THE X FACTOR

A football player knows Xs and Os the way a geneticist knows Xs and Ys.

But who knows a football player who knows genetics?

At Granada Hills High they do. Brad Cohn knows Xs, Os and Ys, giving new meaning to the term letterman.

Cohn, 17, is the only two-way starter for the Highlanders, playing guard and defensive end.

And he is the only player to spend last summer in a laboratory side-by-side with college professors painstakingly sequencing genes under high-powered microscopes.

There’s a lot about Cohn that separates him from most high school students. He’s no product of the shallow end of the gene pool.

A senior who carries a 4.8 grade-point average, Cohn takes morning classes at Pierce College in computer science and economics, then hurries to Granada Hills for three advanced placement classes before football practice.

He’s never had a grade below an A. He took the SAT the morning after suffering a concussion in a football game and scored 1,370. He has been absent only once in high school, the day after a Thursday night football game.

“I was so sick I couldn’t get out of bed,” he said. “It was horrible. It broke my streak.”

High achievement is important to Cohn. He didn’t play football until ninth grade and a year later was starting on the varsity.

“I didn’t know an offensive guard from a mouth guard when I entered high school,” he said. “I try not to be the typical jock or typical nerd. I want to accomplish things in school, but I wouldn’t give up football for anything.”

Cohn continually tries new pursuits. He went out for the track team for the first time last spring and advanced to the City Section finals in the shot put.

Medical school is a goal, and last summer he volunteered as an emergency room technician at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center, handing scalpels to doctors treating everything from bullet wounds to dog bites.

Upon leaving the hospital in the afternoon, he drove to Cal State Northridge to work on a molecular genetics research project that involved categorizing a particular gene on the X sex chromosome that scientists believe might be a tumor suppressor.

“We were colleagues,” said John McLaughlin, a Granada Hills biology teacher and assistant coach who also worked on the project.

“Brad is that rare combination of person who can excel in athletics and in academia. He can do just about anything.”

Summer evenings were spent at the high school, lifting weights and participating in drills with his fellow linemen.

Like any high school kid, Cohn needed cash, so on Saturdays he flipped burgers at the North Valley Youth Baseball snack shack.

Be assured they were the tastiest burgers around.

“Everything I do, I want it to be special,” he said.

Devotion to excellence has its price. Sundays are spent catching up on homework, six to seven hours worth. Cohn has to tell his friends--whether its the tight-knit group of Highlander offensive linemen or the computer geeks designing a Web site with him--he can’t hang out.

“If he wants to go into medicine, he has to make the grades,” said Cohn’s father, Craig. “That’s why playing college football is something Brad has to consider carefully.”

Cohn, 6 feet 4 and 215 pounds, is not top-level Division I material, but he is being recruited by Ivy League schools Princeton and Columbia.

“I’d love to play college football,” Cohn said. “I don’t want to give it up.”

Cohn, an avid student of film, calls the defensive formations and the offensive blocking schemes.

Academic smarts and athletic savvy are vastly different traits, but Cohn possesses both.

“He is the quarterback of the line,” said Tom Harp, Granada Hills co-coach. “He tells everybody who to block. On defense, he is good at recognizing formations and tendencies.

“Plus, he’s got talent. He’s a 6-4 kid with 4.8 speed [over 40 yards]. And he’s got the highest GPA of anyone we’ve ever coached.”

For someone analytical by nature, Cohn can work up the fever pitch necessary to hold his own on the line of scrimmage, a battle zone where calculus scores and HTML coding don’t mean beans.

“Getting that way is totally not my nature,” he said. “Usually I’m a calm guy. But I draw the emotional aspect from my teammates. All the fear and anger builds to a strong emotion. And that’s where our bonds come from.”

Handling the intensity inherent in football reinforces Cohn’s belief that he can become a doctor. He was present when the children shot at the North Valley Jewish Community Center were brought to Holy Cross for emergency treatment.

“That was rather traumatic because some of my friends were victims,” he said. “I was so gung-ho about the medical profession, and that made me think. It was disturbing, but I realized I enjoyed doing what I could to help.”

Such experiences put football in perspective.

Still, Granada Hills’ first-round City Championship playoff game against San Fernando tonight is important to Cohn.

“We have to win,” he said. “I don’t want football to end yet.”

Life presses on, win or lose. On Saturday, he and his girlfriend, Jenette Olson, will celebrate the one-year anniversary of their relationship.

On Sunday, he’ll take a pitching lesson, preparing for a last shot to make the Granada Hills baseball team.

Then he’ll pore over advanced placement physics and English composition homework for hours.

As Cohn balances the regular activities of a high school student with the extraordinary, he realizes stringent challenges await him.

“There is much learning to be done,” he said.