There are two things you notice when you're standing next to Marcus Allen. First, he's big. There's a tendency to think of running backs as smaller than the rest of the behemoths on the football field, small enough to squirt the narrowest of gaps, but Allen stands roughly 6'2" or 6'3". The second thing you notice comes quickly. Even though he's on the other side of fifty years old, he still looks like he could leap over the line and score from the one yard line.
I had two separate conversations with Marcus Allen during last month's Pac-12 Media Day. We talked only briefly during the morning when I interrupted him in conversation just so I could shake the hand of a Heisman Trophy winner, but when I ended up standing next to him in the back of the press room as USC head coach Lane Kiffin and quarterback Matt Barkley spoke to the assembled media, I couldn't resist asking him a question. I wondered if he remembered how he had felt when he was doing press tours before his senior season, back before he had won the Heisman Trophy and won a national championship and won a Super Bowl and gained election into the college and pro football Halls of Fame.
It took him about two seconds to jump back thirty years. He reminded me that back then one of the biggest pre-season honors was to be named to Playboy's All-America team, and even though he was coming a off of a junior season in which he had gained more than 1,500 yards rushing, he hadn't been named to that squad.
"That really bothered me," he said. "I sat down with my position coach, and he asked me what my goals were for the season. I told him I wanted to be the first back to gain 2,000 yards, and my coach just laughed. He said, 'Let's be realistic.' And I said, 'Coach, that's my goal.'"
We look at Marcus Allen now, and we see one of the greatest players in the history of the sport, but in the summer of 1981 he was just the starting tailback for USC, a player hoping to live up to the high standards set by Charles White, who had won the Heisman Trophy only two years earlier. I wondered when Allen knew he might have a shot at making his own mark in Trojan history.
"After spring ball, I knew." He had been good the previous year, but as he explained, that had been done on talent alone. During that spring leading into his senior year, he finally understood the big picture. He finally understood what he was doing on the football field, what his offensive linemen were keying on as they made their blocks, or which way a linebacker might spin off of a block. This epiphany was what elevated him from good to great, and his eyes lit up as he explained it all to me, jabbing me in the shoulder with his index finger to emphasize the point: "There are two kinds of people in the world (jab) -- those who know what they're doing (jab), and those who don't (jab). So if I could gain fifteen hundred yards when I didn't know what I was doing, what might I be able to do now?"
The college football world would find out soon enough. "I got 210 yards in the first game, and then I got 209 against Oklahoma, and they were a top program."
That, of course, was just the beginning. Allen achieved his goal of cracking the 2,000 yard mark, finishing his senior season with 2,342 yards. He had eight 200-yard games that year, including five in a row, and those were just three of the fourteen NCAA records he would set en route to winning the Heisman Trophy. He obviously knew what he was doing.
