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The most dramatic story was of Rozier's last high school game, Thanksgiving weekend, the climax of an unusual season in Camden abbreviated by a gang war. That fall, the Wheels of Soul and the Ghetto Riders bore a certain grudge against each other. The leader of the Wheels had a relative playing for Camden and was not inclined to miss a game. "At the beginning of the third quarter, the shooting broke out," Rozier says. "It sounded like caps at first. Then there was smoke. We all hit the dirt. Both teams were face down around the 12-yd. line. The stands emptied. People were screaming. Babies were getting stepped on. Just as in the movie Black Sunday." Nebraska struck Rozier as a quiet place to play football.
Fryar says, "When Nebraska contacted me, I went and looked in the atlas. 'Lord,' I thought. 'It's in the middle of nowhere.' Actually, I wanted to be a Marine like my uncle. But my parents wouldn't let me. That first year, Turner and I both were so lonely, we tried to quit. Neither of our parents would allow us to come home. We were up there in the room, playing old records and crying, fighting the homesickness together." When Rozier arrived, they helped him resist the same urge to run away. "Nebraska is a place for slowing down and growing up," Fryar says for all of them.
Though each will receive votes for the Heisman Trophy, the award proclaiming college football's best player, Gill and Fryar consider Rozier's election this weekend a foregone and happy conclusion. When asked to describe Rozier, the runner, Fryar simply says, "Heisman." But Rozier personally expresses little interest in hardware. "All it is," he says, not wishing to be rude, "is a little statue of a runner. I guess if I win it, I'll give the hands to Irving and the head to Turner." The legs are his own.
Perhaps 5 ft. 10 in., 210 Ibs., Rozier is a brute with guile, whose balance is such that he seems to be bulldogged off the field more often than he is tumbled off his feet. Rozier's 29 touchdowns this season are an N.C.A.A. record. Among the last dozen Heisman-winning running backs, only Billy Sims of Oklahoma (1978) carried so seldom (an average 23 times a game compared with 30 last season for Georgia's Herschel Walker). Still, Rozier leads the nation's rushers with 2,148 yds., 7.8 per carry. In Rozier's third straight 200-yd. game this year, against Kansas, he set the school record of 285 yds. and then retired for the fourth quarter. Similarly, the passing and receiving figures of Gill and Fryar are stunted by the amount of time they spend as observers in the second half. "I look at the statistics and see Fryar's name under mine," says Iowa State's Tracy Henderson, the leading pass catcher in the Big Eight, "but I know who is the best receiver in the league."