t know? I don’t call the plays.”
Certainly, and when it comes to Schmitt’s game little things are big.
He wound up getting the ball 13 times for 109 yards and two touchdowns in WVU's 38-35 come from behind victory against the Yellow Jackets. It was the first time in 14 years that a West Virginia fullback ran for more than 100 yards in a game. Rodney Woodard was the last one to do so in 1992, gaining 135 yards against East Carolina.
Woodard was so ecstatic with that performance that he chose to leave school a year early for the pros. And like D-Day in Animal House, Woodard’s whereabouts are presently unknown.
Only two other Mountaineer fullbacks have run for more than 100 yards in a game in the last 23 years: Ron Wolfley did it against Boston College in 1983 and Rico Tyler did it against Cincinnati in 1990.
It’s difficult to give the football to the fullback when you’ve had the kind of tailbacks the Mountaineers have had running around here the last 15-20 years. But fullbacks have played a big part in West Virginia’s football history beginning with Gus Eckberg in the 1920s and continuing with Joe Marconi and Larry Krutko in the 1950s, to Tom Woodeshick, Dick Leftridge and Jim Braxton in the 1960s, to Ron Lee, Walt Easley, Ron Wolfley and Craig Taylor of the present.
All of these guys had one thing in common: they all played in the NFL.
“I would rank (Schmitt) right up there with the best West Virginia has ever had and I don’t think we’ve seen the best of him yet,” says longtime reporter Mickey Furfari, who has witnessed all of the good ones with the exception of Eckberg. “You talk to Slaton or White and they will tell you that he is the key cog in the offense. Just look at how West Virginia struggled at the end of the year offensively when he was hurt.
“He just wasn’t himself.”
“Running behind him ... I don’t worry about a linebacker coming to tackle me because I know he’s going to get his block,” Slaton says of Schmitt. “When he’s blocking guys, he’s moving them out of the way.”
Garrett Ford, now WVU associate athletic director for student services, was once a star runner at West Virginia and later running backs coach under Bobby Bowden and Frank Cignetti. He’s seen West Virginia’s best fullbacks since the early 1960s and he puts Schmitt right up there with them.
“He’s much more powerful and he’s bigger than all those guys,” Ford explained. “Ron Lee was 6-4 but he was slender at 230. Tom Woodeshick was small and slow but he was hard-nosed and he would run through a brick wall for you. Bubby Braxton was only about 6-1 although he did weigh 250. Even Dick (Leftridge) was about 5-11, although they listed him at 6 feet.
“None of them were very tall guys,” Ford said.
Ford rates Leftridge and Braxton as the two best fullbacks he’s seen at West Virginia, but he admits Schmitt is approaching their level.
“(Schmitt) always has good body lean, the first guy is never the one that really stops him and after contact, he gets you a couple of extra yards,” Ford said. “He doesn’t have great straight-ahead speed although it’s good for a fullback.
“On third and one at the goal line he’s my man,” Ford said.
Rodriguez says Schmitt at heart is still that former Division III walk-on player who is always trying to prove himself.
“He has the same mentality in practice every day, and he’s going to keep getting better,” said Rodriguez.
For example, Schmitt’s first career 100-yard rushing effort was in his eyes actually one of his worst games of the year.
“I played like crap,” Schmitt said afterward. “I didn’t make very good plays as far as blocking goes. There were some things where if I would have made a key block we could have scored some points. There were some spots where I could have played better and helped the team.”
Sure, with the exception of running for more than 100 yards and scoring two critical first-half touchdowns to help West Virginia win a bowl game it has never won before, it was probably a pretty crappy game for a guy like Owen Schmitt.
Thank goodness he’s just a junior. We all get the pleasure of watching more of Schmitt’s crappy games next year.
