Bryce Love, running back, Stanford
That Love has some massive shoes to fill is undeniable. All he has to do is somehow make Stanford fans forget about the fact Christian McCaffrey is no longer the mainstay on offense.
Easy peasy, right?
Hardly. But if anyone is equipped to take over for the legendary running back, it’s Love. As a backup to McCaffrey the past two years, all he’s done is average 7.2 yards per carry, 8.2 yards per touch and score seven touchdowns.
In many ways, Love is the ideal man to carry the torch for McCaffrey, and he knows it.
“Christian might have about 10 pounds on me, but he never fit the Stanford mold — the big, downhill back — that people would always talk about,” Love said, via David Lombardi of ESPN. “But he still proved that we can be all-purpose backs. We can come in and do everything that everyone else can do. And that’s my motivation now, too: I want to deliver everything.”
Whether he can live up to the hype remains to be seen. But given the way David Shaw loves to utilized the running game to control the clock, we expect Love to get every opportunity to succeed in 2017. And we expect him to deliver.