Sooners standout
Samaje Perine brings a bruising running style reminiscent of Earl Campbell to Oklahoma’s offense,
NORMAN, OKLA. Samaje Perine wears something like this ensemble all the time. It’s a late-summer morning. He’s outfitted in gray shorts, a T-shirt and a ball cap. The latter two garments are in a camouflage pattern.
“It’s probably my favorite color,” he says, and if you know anything about Oklahoma’s junior running back, it’s a perfect fit.
Perine owns the NCAA’s singlegame rushing record: 427 yards vs. Kansas as a freshman in 2014. He needs 1,057 yards to become the Sooners’ all-time rushing leader, no small feat at a school with a lineage of big-time backs. He has done it with a bruising blend of power and speed. And he did most of it on a bum ankle.
Perine has been a driving factor in Oklahoma’s return to the national spotlight. But in a season that features a loaded crop of running backs — Christian McCaffrey, Leonard Fournette and Dalvin Cook, for starters — he is being overshadowed.
There are a couple of reasons. He’s eclipsed on his own team by quarterback Baker Mayfield, who finished fourth in the Heisman Trophy voting last year (and who cheerily admits to being Perine’s polar opposite when it comes to enjoying attention). Perine also shares the ball with another talented runner, Joe Mixon.
Oklahoma’s complete backfield might be the best combination in college football, but at least so far in Perine’s case, it’s not a vehicle for stardom. Which is more than fine with him.
“The spotlight has never been my thing,” he says.
His thing is taking a football and pounding straight ahead, and woe to the defender in the path of a 5-10, 235-pound bowling ball. Former Oklahoma coach Barry Switzer calls the style “ricochet romance.”
Away from the field, Perine is quiet, almost silent. He shuns interviews — though not necessarily because he’s aloof.
“A little bit of it is he’s shy,” says Gloria Perine, his mother. “A little bit is humbleness. A little bit is he feels he’s not that interesting. It’s awkward for him.”
If the camo gear doesn’t make Perine invisible on campus, it’s reflective of his desire to melt into the background. Given a choice, he’d rather be hunting. “Deer, quail, duck, wild hogs, rabbits, squirrels,” he says.
Yeah, that’s where the camo attraction began. Perine says it’s where he can just be himself.
“I don’t have to be around and talk about football all the time,” he says. “It’s just a way to get away. … It’s freeing.”
SHADES OF CAMPBELL
Around football, coaches and teammates describe a reserved maturity that complements a running joke. Mayfield, for one, teases Perine about looking and acting older than his age. He won’t turn 21 until next month, but his nickname, bestowed by Mayfield and taken up by teammates and even some coaches, is “Papaw.”
“It fits him,” says Mayfield, who is delighted that it stuck.
Says Perine, “I’ve been called so many things here, they all start to run together.”
The highlights do, too. In contrast to his personality, Perine is downright confrontational when the ball is in his hands. He runs over defenders, apparently for sport. Question: What’s more fun, making someone miss or — Perine laughs.
“Running over somebody,” he says. “I’m what, 235? I’m not gonna try to cut and juke someone. I mean, if we’re one-on-one in the open field, maybe. But if it’s close quarters, I’m just gonna try to run through you.”
Switzer likens Perine to Earl Campbell, the former Texas and Houston Oilers great.
“Perine can gore people,” Switzer says. “I’ve seen him make runs that, by God, he’s not denied. He’s going forward. He’s not going down. His legs are powerful. … Earl was like that, too. He reminds me, very similar to that.
“Very few backs are like that. Most of them are juking and running and slash and whirl. He can make you miss, but he’s a ricochet romance.”
Add this to the mix, too. Perine played the last two seasons with a chronically injured left ankle. It originally was injured in high school and he tweaked it several times as a freshman and a sophomore — and basically just kept piling up yards and points.
After the season, he had surgery to repair two torn ligaments. He didn’t participate in spring practice but says he’s healthier now than he’s been at any other time since arriving in Norman. What might that mean?
“He looks even quicker and stronger,” Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops says. GETTING STRONGER It’s hard to believe, given the way he runs, but Perine says he has sometimes been hesitant, because of the ankle, to stick his foot in the ground and explode.
“I didn’t really want it to start to hurt bad and have to sit out,” he says. “Now I’ll have the ability to turn and get up the field. I won’t have to slow down. I can make a cut on the run and maintain that speed.”
Perine says he spent even more time in the weight room — which would be extraordinary, because his work there is already the stuff of legend with his teammates. It began, according to his mother, when he was 12, with curling and squatting with dumbbells in his bedroom — and then duct-taping bricks to the dumbbells because they weren’t heavy enough.
“I was naturally a little strong,” says Perine, who is built a little bit like a cinder block. “But I really enjoyed (lifting weights). The biggest part of my career has been getting in the weight room and getting stronger.”
The numbers seem cartoonish. Perine has bench-pressed 450 pounds. He once did 315 for 12 repetitions. And there was that one time he pressed a car. He squats 600 pounds — except wait, the Oklahoma strength coaches don’t let him do squats; that was back at Hendrickson High School in Pflugerville, Texas. His vertical leap is 341⁄ inches. He broad 2 jumps more than 10 feet. Oh, and when back home on breaks, his daily regimen includes 792 pushups and 792 sit-ups.
The results are evident: “Even when he’s not 100%, he’s still stronger than almost everybody out on the field,” Mayfield says.
Perine rushed for 3,062 yards in his first two seasons, and it’s clear that if he is anything close to healthy this season, he’ll almost certainly climb from 10th on Oklahoma’s rushing charts to first, surpassing Adrian Peterson, Joe Washington and Billy Sims (4,118 yards) to become the Sooners’ all-time rushing leader.
“It’ll be cool, to a certain extent,” Perine says. “But I don’t look to accomplish things like that. If I accomplish them along the road — cool, so be it. But my priority is doing whatever it takes to help the team win. That’s what I’ve said since I’ve gotten here, and that’s what’s kept me going.” ‘HE’S AN OLD SOUL’ Oklahoma’s running back history stacks up with almost any in college football. No one is claiming Perine would be the best in that lineage. In today’s hurry-up world, offenses routinely pile up numbers that were once astronomical. Teams also play more games each season. And Switzer notes that a passel of talented runners from his era shared the ball in the wishbone offense.
But Perine split carries with Mixon last year and will again this season. Oklahoma’s version of the Air Raid features a lot more passing than those teams from earlier eras. Washington, for one, sees Perine as more than worthy.
“You could see from the first time he touched the ball that he understands what running the football is all about,” Washington told The Norman (Okla.) Tran
script. “He’s an old soul in a young body. It’s like he’s been reincarnated. It’s like he was here before as a running back in the ’50s and ’60s. He’s here in 2016 and letting you know how people used to do it.”
Wherever he ranks among Oklahoma’s greats, Stoops thinks Perine easily ranks among the nation’s best running backs. And if the offense progresses the way the coach suspects it might, there’s potential for a huge season. In 2015, after offensive coordinator Lincoln Riley installed a new offense, it took until midseason for the running game to click.
“I feel confident we’ll be able to run the football better earlier in the year,” Stoops says. “You just don’t know how the year would go, but he could very well light it up from start to end, and then everyone is talking about him.”
And then there’ll be no camouflaging Perine’s impact.