Last season’s Heisman Trophy race had an unusual scene beyond the finish line.
In the weeks and months after Alabama running back Derrick Henry won the award, many voters and non-voters questioned whether the right player won. Some suggested Heisman balloting should happen in January rather than December, the better to consider every player’s full body of work.
Christian McCaffrey’s season, one that saw him gain an FBS-record 3,864 yards — 1,227 more than the next best total in 2015 — was the main reason.
There is no doubt Alabama would not have won the College Football Playoff championship without Henry’s contributions. But McCaffrey’s 368-yard, two-touchdown performance in the Rose Bowl against Iowa that propelled Stanford to a No. 3 finish in the polls further cemented the notion in some minds that he was actually college football’s best player in 2015.
“He's one of the best players that ever played college football,” Stanford coach David Shaw told USA TODAY Sports.
“I mean, they numbers say that, and when you watch the film it's saying it. Did he really do that? Did he really break the rushing record in three quarters for the school? Did he really break Barry Sanders' record with a game to go in the season? Those are astronomical things.”
But as we near the kickoff of 2016, two other juniors — LSU’s Leonard Fournette and Clemson’s Deshaun Watson — are ahead of McCaffrey on oddsmakers’ lists of Heisman favorites. With that in mind, here are 12 reasons why McCaffrey should end up on every voter’s ballot by season's end.
McCaffrey’s close friend and teammate Solomon Thomas had been on campus all of two weeks in 2014 when he texted friends back home in Coppell, Texas, “Watch out for this kid, he’s going to win the Heisman.”
“A year later I’m at the Heisman ceremony with him!” he said. “It’s insane!”
Michael Mann, a close family friend and high school and college teammate of McCaffrey’s brother Max, remembers McCaffrey’s first high school carry. Valor Christian was playing Denver-area rival Grandview and future Wyoming star defender Eddie Yarbrough, and Valor Christian’s starting running back was hurt.
“They put Christian in, and it was his first play, first snap of high school football, and I won't ever forget it,” Mann said.
“Eddie Yarbrough was in the backfield, I think, by the time the ball was snapped. It was a handoff to Christian, and he just put the nastiest spin move on that guy. That was his first play, and we were like Holy crap, watch out.”
Two years later, during McCaffrey’s junior season, Shaw sent two coaches to a Valor Christian game to see if what they had seen of him on film matched reality.
“Those two coaches called me at halftime,” Shaw recalled. “They said, ‘Oh my God, this kid is unbelievable. He’s the most competitive, toughest, most aggressive running back we’ve seen in years. This is our guy.’ ”
Shaw later visited McCaffrey’s high school and gained an even greater appreciation for McCaffrey’s quickness and explosion by watching him play basketball.
Once McCaffrey arrived at Stanford, Cardinal running backs coach Lance Taylor had a reaction similar to Thomas’s. “Immediately when he got here, first training camp, he was different than all the other freshmen,” Taylor said. “Going into the (2015) season, we knew he was going to be a big part of what we do. He’s gonna have a really good year. But I don’t think any of us expected him to do what he did.”
It is fair to wonder what McCaffrey’s life would be without YouTube. The web video service has taught him so much.
When he was getting into football, it showed him the running techniques and footwork of players like Barry Sanders — whose FBS single-season all-purpose yards record McCaffrey broke last season — and Reggie Bush. “I think I’m definitely better when I see something happen first and then go out and try and replicate it, for sure,” McCaffrey said.
When he was getting into the piano, he said, he would watch pianists’ hand movements and copy them in order to learn songs. “I don't know if you call it gift or whatever,” said his mother, Lisa McCaffrey. “He is pretty good at watching something and being able to do it pretty quickly.”
It all plays to Christian McCaffrey’s strengths on the football field, too. Taylor says McCaffrey watches more extra film than anyone on the team, and that film study combined with McCaffrey’s learning style allows him to solve wrinkles he sees in defenses in a split second.
