Colorado’s Travis Hunter: college football’s mind-warping dual threat is one of one

Travis Hunter of the Colorado Buffaloes, center, celebrates after scoring a fourth-quarter touchdown against Utah at Folsom Field last month.Photograph: Dustin Bradford/Getty Images

The Heisman Trophy is college football’s supreme individual honor, an annual tribute to the best player in the game, and more often than not it’s the country’s top quarterback who takes the prize. But this could be the year Colorado’s Travis Hunter breaks with tradition.

Hunter is college football’s mind-warping dual threat, a game-changing wide receiver and cornerback. It’s not uncommon for the nation’s best college football prospects to play offense and defense as high schoolers, especially if there aren’t enough bodies to fill out every position on the roster. At the highest levels of the college game, though, “ironman” players are confined to specialty roles on one side of the ball or the other. Why? Because why double the injury risk? Why mess with convention?

Related: Bling to wins: Deion Sanders has struck fear into the college football establishment

But Deion Sanders, aka Colorado’s Coach Prime, has never been one to bow to convention. Famously, he set the standard for modern day ironmen in professional sports at the turn of the century – dominating the NFL as a shutdown cornerback, big-play receiver and kick returner while also dazzling Major League Baseball with his prowess as a hitter and baserunner. When Sanders pivoted to coaching college football in 2020, jumping straight into the head job at Jackson State University, his first call was all-out recruiting blitz for Hunter, the nation’s top high school recruit as a defensive back.

Thing is, Hunter had already verbally agreed to play at Florida State, the school where Sanders broke onto the national scene, with the explicit intention of following the…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/colorado-travis-hunter-college-football-093003823.html

Author : The Guardian

Publish date : 2024-12-04 09:30:00

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