Little Big Man

With three or four receivers on the field at a time, San Jose State can’t help but look like a passing team.

Last season, the Spartans gained two-thirds of their total offense through the air. It was pretty much the same the previous season.

The team that comes into the Coliseum to play USC on Saturday gives the impression that nothing has changed--still all those wideouts--but there is a small difference.

Deonce Whitaker, the lone tailback, all 5 feet 6 of him, has given the Spartans a bona fide running game by putting his spin on the spread formation.

“You spread the defense out,” he said. “It gives you a chance to get into the secondary very fast.”

The diminutive senior has done that often enough to run for big totals against Nebraska and Stanford. His 548 yards make him the third-ranked rusher in the nation through three games.

Even when he isn’t carrying the ball, the mere threat has opened up the passing attack, propelling the Spartans to a 2-1 start after seven losing seasons.

“For us to win, we can’t throw the ball 40 or 50 times,” Coach Dave Baldwin said. “We have to run.”

That element of the Spartan offense was largely absent in Baldwin’s first three seasons as coach. All that time, Whitaker was waiting not so patiently to fill the role.

As a senior at Rancho Cucamonga High in 1996, he rushed for 2,243 yards and 39 touchdowns, numbers that might have attracted major-college recruiters. But another set of numbers worked against him.

His grades were average, his test scores low. Then, of course, there was his height.

While other coaches passed on Whitaker, Baldwin suspected he could succeed in college, as a student and an athlete.

“He took a chance when other schools didn’t,” Whitaker said. “He had confidence in me.”

Not that Baldwin was entirely certain, at least not about the football part of the deal.

“When he first walked into my office, I looked at him and thought that he was so small,” the coach recalled.

It would be a year before Whitaker could prove him wrong. As a Prop. 48 student admitted with substandard academic qualifications, he could not so much as practice with the team during his freshman season.

But Baldwin remembers hearing whispers about the short kid dunking basketballs in the gym. The new kid who could bench-press close to 400 pounds. He remembers glancing over at the sideline during practice one afternoon and seeing Whitaker do a flip.

“In his street clothes,” Baldwin said. “You just knew he was special.”

That talent surfaced in his sophomore season when, finally eligible to play, Whitaker set NCAA single-season records with 51 kickoff returns for 1,214 yards.

Along the way, he got more and more snaps at tailback. Baldwin--struggling to revive a losing program--saw the opportunity to add another weapon to his spread offense.

The coach used a similar attack at Cal State Northridge in the mid-1990s. It is an offense that often relies on the quarterback to throw quick passes to a horde of receivers. But it is also a flexible offense, always looking for an advantage.

If the defense crowds the line of scrimmage or tries to cover those extra receivers with linebackers, the quarterback throws. If the defense inches back, wary of the pass, look for the run.

“That is the ideal situation,” Baldwin said. “When you’re running the football, teams will not blitz as much and you take a lot of pressure off the quarterback.”

Whitaker gave the Spartans a taste of that luxury last season. As the starting tailback, he opened with a 169-yard game against Louisiana State, then followed with 132 yards against Colorado.

It turned out that being short wasn’t such a bad thing.

“I try to use my size as an advantage,” he said. “I hide behind my linemen and run close to the ground so it’s tough for people 6-foot-something to drop on me.”

Off the field, he became a leader.

“I call him our Pied Piper,” Baldwin said. “He’s got a great personality and competitiveness and people just follow him.”

But there was a setback, more trouble waiting, after Whitaker sprained his ankle in the fourth quarter of a 123-yard performance against Tulsa. He hobbled through the rest of 1999 and, in March, needed surgery for yet another injury to his neck.

The recuperation was slow, causing him to miss spring practice, but he has wasted no time getting started this fall.

His 147 yards against the vaunted Nebraska defense had Coach Frank Solich talking about his quickness. His 254 yards and two touchdowns fueled a 40-27 upset at Stanford two weeks ago.

“You see the way he bounces off people,” USC Coach Paul Hackett said. “You see Stanford try to tackle him. He’s a problem.”

And his size?

“He’s not small, he’s short,” Hackett said. “So is Barry Sanders.”

So the USC defense will have something to think about as it spreads itself thin to account for all those receivers and a quarterback, Marcus Arroyo, who threw three touchdown passes against Southern Utah last week.

San Jose State may look like a pure passing team, but Whitaker offers a prediction.

“My offensive line is going to open some holes,” he said. “The running game will be there.”

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Doing Yardwork

San Jose State’s Deonce Whitaker is among the nation’s top runners:

9.6 Yards per carry (2nd in Division I)

182.7 Yards rushing per game (3rd in Division I)

193.3 Yards all-purpose running per game (4th in Division I)