The nation’s best high school football players
Solomon Tuliaupupu of Santa Ana, Calif., is the ALL-USA defensive player of the year. See the full teams
ATHENS, Ga. – From now until the College Football Playoff semifinals kick off, the assertion Oklahoma has the best player in the country will be repeated so endlessly that any attempt to debate it will be shouted down as a hot take unworthy of your time or attention.
So let’s stop just short of saying Georgia’s Nick Chubb will actually be the best player on the field at the Rose Bowl and settle on this: He is, without question, the most unfairly overlooked superstar in college football and will have just as much opportunity to carry his team to a national championship as Baker Mayfield does his.
Regardless of how the Playoff goes, Mayfield’s career will wind up among the most decorated in college football history, including two first-team All-American honors and a Heisman Trophy.
Chubb, on the other hand, will leave with only one major individual award as Southeastern Conference freshman of the year in 2014. His legacy will include coming back from a gruesome knee injury he suffered as a sophomore during a game at Tennessee, then bucking conventional wisdom by skipping the NFL draft to play as a senior, which led to Georgia’s first SEC title since 2005.
“It definitely made it more worthwhile coming back,” Chubb said this week. “That’s kind of what I envisioned, me and the guys that came back. We envisioned having a great season, and it turned out we did.”
But even in the wake of this Playoff appearance and a season in which he ran for 1,175 yards and 13 touchdowns while averaging 6.2 yards per carry, doesn’t it feel like Chubb has been oddly overlooked?
If you were to ask people who follow college football closely to name the 10 best players in the sport, it’s unlikely many of them would list Chubb. He wasn’t among the listed vote-getters for the Heisman (his teammate, linebacker Roquan Smith, finished 10th), he wasn’t on any of the Associated Press All-America teams and he wasn’t a finalist for the Doak Walker Award as the nation’s top running back.
In fact, he wasn’t even the most celebrated Chubb in college football this year, having lost that honor to his cousin, North Carolina State defensive end Bradley Chubb, who took home the Nagurski Trophy as the country’s top de--
fensive player.
But if you lined up the four Playoff teams and asked me to pick the most breathtaking athlete on the field, the one who could win a game almost by the sheer force of individual talent, I’d have a hard time picking anyone but Chubb.
This is a player, after all, who looked so unstoppable before his injury in 2015 that he seemed like a lock to win a Heisman at some point. This is a player who, despite missing the final eight games of his sophomore season and splitting carries with Sony Michel the last two years, is still the second all-time leading rusher in SEC history behind only Herschel Walker. And though Chubb got very little national attention this season, this is still a wrecking ball of a running back with the speed/power combination that seems built for a Playoff run against elite defensive fronts where sometimes you just have to run over somebody to get a first down.
“You never see Nick complain,” Georgia defensive end Lorenzo Carter said. “He just goes out there and does what he has to do, and usually it’s quite amazing. People overlook him, but as long as we keep getting wins, they’re fine.”
It’s no mystery why Chubb was a bit under the radar this year, even as Georgia went 12-1. Last season, he didn’t look like he had 100% of his old burst on that knee. Thankfully he’s gotten that back this year, but he just didn’t have the numbers to be part of the All-American or Heisman conversation. But that’s also by design.
Even before Kirby Smart became the head coach last season, the Bulldogs have had a long tradition of crowded backfields. In the late 1980s, both Tim Worley and Rodney Hampton split time and ended up as first-round picks. Hall of Famer Terrell Davis shared carries with Garrison Hearst in the early 1990s, as did Thomas Brown and Knowshon Moreno in 2007, as did Todd Gurley and Keith Marshall before Chubb and Michel came along.
And while Chubb has undoubtedly sacrificed carries, yards and honors — he carried the ball 20 times just once this year — the way Georgia has used him probably saved some of the wear and tear on his body before he gets to the NFL, particularly given the significant injury he had to overcome.
For his part, Smart said he didn’t have to convince Chubb that less might be more in the long run.
“I’ve never had that conversation with Nick, nor do I ever expect to have that conversation with a running back, because if they’re worried about (number of carries), they’re probably not worried about us winning games. I like the running backs that are more concerned with us winning football games. If he’s got to carry it 35 times, so be it. He’s done that in his career here. But that’s not his role right now, and he’s embraced his role, and the best thing he does is lead by example.”
But in a year when Saquon Barkley and Bryce Love were far more celebrated running backs — even Auburn’s Kerryon Johnson overshadowed Chubb in the SEC — this feels like Chubb’s moment to finally come back to center stage. If Georgia wins its first national title since 1980, it will likely be because Chubb reminded everyone that when the ball is in his hands, nobody in the country is better.
“You never see Nick complain. He just goes out there and does what he has to do, and usually it’s quite amazing. People overlook him, but as long as we keep getting wins, they’re fine.” Lorenzo Carter Georgia defensive end, on teammate Nick Chubb