Red alert: super-sharp Alex Smith, a Heisman candidate with smarts to match his skills, is leading Utah on a historic march

When he was playing football at Helix High School near San Diego, quarterback Alex Smith was nobody's idea of a Heisman Trophy candidate. He was a brilliant student, yes, but too skinny and overshadowed by a teammate named Reggie Bush. So, all this Heisman talk now? "It's overwhelming," Smith says.

That's funny. So is he.

As the quarterback for one of the most exciting teams in the nation, Smith has Utah on the doorstep of the BCS party, and no team from outside the power conferences has gotten inside. His combination of passing and running has helped him master the second-highest scoring offense in the nation--one that makes use of everything from the option to the 2-minute drill with five wide receivers. He is putting up the kind of numbers that eluded him in high school, when Bush, now a star at Southern California, was bulldozing opponents, and Smith seldom had to pass.

"Once he got his opportunity," Utes wideout Paris Warren says, "he exploded."

Although Smith was stuck behind two other quarterbacks as recently as two years ago and nearly left the program, he now is 19-1 as Utah's starter and boasts a stack of statistics that compare favorably with other quarterbacks being considered for the Heisman (see chart).

What happened? Smith--whose only other scholarship offer came from Louisville, where his uncle John L. Smith (now at Michigan State) was coach--used an uncommon intellect to transform himself into a player who could understand every nuance of the complex offense coach Urban Meyer brought to the Utes two years ago.

"He puts a lot into what he's doing, whether it's in the classroom or on the field," freshman quarterback Brian Johnson says. "He prepares for the game so well. He's in there watching film, every day, constantly."

Smith always has possessed a certain focus. It allowed him to amass so many advanced-placement credits in high school that he arrived at Utah with a grade-point average far surpassing the usual maximum 4.0. He graduated in two years with a degree in economics and is working on a master's degree now--in addition to the Utes' perfect season.

"The thing I remember about Alex as a little boy, all the way up, was the ability to focus," says Pam Smith, his mother. "If he's reading a book or if he's watching something, he's just ..."

"Some people call it stubborn," chimes in Doug Smith, his father.

Whatever word you use, that trait has worked wonders for Smith. He has perfected his throwing motion to improve his passing efficiency, added 15 pounds of muscle through weightlifting in the offseason and improved his quickness and agility enough that he can run option plays every bit as as well as he can fire rockets to his talented receivers.

"He's the best quarterback I've ever been around," Meyer says.

Perhaps the most involved, too. Smith is so bright that he typically spends time with the coaches in their game-plan meetings, helping to decide what to try and what to avoid.

"I don't think there's any part of the game plan that goes through if he hasn't really given it approval," quarterbacks coach Dan Mullen says.

Though he arrived at Utah eager to learn, Smith nearly left the program after a disastrous debut in 2002.

The Utes were mired in a losing streak under former coach Ron McBride, and Smith had not played and expected to redshirt. But with the Utes getting blown out at San Diego State in the sixth game of the season, McBride threw Smith into the game, ill-prepared. He took only a handful of snaps, was sacked twice and left the game after throwing an interception that was returned for a touchdown.

The Utes lost, McBride was fired, and Smith seriously considered transferring.

But Smith liked Utah and his teammates well enough and was willing to give Meyer a chance.

"Urban did come down and meet with us very early on," Pam Smith says. "He, in fact, apologized to us for what had happened. He said, 'You know, I had nothing to do with it; it's just absolutely ... it's a terrible thing.' And he just told us that, you know, things would be different."

Nobody could have known just how different they would be. Smith still wasn't the starter at the beginning of last season, but he inherited the job when Brett Elliott dived for the goal line on a 2-point conversion attempt at the end of a game at Texas A&M, broke his wrist and unwittingly ceded his starting position forever.

When Smith made his first start the next week while fighting an excruciating back injury after four days to prepare for a nationally televised game against California in front of the largest crowd ever to watch a football game in Salt Lake City? No problem. Using a scaled-back version of the offense to suit his lack of experience, Smith directed two scoring drives in the fourth quarter that lifted the Utes to a 31-24 victory.

"Things just started to make sense to me as far as this offense," Smith says. "That was a big step."

Others saw it, too--all of the hard work in the classroom, the weight room and the film room finally starting to come together.