But earlier this spring Taylor also got a glimpse of how McCaffrey uses his visual learning in other ways when he asked his best back what he did that weekend. McCaffrey told him he and his roommates built a TV stand for their room. They went to Home Depot, bought the wood and built the stand — with the help of a video they watched on YouTube.
“I try to pick up my room a lot and have him sit there and watch me, but he hasn't taken to that,” his mother said. “That didn't really translate. The football, he got that.”
Only seven years separate the four McCaffrey boys — Max, Christian, Dylan and Luke. But there was little if any conflict between them, something their mom attributes to the calm temperament of their father Ed, a former Denver Broncos and Stanford star wide receiver.
As the oldest, Max was a leader, a quiet one who Christian says he always wanted to emulate. Christian, his mother said, was more vocal and outgoing, while watching and learning from his older brother.
“He would turn it around and he would advise the younger two, which was nice to see him flip his role and be a leader to them,” Lisa McCaffrey said. “He's in the middle. They always say the middle one is more of like the peace maker. I guess, he's a little bit of that.”
McCaffrey always was welcomed to play with Max and his friends, who were two years older, and then and now they remain some of his best friends. But at one time, internally, McCaffrey felt a need to prove himself to them physically and athletically.
“He looked up to those guys,” his mother said. “He still does. It's cute. Just watching him play, he was always just so determined and so competitive. You just see it.”
That drive is still with him at Stanford.
Thomas says McCaffrey is the kind of person who you see during a workout and tell yourself, “I need to do that.” Teammate and roommate Joey Alfieri says McCaffrey is a role model because of his work ethic and the extra time and effort he puts into being great.
“He is such a dream player in the way he practices and the way he prepares,” said Stanford offensive coordinator Mike Bloomgren, “and he’s putting that pressure on his teammates.”
Big plays that make great Vines or ESPN highlights are the capstones of Heisman campaigns. McCaffrey has enough to fill an iPhone.
In 2015 McCaffrey led the FBS with 76 plays from scrimmage of 10 or more yards and tied with Tulsa’s Keyarris Garrett with 29 of 20 or more yards.
When punt and kickoff returns are factored in, no one had more plays of 50+ or 60+ yards than McCaffrey’s 16.
Mann doesn’t know where, when or to whom he will be married, but he does know this: When it happens, McCaffrey will be there playing Pachelbel’s “Canon in D.”
That was the song Mann and McCaffrey once played as duet to win their high school talent show. Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah” is another go-to song for them. And this summer they drew rave reviews in cyberspace for piano-harmonica version of Billy Joel's “Piano Man.”
McCaffrey says he can’t remember a time when he didn’t love music, and that Mann’s suggestion that learning the piano would help Christian with girls hooked him. “I was all for it at the time, and then I realized that it really is a great escape,” said McCaffrey, who taught himself the harmonica during “Camp Blues” — Stanford players’ term for dog day preseason drills — in 2014. “If you ever need some peace and some quiet and to get away from everything, it's a good thing to do.”
McCaffrey sat beside Mann on the family’s piano bench, watched his hands, and before long they were performing as a duo.
“I have never seen anyone pick it up as fast as he could,” Mann said. “He could literally just hear what I would play and play it. I have never seen anyone be able to just hear something and then be able to transpose it, and play it.
“I think that he is one of those few special people that it just kind of dawns where he just understands rhythm. Same way the moves he makes on the field, you cannot really teach it.”
Alfieri is a workout warrior, someone who excels in the shuttle, cone drills and the vertical leap. But when he saw McCaffrey as a fellow Stanford freshman, he was amazed.
“I've never seen a guy as smooth as him,” Alfieri said. “We do these ladder drills, and I remember the first day of our freshman year, he came out there and just blew everyone away. All the older guys are in awe of this young true freshman who just flied through the ladders, not missing a single rung.”
Bloomgren said, “Physically the best thing he does is start and stop. His ability to start and stop so quickly. There’s times it looks like he gains 4 yards in the air and he changes directions and it doesn’t make any sense.
