True freshmen have always played an outsized role in the direction of college football seasons.
College football certainly isn’t college basketball, where one-and-done players (a la Cooper Flagg) often emerge as the defining player of a season, at least since the NBA changed its eligibility rules in 2005.
But it is a sport in which first-year freshmen — the freakiest of the athletic freaks — have almost always found a way to make a huge impact. What would the 2024 college football season would have been without Jeremiah Smith (more on him later) or the 2016 season without Jalen Hurts (more on him as well)?
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True freshmen like Herschel Walker and his 150 yards and two touchdowns in the 1980 national title game are responsible for some of the most notable individual seasons in the sport’s history.
With college football set to enter the 26th season of the 21st century, it’s a great time to look back at the first 25 years and highlight the best of the best true freshman seasons. Some were 247Sports True Freshmen of the Year. Others, from the early 2000s, were transcendent stars that helped define the early years of the BCS.
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Source link : https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/top-25-true-freshmen-of-the-century-from-trevor-lawrence-to-adrian-peterson-the-best-debuts-since-2000/
Author : Chris Hummer
Publish date : 2025-06-30 13:00:00
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