Royce Freeman Is Rock Steady

For all his immense production, bulbous muscles, and indispensability to Oregon's withered offense, Royce Freeman is not Leonard Fournette, whose talent is so incandescent that he dominates every running back conversation in college football. After all, who else could crack the 1,000-yard mark in just a half-dozen games, the way Fournette has with a brain-melting 1,202?

Yet with just one more garbage carry, Freeman would have been up there, too. His 997 rushing yards are second only to Fournette among running backs, and his 6.6 yards per carry ranks fourth among backs with 125 or more carries on the season. No program weaponizes backfields as efficiently as Oregon and yet, not even halfway through his sophomore year, Freeman already ranks eighth on the school's career rushing charts. He genuinely stands out, even at a place that breeds stat-chewing monsters.

Perhaps the greatest compliment that can be paid to Freeman is to say that he makes sense. He doesn't possess one super-trait like Dalvin Cook's nitrous-oxide acceleration or Christian McCaffery's geometry-defying cuts, to name others who matriculated with Freeman and Fournette in the preposterous running back Class of 2014. Instead, he is an enormous back—5'11'', 230 pounds—who intuits exactly when and how to leverage his size. Even when he jukes, he never quite eschews contact. It reads more as strategic disengagement—that he could blow a hole into a would-be tackler's chest, and probably would like to, but would rather save the firepower for when it's acutely needed. There's a purposefulness to his game. Everything looks exactly in its place, deployed at just the right time.

Freeman's coming of age is precisely what Ducks have needed as their reign atop the college football world seems to be ending. Marcus Mariota is gone and, bereft of the greatest player in program history, Mark Helfrich's Ducks look listless. Three quarterbacks have started games this year, and none have managed to quite fit into Oregon's plug-and-play system. Even more damning, one potential savior—redshirt freshman and former four-star recruit Morgan Mahalak—isn't playing because, by Helfrich's own admission, "We probably didn't [take advantage of his redshirt year] as much as we possibly could in his case."

It's a gaffe that recalls why so many were skeptical of Helfrich in 2013, when, in his first year as head coach, perhaps the deepest of his three Ducks teams splintered apart, dropping out of the BCS picture altogether en route to an Alamo Bowl win. He inherited Chip Kelly's post thanks far more to his tactical acumen than his charisma, but even that appears to be on the wane: after five consecutive years inside the top 15 nationally in points per possession, the Ducks currently rank 32nd. This year's team recalls the worst of Mike Bellotti, with a stellar ground game trying, and often failing, to haul its passing game and moribund defense out of mediocrity.

Putting aside Taj Griffin's recent emergence, that ground game remains mostly synonymous with Freeman. He is the reason the Ducks have withstood mediocre teams like Colorado and Washington; his gargantuan 246 yards were all that kept Washington State from blowing out (as opposed to just defeating) the Ducks in Autzen Stadium.

This, perversely, is why Freeman hasn't quite gotten his due from the national press. Oregon's slow descent back into the dregs of the Pac-12 has overshadowed the man who is doing everything he can, perhaps futilely, to prevent it.

His task only grows tougher from here on out. Stanford and Cal are ranked in this week's polls, while USC and Arizona State are two of the conference's most talented squads. The season ends against Oregon State, who is starving for its first Civil War win since 2007. The same Ducks team that has beaten only two Power 5 teams all season must double that total the rest of the way.

Each one of those opponents will zero in on Freeman the way Washington did last week, both because they must and because no one else on Oregon can hold them accountable for doing so. He'll keep rumbling like the boulder he is, into the defenders who now swarm the box eight at a time. And so, with 27 carries in each of the past three games, Freeman will shoulder the load again, because that is what he is built to do.