Green Gobblin’

He wore a green, hooded sweatshirt, torn blue jeans and black sneakers. His camouflage cap was set at the approximate angle of an off-tackle play. And if Jamario Thomas had walked any slower, he would have been standing still.

This is college football’s leading rusher?

“Oh, just give him the football and he looks a lot different,” says teammate Andy Brewster.

Here at the University of North Texas, Thomas, a previously little-known freshman running back, has broken into the clear with a record-smashing performance, all the while stiff-arming notoriety.

“He doesn’t say a whole lot,” Coach Darrell Dickey said. “He lets his running do the talking.”

If Thomas embraces his celebrity reluctantly, he exhibits no such shyness on the field. He doesn’t have great size -- he’s 5 feet 11 and 195 pounds -- but his accomplishments loom large. He averages 189.89 yards per game, easily the best in the nation, having rushed for 1,709 yards in only nine games.

Tonight, when North Texas kicks off the bowl season against Southern Mississippi in the New Orleans Bowl, Thomas will need 155 yards to break the NCAA single-season freshman rushing record of 1,863 yards set by Ron Dayne of Wisconsin in 1996. Oklahoma freshman Adrian Peterson, with 1,843 yards in 12 games, is closer to Dayne’s mark and figures to surpass it against USC in the Orange Bowl on Jan. 4. But Thomas can get there first.

Thomas previously tied a Division I-A record held by Barry Sanders and Marcus Allen with five consecutive games of more than 200 yards rushing, while helping the Mean Green win a fourth consecutive Sun Belt title and extend its conference winning streak to 25 games.

But until recently, he had kept such a low profile that some of his new friends on campus didn’t know he was on the football team.

“They said, ‘Why didn’t you tell us you play football?’ ” Thomas said. “I said, ‘You didn’t ask.’ ”

He was chosen Sun Belt player of the year, so a lot of people know now, although his trip to stardom didn’t start off with a bang. He was rated the second-best high school back in Texas, behind Peterson, but both were from the same area in East Texas -- Peterson from Palestine, Thomas from Longview -- and Peterson, dominated the headlines. (As he continues to do, having finished second to USC’s Matt Leinart in the Heisman Trophy voting.) Besides, the Mean Green already had the nation’s leading rusher, Patrick Cobbs, so Thomas sat at the start of this season. But after Cobbs injured his knee in the second game, Thomas took over.

The first time he got the ball in the next game, against Colorado, Thomas ran 57 yards for a touchdown.

“It all happened so fast,” he said. “Before I knew it, I was 10 yards down the field.”

He finished his first start with 257 yards in 32 carries, although the Mean Green was routed, 52-21. And when Thomas was injured after gaining only 58 yards in a loss at Baylor, North Texas was 0-4.

Seven games later, the Mean Green is 7-4, playing in the New Orleans Bowl for the fourth consecutive year and being led by a freshman running back so low-key, he’s almost off the charts.

“I don’t want to be different than anybody else,” he said. “I just want to be treated the same.”

Thomas, though, is different, according to Dickey.

“He is a very unique kid,” the coach said. “The surprising thing is how humble he is about all this stuff -- the attention, the media and so forth. We knew during two-a-days that he was very, very talented, we just didn’t know that he would deliver all these numbers.”

The numbers are impressive, all right: Those 1,709 yards have come in 256 carries, an average of 6.68 yards a carry, and he has 17 touchdowns. Then there’s that eye-popping average of almost 190 yards a game -- well ahead of California’s J.J. Arrington, who is second with an average of 167.73. Thomas achieved his average despite getting minus-one yard in two carries in a season-opening 65-0 loss to Texas. He also sat out the regular-season finale against Arkansas State because of a hamstring injury.

Brewster, a senior center, says the offensive linemen love Thomas because he goes out of his way to show them respect. They also love him because of the way he runs the football.

“He has the ability to put people in bad situations, to get into open spaces and make people miss,” Brewster said. “When he’s got the ball, he makes us look good too.”

Thomas averaged 6.6 yards a carry against Big 12 opponents Texas, Colorado and Baylor, broke the freshman record shared by Herschel Walker and Dayne with five 200-yard games and became only the third freshman in the history of Division I-A to run for more than 1,700 yards. Peterson became the fourth when he ran for 172 yards against Colorado in the Big 12 title game.

Beginning with the Mean Green’s fifth game, Thomas’ third start, he had rushing performances of 179 yards, 256, 258, 218, 203 and 291.

Still, there have been some downsides. Thomas was embarrassed when he was run down from behind and tackled during a victory over New Mexico State. On that play, though, he lost his shoe at the line of scrimmage -- and still gained 77 yards.

That was a slight mishap, with a humorous side, nothing at all compared with what happened later. When the eight Doak Walker Award nominees were announced, with freshmen included for the first time in the recognition of the nation’s top running back, Thomas was not among them.

Dickey was incensed.

“If you’re going to tell me he’s not one of the top eight running backs in the country, I’m going to tell you you’re crazy,” he said.

Associated Press, at least, deemed him one of the top six in the nation, naming him to its All-American third team Monday.

North Texas may play in a second-tier conference, but the school has a proud football tradition, with such notable alumni as Mean Joe Greene, Abner Haynes, Cedric Hardman, Ray Renfro, Carl Lockhart and Ronnie Shanklin. So Dickey would not accept the argument that Thomas achieved his statistics against inferior opponents in the Sun Belt.