“It’s one of those mystifying things, you slow the film down and go, how’d he do that again?”
Shaw concurred with Bloomgren. “We're talking about LaDainian Tomlinson. We're talking about guys on that level. It's just scary. It's freaky, but then how physically tough he is. He runs through contact. He'll just run around people. He runs through on tackles. He breaks tackles. His mentality and his preparation, his effort, his intelligence, a perfect storm of all the things that you want to be in a football player, it's all in him.”
The McCaffrey boys love football so much, they resorted to any means and any place possible to play it growing up. That sometimes meant doing it in their house. But going full speed in a living room can be dicey, so they adapted. Thus begat “knee football.”
“You run on your knees,” McCaffrey said. “You get a lot of rug burns there.”
Anthony Walker, Northwestern’s captain and a preseason All-America candidate at linebacker, said that when the Wildcats hosted Stanford in the teams’ 2015 opener, every call their defense made was geared to stop McCaffrey. “You cross your fingers that he’s not in for a play or two and you call a normal play,” Walker said, “but you’re not going to stop a player like that. You do the best you can.”
Taylor told McCaffrey this spring that he is going to be the “offseason project” for every team on the Cardinal’s 2016 schedule. But Bloomgren stresses that Stanford won’t change its identity because of one player.
“People think we’re gonna be Christian and the Christianettes and there’s gonna be a one-man show,” Bloomgren said. “That’s never gonna be the case in this offense. It wasn’t the case (last) year. But Christian made ’em pay if they didn’t have a great plan in place. Even when they did — gosh, there were nine men in the box against Iowa, and all he did was slice and dice ’em up and down.
“We’re never gonna be about one person. There are too many guys that work too hard to make that the case. But if I were playing Stanford I would find a way to at least schematically slow him down on the board.”
Last season in addition to his snaps at running back and returner, McCaffrey had 62 snaps at receiver and 41 as a wildcat quarterback (or WildCaff, as Stanford calls it), according to Pro Football Focus.
Shaw can rattle off at least six places McCaffrey could line up on offense, not including quarterback. “He was 2 of 3 passing too, let’s not forget that,” Bloomgren said. “Two touchdowns.”
Bloomgren says Stanford will move McCaffrey even more this season to keep defenses from keying on him.
Taylor said, “There is nothing physically or on the field that he hasn’t done or we haven’t tried to use, ways we haven’t used him. Obviously we’re still on the drawing board trying to create new ways and new things, but they’re all wrinkles we’ve probably already tried. He’s played running back. He’s played quarterback. He’s been a lead blocker for other guys who are getting the ball. He’s been the leading receiver. He’s the kickoff and punt return guy. So what hasn’t he done?”
Whether in football, track (he was a multi-time high school state champion in Colorado), schoolwork, mission work or music, McCaffrey is relentless in his pursuit of improvement. “I believe it’s a sin not to use all your talents,” he said, “so I’m trying to do everything I can with what God gave me.”
In the wake of McCaffrey’s 437 total touches last football season, Bloomgren says he, Shaw and Taylor made a conscious effort to keep him out of live contact periods during spring football and limit him at other times.
But that won’t happen this fall. Shaw said, “I think when you have a great player, the last thing you want to do is pump the brakes. … We’re going to push him harder, push him further, and see if there’s more that he can do.
“Honestly I think we’ve all just gotten a glimpse of his abilities.”
Pushing harder and testing his athletic limits fits McCaffrey’s personality and ethos. Asked what he wants to improve on the field this season, McCaffrey said, “I’m trying to be better at everything.”
The public — and Heisman voters — will measure that by the potential statistics, milestones and records he reaches. He and his coaches will judge it differently.
“Last year I approached the season as, ‘Go and do whatever I can to help the team win and get as many yards on every carry as possible,’ ” McCaffrey said. “And that's exactly how I'm approaching this season.”
Contributing: George Schroeder and Nicole Auerbach
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