Life is easier this season for Minnesota coach Glen Mason.
He lost 1,269 rushing yards to the NFL when Marion Barber left school a year early, but Mason had running backs to spare.
“If there’s one position we could afford to lose an outstanding player early to the NFL, it was running back,” Mason said Tuesday during the Big Ten teleconference.
Barber, the starter in all but one game, was only the second-leading rusher for the Gophers. Part time has turned into prime time for Laurence Maroney, who opened his junior season Saturday with 203 yards against Tulsa. His night was virtually complete by the end of the first quarter after touchdown runs of 67 and 73 yards.
It doesn’t figure to be any easier for Colorado State to stop just Maroney instead of alternating backs. Last year Barber, now with the Dallas Cowboys, carried 31 times for 201 yards and two scores along with Maroney’s 17 rushes for 132 yards against the Rams.
Gophers guard Mark Setterstrom and center Greg Eslinger, both four-year starters who earned all-Big Ten honors and some All-America acclaim, contribute to the rushing production.
“This is as good a running game as we’ll face all year until we get to Air Force,” CSU coach Sonny Lubick said. “There might be one or two teams in the Big Ten that might shut them down. I’m not looking to shut them down to no yards.
“This guy (Maroney) is as good as there is. He’s so good, he’ll make you miss.”
When Minnesota visited CSU in the third game of the 2004 season, the Gophers rushed for 360 yards.
Last year Minnesota ranked fifth in the NCAA in rushing at 256.8 yards. The Falcons were fourth with 277.4 yards from their triple-option attack.
Maroney, at 5-feet-11, 205 pounds, is just trying to play his own game, not make up for the loss of Barber. The two were close friends and still talk regularly. At Minnesota’s news conference Tuesday, Maroney said when Barber told him he was leaving “it was like a part of me was leaving, but I wished him the best of luck.”
Maroney didn’t look at it as his chance for a 2,000-yard season or Heisman mention, both inevitable speculation since Barber’s departure.
First, there’s no sense in fixing a perfectly good system and second, he said, “I’m going to continue to do everything that I did last year, so I am not going to try to go out every game and do something extra. That’s when you mess up is when you try to overdo some things. So I am just going to continue to do the things I do.”
Colorado State linebacker Jahmal Hall, his confidence boosted by three solid quarters against Colorado’s running game said: “They are going to come in thinking they can run the ball down our throats. We have to show them we are a completely different school this year and it’s not last year.”
Although Maroney is the undisputed feature back now, it’s not as if he lacks for a supporting cast.
Noting how sophomore third-teamer Gary Russell averaged 11.2 yards a carry on eight rushes, Mason said, “We probably didn’t give him the ball enough.”
Mason suspects he knows what the Rams are thinking this week.
“I’m sure they ‘what-iffed’ themselves to death,” the Minnesota coach said of the number of times the Rams were in position to make a tackle but didn’t.
“We looked at tape all week and we kind of embarrassed ourselves,” CSU safety Travis Garcia said. “We don’t want to repeat that.”
Footnote
Lubick estimated CSU running back Nnamdi Ohaeri will miss from three to five weeks with an ankle sprain.
