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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/18/SPER1AM2F5.DTL<h1>Stanford's star stays grounded</h1>
The
ability to see blocks almost before they happen. The power to shrug off
tacklers without breaking stride. The mentality to finish plays with a
bruising flourish. Speed. Balance. The skill and toughness to block
blitzing defenders. The hands to catch passes.
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<div><hr>Stanford's
Toby Gerhart is the complete package as a running back. He has
something else that few other players have: his own personal spotter.</div>
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His dad, Todd, who coached him at Norco High School in Riverside
County, watches from high in the stands and flashes hand gestures. Toby
gave an example of one that, he says, means "as soon as I get through
the hole, he wants me to break to the sideline." Another means: Next
time, hurdle that tackler.
At halftime in the locker room, he checks his text messages. The eye
in the sky will tell him: "Hit it - you're running soft" or "Running
too high."
Gerhart obviously gets the message. Rushing for an average of 140
yards per game, the senior is ranked third in the nation. He could
break Stanford's season and career records for rushing touchdowns in
Saturday's Big Game against Cal.
He could even become Stanford's second Heisman Trophy winner, the
other being Jim Plunkett in 1970. (The front-runner appears to be
Alabama running back Mark Ingram, who has carried the Tide to a 10-0
record and the No. 2 national ranking.)
As Stanford coach Jim Harbaugh sees it, "The Heisman has evolved to
where 50 percent is about preseason hype, 25 percent is about giving it
to somebody who's on an undefeated team, and about 25 percent is about
actually what the player is accomplishing."
Todd Gerhart wasn't in any Heisman discussions at Cal State
Fullerton in the mid-1980s, but he was a fine power back, about the
same size as Toby, 6-foot-1, 235 pounds.
Todd admits it's not easy to strike a balance between demanding
coach and concerned parent. "I want him to finish runs but not take
excessive hits," he said. "I tell him, 'Finish the run lower.' Running
backs tend to get thrown around at the end of a play. I'm going, 'Why
don't you just go down?' "
That's not in Toby's DNA. Speaking of genes, his mother, Lori, was a
basketball star at Norco High, where Todd was the football star. Toby's
instincts on the football field, according to Harbaugh, come "from Mom,
Dad and God. (Players) come out of the crib with it. Either they have
it or they don't."
Toby and his brother Garth, the starting center on the Arizona State
football team, were running pass patterns through the kitchen shortly
after they learned to walk. The whole family is athletic. Two of Toby's
triplet sisters, Teagan and Kelsey, are freshman softball players at
Stanford. The third, Whitley, is playing at Cal Poly. The youngest boy,
Coltin, 15, is a strong-armed quarterback.
As Toby was rushing for a state-record 9,662 yards in high school,
college recruiters learned that in the Gerhart household, Tuesday is
Taco Night, Thursday is Spaghetti Night and academics count for a lot.
The standard course load at Stanford is 15 credits. This quarter,
Gerhart is taking 21. Then he'll be three courses from his degree in
management sciences and engineering. He's taking investment science,
integral calculus, introduction to optimization (engineering),
prehistoric archaeology and high-technology entrepreneurship.
He'd like to go to a four-year graduate program that would give him
both an MBA and a law degree, depending on how pro football works out.
He said that if he doesn't figure to be a high draft pick this
coming offseason, he might stay in school and play baseball again. An
outfielder, he hit .288 last season but is considered a pro prospect.
So how high would he go in the pro football draft? Dan Shonka,
general manager of Ourlads Scouting Services, an online operation run
by ex-NFL scouts, sees him as an early second-round pick.
C.J. Spiller of Auburn "is the only guy (among senior running backs)
we have higher than Gerhart," Shonka said. "My guess is he'd get
knocked into the second round by some of the junior running backs who
probably will come out."
The man whose Stanford touchdown records Gerhart is about to break,
Tommy Vardell, calls him "a phenomenal prospect." Vardell, the ninth
pick of the 1992 draft, played eight years in the NFL.
"The question will be what kind of a system he's in and how he can
leverage his assets," Vardell said. "If he can get the ball and run
downhill, I wouldn't anticipate him being any less productive in the
NFL than he is in college."
Perhaps Gerhart has a productive future in football, but he might
not match his current variety of production off the field. Besides
hitting the books hard, he's a bit of a YouTube star. He willingly
played along on a Stanford-produced video that poked fun at his
two-sport status and showed him trying - and failing - in other sports,
even synchronized swimming. At one point, he was hoisted out of the
pool by several of the swimmers.
The one he was standing on like a plank was senior Taylor Durand, who gave this assessment: "He's very clearly a land mammal."
Grounded, too, according to Meredith Ayres, a member of Stanford's
swim team who has dated Gerhart for two years. "He's very laid back,"
Ayres said, "and that's different from a lot of other people at
Stanford. He handles stress very well. He's really good at taking
things one at a time, and not projecting into the future."
One friend, however, sees a limit to what Gerhart can accomplish.
His roommate, Wande Olabisi, has a fine retort when the running
back muses that he could have been a good linebacker as well. "You'd
suck at it," Olabisi says. "You're not mean enough."
E-mail Tom FitzGerald at
tfitzgerald@sfchronicle.com.</div></div>
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Edited by: Colonel_Reb 