"When the bright lights come on at game time, a lot of guys go in one of two directions," Mullen says. "They either take it up a step, or they kind of shy away from it. And when the lights went on, for him, it was showtime."

The offense has been expanded to mind-boggling proportions, and the winning streak has reached 14 games--two shy of the school record set in 1928-30. The Utes will equal the record if they beat rival Brigham Young for the third straight season on Saturday in Rice-Eccles Stadium and then win a bowl game, perhaps the Fiesta Bowl on New Year's Day.

And Smith? He might still be a little light to have a tremendous future in the pros--he strains to keep his weight above 205 pounds--even though he has started to hear rumblings about whether he will be back for his senior season, particularly if Meyer leaves the Utes for another job.

But Smith is content for the moment to bask in his unexpected success and remember the lessons that have brought him this far.

"If you try to win and you try to have good stats and you try to put up big numbers, that's when you play bad," he says. "I play my best when I just take what's given. I don't force balls. I have a high completion percentage; I'm not always trying to force things in there and get a big play. I've come to the realization that that's what I have to do, and the stats will kind of come to me, especially in this offense."

Oh, the stats have come, all right. And a lot more talk about talent, trophies and tearing down the walls of the BCS have come right along with them.

RELATED ARTICLE: Mr. Smith goes to New York?

A case can be made that Alex Smith is the most Heisman-worthy quarterback in college football. Statistically speaking, it's an open-and-shut case. The closest thing to a smoking gun is his pass efficiency rating of 179.3. But the body of empirical evidence is what's so impressive.

Take a look at how Smith's numbers compare with those of other Heisman-contending QBs near the top of the BCS rankings. The areas examined: pass efficiency, total offense per game and points responsible for (passing, rushing, other) per game. To account for the relative nature of the latter two stats, we measured each player's contributions against his team's total offensive and scoring outputs.

You be the judge.--Steve Greenberg

                           Alex           Jason          Matt
                           Smith          Campbell       Leinart
                           Utah           Auburn         USC

Pass efficiency            179.3          171.4          150.9
Total offense/Share of
  team's total             296.9/59.5%    188.2/43.6%    233.2/53.6%
Points responsible for/
  Share of team's total    21.6/47.3%     11.2/32.7%     15.6/42.0%

                           Aaron          Jason
                           Rodgers        White
                           California     Oklahoma

Pass efficiency            163.4          165.7
Total offense/Share of
  team's total             229.3/46.7%    246.4/53.1%
Points responsible for/
  Share of team's total    15.1/39.7%     16.8/47.2%

RELATED ARTICLE: A match made in ... Memphis.

Begging for a seat marked "Utes" at the BCS table? Careful what you wish for, you could miss a great game.

Because given the choice between a Fiesta Bowl matchup of Utah and Boston College and a Liberty Bowl matchup of Utah and Louisville, as conference bowl-affiliation contracts require, you should leap at Utes-Cards quicker than you can say, "52-49 on a last-minute field goal."

Contractual obligations aside-and that's a big aside, says Liberty Bowl executive director Steve Ehrhart, who has spent recent weeks marking his turf against the BCS-Louisville vs. Utah would be a fan's dream: a bowl featuring two scoreboard-spinning offenses starring high-energy quarterbacks led by young, imaginative coaches whose names are on the BlackBerry of every A.D. with an opening (and, in Bobby Petrino's case, at least one without).

Assuming Utah wins out, Ehrhart would have to stand up to the sport's big boys to make this game happen, and he certainly has shown that kind of resolve in recent weeks as Fiesta and Orange bowl reps have paraded into Utah's press box.

"The BCS can't come along and say, 'All right, we want this team,'" Ehrhart told the Deseret Morning News. "We've been backing the Mountain West since the day of its inception. The BCS hasn't done anything for the Mountain West."

Realistically, sadly, there are roughly 14 million things, beyond on-field prestige, that the BCS can do for the Utes--and the MWC. The pressure to release Utah would be enormous, and Ehrhart might be, ahem, persuaded to give in with the right inducements. At some point in the negotiation, though, he will be looking for more than money; he'll need to fill a matchup void.

That's when there are precious few words you want to hear out of Ehrhart's mouth, aside from, "1 don't need Utah or the BCS; get me Boise State."--Bob Hille

COPYRIGHT 2004 Sporting News Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group