FAYETTEVILLE - James Rouse, Madre Hill, Darren McFadden and Felix Jones share at least two bonds.
All were Arkansas Razorbacks running backs who arrived as phenoms and indeed played phenomenally.
Yet none of them played as much immediately as freshmen as Razorbacks fans clamored for back then.
Overexposing the young running backs wasn’t what caused the Ken Hatfield, Danny Ford and Houston Nutt regimes to debut their freshman flashes in spoon fed stages.
Overexposing the quarterback is what they feared.
Heralded prep running backs tend to be all about running the football but unschooled at picking up blitzes, carrying out play-action fakes or executing the safety valve pass patterns that can make the difference in a healthy star quarterback or a quarterback seeing stars.
That brings us to the Bret Bielema regime debuting with phenom, five-star freshman running back Alex Collins of Plantation (Fla.) South Plantation.
How much will Collins, 5-11, 206 pounds, play early?
Probably as much as he earns between now and the Aug. 31 season-opener against Louisiana-Lafayette, running backs coach Joel Thomas said. If Collins earns it, opportunity will follow, asserts Thomas, who coached 1,000-yard rushers at Purdue and Washington.
“If you look at my track record, guys have been productive with first-year players starting, etc., so we are going to coach him up like he’s going to play and then go from there, ” Thomas said. “We are going to bring Alex along, throwing as much at him as he can tolerate and still play the game fast. Just get better with accelerated learning to his ceiling, wherever that is.”
Thomas anticipates a high ceiling.
“I think Alex is very intelligent when it comes to football,” Thomas said. “We’ll find out what his level is at and then cater to those things he does very well and find out what he’s not totally locked in on.”
He’s had a learning head start after being told in the winter to learn from his elders in the voluntary summer workouts leading to the opening of fall practice Aug. 5.
“I think it all starts with our communication when we signed you to come here,” Thomas said. “We didn’t sign you to come here and be a spectator. The way he is driven and motivated, I don’t foresee him taking a back seat. He is going to come out and be competitive and do the small things it takes to put himself in position to compete.”
Of course, sophomore Jonathan Williams, Arkansas’ leading returning rusher from 2012, third-year sophomore big back Kody Walker and sophomore Nate Holmes also have worked to put themselves in position to compete.
Holmes is by far the lightest at 6-1, 180, but he also is the fastest.
“Nate is the fastest running back I have ever been around as far as flat-out speed,” Thomas said. “His deal is being able to stop when he needs to. We worked a lot in the spring as far as developing his footwork.”
Sports, Pages 20 on 07/27/2013