“I say 250 yards against Colorado, which was the fourth-best rushing defense in the country when we played them,” Dickey said. “They can throw that stuff in our face all the time, you can spin things, but the numbers tell the story.”

They don’t tell the entire story, though. Off the field, Thomas hangs out with friends, plays video games, plans fishing trips with Cobbs, who has become his mentor, and tries to make the most of his freshman studies while battling an opponent as difficult as any would-be tackler.

Thomas has dyslexia, a learning disability that makes it difficult to read, write and spell.

“I’m no different than a lot of people with learning disabilities,” he said. “We’re all trying to get along, to fit in, to do better.”

Government studies say that almost 10% of the U.S. population is dyslexic and that as many as 80% of those with learning disabilities are dyslexic.

Thomas said he was in ninth grade and finding it continually hard to read when his dyslexia was diagnosed. Dickey said that counselors from several local high schools had asked Thomas to speak to their dyslexic students. Thomas quickly agreed because he believes he has something important to say. “Just because you’ve got a learning disability doesn’t mean you can’t do stuff with your life,” he said.

At North Texas, where 31,112 are enrolled, Thomas is one of 1,107 students registered with the university’s Office of Disability Accommodations, a program established through the Americans With Disabilities Act that provides classroom help for students with dyslexia and other learning disabilities, visual impairment, deafness and mobility disabilities.

Kenneth T. Ballom, dean of students at North Texas, said standard accommodations for dyslexics and others with disabilities included the use of note-takers, extended test times and books on tape.

Thomas’ study load includes classes in math, biology and science, and he said he was most helped by being given extra time on tests and on making reports.

Cobbs, who has grown close to Thomas after guiding him on his campus visit as a high schooler, said Thomas wasn’t shy around him and certainly wasn’t reluctant to express himself on the field.

“People were asking me at first how he’d do,” Cobbs said. “I said, ‘Watch, you’re going to be amazed.’ ”

Arizona State, Texas Tech, Colorado and Mississippi State also were interested, but Thomas, after visiting the campus and discovering the ODA, and knowing Dickey was dedicated to running the ball, chose North Texas.

“I just felt comfortable here,” he said.

Thomas is even having an effect off-campus. At Ruby’s Diner, across from the courthouse on the east side of the town square, owner Ken Willis offers a discount on chicken-fried steaks and hamburgers tied to the number of points North Texas scored the night before. After a 51-point performance against Idaho -- thanks to 291 yards rushing and four touchdowns from Thomas -- Willis said Ruby’s was packed.

“He’s good for business,” Willis said.

Back home in Longview, his mother, Laverne Thomas, wasn’t at all comfortable with Jamario playing football as a youngster. She started him out slowly.

“I wouldn’t let him play Pee Wee until he was in the seventh grade,” she said. “I was afraid he was going to get himself hurt.”

Laverne, who has worked at a hat factory in Longview for 33 years, is a divorced mother of four sons, Jamario her second-youngest. Little brother Demario is following in his brother’s path as the featured running back at Springhill High, and when he rushed for 2,056 yards as a senior this year, he broke Jamario’s school record for most yards in a season.

And tonight’s game?

“It’s just another game to me, a big game, but I’m just an ordinary guy who happens to be a football player,” he said.

But put a video game controller in his hands and Thomas changes -- he no longer wants to be just one of the guys.

“I’m trying to beat everybody,” he said. “I don’t want anyone to catch me.”

On the field this season, not many have. And if football were a video game, his cover would be blown because we’d all know his real identity -- Super Jamario.

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(Begin Text of Infobox)

Bowl Season Opens

NEW ORLEANS

North Texas (7-4)

vs. Southern Mississippi (6-5)

Tonight, 4:30 PST, ESPN

Top Rushers

Top rushers in Division I-A football:

*--* Player, School Yd/Car Yd/G Jamario Thomas, North Texas 6.68 189.9 J.J. Arrington, California 6.99 167.7 DeAngelo Williams, Memphis 6.20 166.2 Cedric Benson, Texas 5.82 160.4 Garrett Wolfe, Northern Illinois 6.52 157.2 Adrian Peterson, Oklahoma 5.87 153.6 Ryan Moats, Louisiana Tech 6.16 147.8 Vernand Morency, Oklahoma St. 5.82 145.4 Michael Hart, Michigan 5.26 124.7 Andre Hall, South Florida 6.46 123.4

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Yard Shtick

Jamario Thomas averaged 189.9 yards per game despite a negative rushing total in his first game against Texas. A look at Thomas game by game:

*--* Date Opponent Carries Yards Sept. 4 at Texas 2 -1 Sept. 11 vs. Florida Atlantic Did not play Sept. 18 at Colorado 32 247 Sept. 25 at Baylor 10 58 Oct. 2 vs. Middle Tenn. St. 36 179 Oct. 9 at Utah State 38 256 Oct. 23 vs. New Mexico State 33 258 Oct. 30 vs. Louisiana Monroe 41 218 Nov. 5 at Louisiana Lafayette 36 203 Nov. 13 vs. Idaho 28 291 Nov. 18 at Arkansas State Did not play

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