| | | |
Friday, December 13, 2002
The Sultan of Troy
By Marc Connolly
BCSfootball.com
EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. -- He is the Sultan. He is the Sultan of speed.
If a casual college football fan dropped by Giants Stadium on Sunday and was asked which USC Trojan had been hyped as a Heisman candidate and resident Golden Boy of Troy, the answer certainly wouldn't have been Carson Palmer. In fact, the sophomore quarterback didn't have much to do with his team's Kickoff Classic victory over No. 17 Penn State.
|  | | Sultan McCullough ran for 129 yards en route to MVP honors in the Kickoff Classic. |
Instead, his ultra-speedy backfield mate, Sultan McCullough, would be the one with an enthusiastic finger pointed his way after an inspiring performance that displayed his world-class wheels and the juking ability of a cocktail waitress in a 29-5 victory in front of 78,902 fans to open -- officially -- the 2000 college football season.
What was supposed to be a USC three-headed monster attack heading into the season quickly turned into McCullough's playground. The sophomore tailback carried the ball 29 times for 128 yards en route to earning Kickoff Classic MVP honors.
"It feels good. It's my first game and my big opener. My coaches said it's your turn to shine and that's what I did," said McCullough. "I knew before I got here what I had to do."
Sure he might have known, but his coaches couldn't have expected to see such toughness on display from a kid who's a track superstar and weighs a mere 185 pounds. This is USC, yet it wasn't Student Body Left or Student Body Right. For the most part, it was Sultan Up The Middle.
"It was the way he got his yards," boasted head coach Paul Hackett. "He's got great speed -- one of the fastest players in college football -- but he didn't have any breakaways. He had tough runs ... He ran for the tough yards, and ran for them over and over again today."
Many of those grind-it-out yards were tallied in a drive to end the third quarter after Penn State had forced a safety, gained some momentum and the outcome was still in question at 23-5. He carried the ball six times for a total of 35 yards, which not only set up a field goal, but also ate up nearly five minutes of clock and further tired a beat-up Penn State defense.
"That's what, to me, changed the tenor of the game," said Hackett.
That type of talk -- anything about his play that doesn't mention the S-word -- is exactly what McCullough wanted to hear. He's tired of his speed dossier. So what if he was the 1999 Pac-10 100-meters champion or that he ran a leg on USC's 400-meter relay which was fifth in the nation? Who cares that he's the fastest Trojan footballer ever with a 10.17 in the 100 (which, by the way, is the best mark in the world by an under-20 runner)?
"People say I am a track star, but I think my first love was always football," says McCullough, who rushed for a mere 413 yards and one touchdown on 90 carries in 1999. "So now, because I'm off to a good start, I may not run track. I might take a year off ... I want to look forward to playing just football for the next two years."
He's not joking. This is a kid who grew up in Pasadena wanting only to carry the pigskin at Tailback U. for a program that has seen the likes of O.J. Simpson and Marcus Allen storm through its record books. USC was the only school he ever looked at, and it had nothing to do with its track team.
"I've been dreaming about this since I was little," says McCullough, who worshipped Eric Dickerson and -- get this -- fullback Merrill Hoge as a child. "I wanted to be the man, that's why I came here."
Reaching the century mark in rushing yards and winning MVP honors in the season opener will accomplish that for most backs anywhere, whether it be Pop Warner or the NFL. But it's not that easy with this USC squad. Though McCullough will undoubtedly get the bulk of the carries the rest of the way, Hackett says he'll continue to mix it up by using all three of his tailbacks in USC's suddenly loaded backfield.
"We've said all along that we have three tailbacks -- Malaefou MacKenzie, Sultan McCullough and Petros Papadakis -- and we felt that in the first part of the season one of them would establish himself as our tailback. Certainly today, Sultan took a big step in that direction," says Hackett. "We're going to continue to use all three tailbacks until it's clear we have just one guy."
| | | |
|
|
Petros Papadakis drives the ball hard for the 2-yard TD.
Paul Hackett knows that a win in the Kickoff Classic is a confidence booster for his team.