SDSU’s Faulk Is Getting an Education : Agents Blocking Out Vow to Stay in School

Marshall Faulk said it before the season started. He said it after the season started. He reiterated it this week. He should, by now, have made it perfectly clear.

He will return to San Diego State for his junior year of football eligibility in 1993.

Don’t bother reading his lips. That hasn’t proven to be a trustworthy indicator of unbreakable promises. If it did, Bill Clinton would be running on a treadmill to nowhere rather than a stairway to heaven.

Marshall Faulk has to be wondering why he has to say the same thing in so many ways . . . and why he can’t seem to get his point across. You have to believe him because he has been unwavering in what he has said. If he was uncertain at all, his lips could have been as evasive as his feet.

He will return.

The problem is agents. I know, agents are a big problem for everyone following sports these days. His problem is that agents are chasing him like a pack of linebackers.

And he thought he was heavily recruited out of Carver High in New Orleans. College coaches chased him because they could see W’s. Agents chase him because they can see $’s.

Faulk is pursued now because of greed.

It’s different.

Not all agents are despicable low-lifes, of course. However, the ones currently pursuing Faulk are. They are a cut below, make that a very large slice below, guys who go door-to-door selling miracle cures.

In a sense, they are cradle snatchers.

Here is a 19-year-old kid enjoying his second year of college, athletically, academically and socially. He is only 16 months out of high school, for heaven’s sake.

Understand that Faulk is in a positive, uplifting environment for the first time in his life. He had to be tough when he lived in those New Orleans projects. He worked in the boiler room at Carver High to earn a pittance while others his age were carrying around wads of drug money. As our Scott Miller has said, he was a man before he ever had a chance to be a boy.

Marshall Faulk is having a taste of that boyhood now, of being cared for, of knowing dinner will be on the table, of not going day-to-day worrying about stray bullets. Pressure is playing a game, which he will do Saturday night against Texas El Paso at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium.

In a sense, he is a baby, though no one who has tried to tackle him would buy the notion.

His problem is that these agents pursue him. They call him on the telephone. He changes numbers. They call his coaches, begging for an “in” with the kid who stands as the mid-morning line favorite to win the Heisman Trophy.

They want him.

They want to represent him.

They will say that they want to make money for him. In truth, they want to make money off of him.

That’s their bottom line.

He’s getting all of the attention he wants, but their’s he can do without.

It has not helped that network television’s talking heads with nothing between the ears keep insisting that Faulk will be in the NFL in 1993. ESPN is a particular culprit, given that its commentators have all those hours to fill whether or not they have anything accurate to say.

Why don’t people just believe it when a young man says he intends to keep doing what he is doing, where he is doing it?

He has made it perfectly clear that agents are not to contact him. None. Zilch. He will not converse with them.

So what has he encountered?

He now gets calls from agents who think they might get a leg up because maybe no one else is calling him. He has now gone from being contacted by mere low-lifes to being contacted by outright and outrageous scumbags.

Not all of the calls get to Faulk, of course. Curtis Johnson, the assistant coach who recruited him, gets at least a call a day. Johnson would not put these people through to Faulk if they offered him the deed to Coronado Island.

However, I do hope Curtis Johnson is taking down all these names and telephone numbers.

I hope that Marshall Faulk too is taking down the names and telephone numbers of any agent with the audacity to contact him.

You take all these names and all these numbers and you put them all into a directory. These people beg and plead that you not forget them. And you shouldn’t.

You want to make sure you know who they all are. You don’t want to miss a one.

You want to be damned sure you never call them when the time does come to turn professional.