Finally, Raye Has His Way : Aztecs: H-back comes out of the background and puts together a big game against Hawaii.

The Forgotten Man cut across the middle of the field, plucked the football out of the air and shifted toward the end zone. It was only Jimmy Raye, the ball and about 35 yards of open field.

His legs pumped as hard as ever. He was running to salvage his senior season, rushing to give San Diego State the lead. Sprinting back into the Aztec playbook.

Once, he was right there on a prominent page, laughing and catching and hugging the football. Lately, the focus of this picture has been somewhere else. Raye still starts and plays quite a bit, but he has been part of the background.

He was SDSU’s third-leading receiver last year. He caught 45 passes for 745 yards and four touchdowns. Neither of the top two receivers were returning, so Raye came into this year prepared to be a leader.

But while fellow receivers Dennis Arey and Patrick Rowe have taken turns atop the national receiving charts, Raye, the H-back, has quietly became a role player. It’s third down and short? Get the ball to Raye.

Entering the Hawaii game, he had 29 receptions for 222 yards. Rowe and Arey? They had caught 43 passes apiece, Rowe for 843 yards and Arey for 742.

Raye was frustrated. It was more than simply statistics. Mainly, SDSU was having a disappointing season. The Aztecs had won only three of their first seven games. And, Raye had dropped a few balls this season, most notably one in the end zone during a victory over Air Force.

“I felt like I wasn’t doing my part to help the team,” Raye said.

And Saturday he was in the middle of the Hawaii defense, running wildly for the end zone.

He made it. He crossed the goal line untouched, completing the long leg of a 44-yard touchdown pass from Dan McGwire, giving the Aztecs a 7-0 lead with 9:51 to play in the first quarter.

Hasn’t he always made it? This is a guy who many said was too small and too slow, and yet he is completing his fifth year of football at SDSU (he redshirted his freshman year). This is a football player who, at 5-foot-8, could get lost in a group of sportswriters, and, at 155 pounds, probably wouldn’t outweigh many. Curtis Johnson, SDSU receivers’ coach, said Raye ran a 4.84 40-yard dash when Johnson arrived two years ago.

How does that measure up?

“That’s probably a lineman’s time,” Johnson said.

Oh.

Thanks to hard work--particularly this summer, when he pounded his body with weights and ran--Raye’s speed has improved, slightly. Johnson said the Aztecs haven’t timed him lately, but he’s probably down to a 4.55 or 4.6. Better, but still not enough to make cornerbacks shudder.

Still, Raye finished the Hawaii game with 10 catches for 209 yards--eighth best single-game total in SDSU history--and the touchdown. Both the receptions and yards were career highs, and it was the first time this season he has gone over 100 yards.

“I think it’s made it easier to take, but I wouldn’t say it made my season,” Raye said. “I still have high expectations of myself. With three more games to go, I want to have three more good games. If it’s possible, I want to end the season strong. What Saturday’s game did for the most part was put me in the right frame of mind. I was starting to doubt my ability to play.”

Aztec coaches say the biggest reason Raye hasn’t gotten the ball as much as Rowe and Arey is because of the way SDSU has been defensed this season.

“With our running game and the way people have been running coverages, he hasn’t been the guy who’s been open,” Coach Al Luginbill said.

Against Cal State Long Beach, Raye caught just two passes for 14 yards. Against both Air Force and UCLA, it was two for 13.

When you’ve grown up around football, those kinds of games are difficult to take. Raye is the son of Jimmy Raye II, the offensive coordinator of the New England Patriots and a former Michigan State quarterback. Raye II was the MSU quarterback when the Spartans played Notre Dame in the 1966 “Game of the Decade.”

Raye doesn’t remember his father’s playing days, but by the time he was old enough to go to school, his father was coaching--the San Francisco 49ers first, followed by Detroit, Atlanta, the Los Angeles Rams, Tampa Bay, Atlanta again and now New England.

Raye has watched film with his father from the time he was 6 or 7, and he would attend training camp, get to know the players and learn football. He was a ballboy in Atlanta’s training camp for three years, starting when he was 11. Several of the players became like older brothers to him, particularly receivers Alfred Jenkins, Alfred Jackson and Wallace Francis.

Football lives are never easy and, in this case, the game made Raye and his father close, but it has also distanced them. They talk on the telephone once or twice a week, but the last time Raye’s father saw him play in person was when Jimmy was a junior at Irvine High and his father was coaching the Rams.

Raye’s father almost saw him play a college game once. It was in 1988, when Atlanta played at San Francisco and the Aztecs were at Stanford. But Jimmy Raye II’s plane didn’t land in San Francisco until the third quarter of the SDSU game.

“The one thing I regret about this job more than anything else. . . . I’d trade it all in for the chance to share his experience,” Jimmy Raye II said this week during a break from watching films in the Patriot offices. “To be there and watch him play, live, and to be there when he comes out of the locker room. I’d trade it all in. But it pays the bills.”

During their telephone conversations this year, Raye has tried to mask his disappointment at the way the season has gone. He figures his father has things difficult enough the way the Patriots are playing. But it has been difficult to hide it all.

“I’m really pleased at his fortitude, how he has hung in there,” Jimmy Raye II said. “I told him to stay in there and when the phone rings, be ready to answer it. Those things have a way of working out.”

That’s what Johnson has been telling Raye, too. Be patient, Johnson has said. You’ll get your chance. The ball will come to you.

But it didn’t.

“It helps me to get the ball early in the game, to get into the flow,” Raye said. “In the early part of the season, it didn’t happen. I found myself losing concentration during a game, and a ball would come to me and I might drop it because I wasn’t concentrating.”

Last season, SDSU’s H-back, Monty Gilbreath, was the team’s leading receiver. Maybe that’s why Raye expected to help the Aztecs more than he has. Maybe, too, that’s why opposing defenses have, for the most part, taken the H-back out of the offense.

But then, a sliver of light appeared. Here came Hawaii, and SDSU coaches told Raye to get ready. They had noticed something.

“(Hawaii) tried to cover him with a linebacker,” Luginbill said. “Anytime anybody does that, the H-back in our offense is going to catch a bunch of passes and probably have some big plays.”

To Raye’s delight, the Rainbows learned that the hard way. He is a forgotten man in SDSU’s offense no longer.

“It was really good to see him catch some balls,” McGwire said. “He’s got that fire in his eyes. ‘Give me the ball.’ He’s got an itch for the end zone when he gets the ball. I’ve got an extreme amount of confidence in him.”

Said Raye: “I kind of felt like I was due. Sometime during the season, something big was going to happen. It all came together in one game.”

And now, after Rowe and Arey’s exploits this season. . . .

“You have a second to talk about Jimmy Raye?” someone asked Johnson one night earlier this week.

“Jimmy’s turn now, eh?” Johnson asked back.

You bet.