Most football players making their college debuts mention the need to adjust to the speed of the game.
When quarterback Robert Griffin III made his anxiously awaited debut for Baylor last season, the speed of the game adjusted to him.
He's that fast, fast enough to win a Big 12 championship in the 400-meter hurdles in the spring of 2008, when most of his high-school classmates were completing their senior years at Copperas Cove High School in Texas. Griffin graduated in December 2007 and spent the next spring practicing football with the Bears and running track.
Luckily for Wake Forest, Griffin didn't win the starting job outright. Instead Art Briles, in his first game as Baylor's head coach, started Kirby Freeman, a transfer from Miami.
The Deacons made the night far easier on themselves by scoring on their first three possessions. They led 17-0 before Griffin ever took the field and the speed of the game accelerated.
"He was pretty impressive," Coach Jim Grobe said last year after his Deacons prevailed 41-13. "For a young kid to get out there and do some of the things that he did tonight, he got my attention.
"They gave us fits tonight."
By his third game last season, Griffin set a school record with 217 yards rushing against Washington State. Afterward, Coach Paul Wulff of the Cougars said: "That quarterback makes everybody look slow."
That quarterback now has 11 starts behind him going into Saturday's 2009 season-opener at Wake Forest. Briles, whose team finished 4-8 last season after losing three games by a combined 13 points, is hoping that it shows.
"We're just more familiar with our players, and vice versa," Briles said. "So we have a little more comforting understanding at what should happen in certain situations as opposed to a year ago.... What we expect is (for Griffin to have) just a good understanding of what needs to happen with the football, where, when and how. That's the thing that he's really been working on, and he's really good at."
Briles has one of the hardest jobs in major-college football, trying to coach a program that has compiled a 13-43 conference record since joining the Big 12 in 1996 to its first bowl appearance since the 1994 Alamo Bowl. But he has nine starters back on offense and nine back on defense, and he has the one asset a coach wants most of all.
He has a quarterback who can dictate the way a game is played. That was obvious last season when Griffin completed 160 of 267 passes for 2,091 yards and 15 touchdowns and rushed 173 times for 843 yards (4.9 yards a carry) and 13 touchdowns. Griffin was named the Big 12 offensive newcomer of the year by conference coaches.
By all accounts Griffin is an uncommonly mature sophomore, which showed last season when he set a major-college record by throwing the first 205 passes of his career without being intercepted.
Griffin originally committed to Houston when Briles was the coach there, but followed him to Waco when Briles took over the Baylor program.
"That's one of the things that makes Robert special, that he is a very disciplined, very focused, very determined and confident young person," Briles said. "And he's very intelligent. So he's got all those ingredients that go together with a burning desire to excel and to win.
"So when you throw all those things together with the physical presence that he brings to the game -- being able to run and throw effectively -- then what you've got is a darned good football player."
Both of Griffin's parents spent their careers in the military and both required their children to succeed academically in order to play sports. Both, upon retiring from the Army, returned to college, Jacqueline Griffin for a degree in general studies from Mary Hardin-Baylor and Robert Jr., for a psychology degree from Tarleton State.
Griffin graduated seventh in his high-school class and made the honor roll both semesters of his freshman year at Baylor.
"Did I see that (maturity)?" Briles asked. "I saw that when I was recruiting him, and he just put an exclamation point at the end of all of those intangibles last year, because he did an outstanding job as a true freshman."
■ Dan Collins can be reached at 727-7323 or at dcollins@wsjournal.com.
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