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ARLINGTON, Texas — It isn’t supposed to work like this in the NFL. You aren’t supposed to fall out of the sky unannounced, crash-land into the playoffs, leading one of the league’s historic teams to the brink of a historic moment.
When’s the last time you’ve heard of a story like James Starks’ — the 193rd player picked in last spring’s draft, absent his entire senior year at Buffalo with a shoulder injury, absent from offseason training and preseason with a hamstring injury, absent for the Packers’ first six games as he whiled away on the Physically Unable to Perform list, absent from the playing field during the Packers’ must-win games against the Giants and Bears to end the regular season, accountable for all of 101 rushing yards during the regular season?
Compared to Starks, Tom Brady (pick No. 199 in the 2000 draft) was Peyton Manning coming out of Michigan. Hell, compared to Starks, John Starks was Blake Griffin.
“I know this may sound hard to believe but I wasn’t depressed at all while I was making my way back,” Starks said yesterday, as he stood on the field at Cowboys Stadium looking more than a little wide-eyed at the spectacle of Super Bowl Media Day. “I looked at it in a positive light. Everybody doubts you and they don’t know what you’re capable of. So when you get an opportunity to go out there and be successful and prove everybody wrong — I just get a thrill out of that.”
Starks has galvanized his home town of Niagara Falls, N.Y., too, and converted most of the citizenry — including his grandmother, whom Starks describes as a “crazy Bills fan” — from obsessing over Buffalo’s miseries and embracing this remarkable Packers run that Starks has been one of the impossible-to-believe engines of. At his old school, Niagara Falls High, where all headgear is strictly forbidden, students this week have been granted one exception:
They can wear cheeseheads to class.
And many students have embraced the offer.
“The whole thing is like a dream, man,” Starks said yesterday. “And I don’t want to wake up.”
The very first time Starks touched the ball in the postseason, he rumbled for 27 yards, part of a 23-carry, 123-yard coming-out party against the Eagles in Philadelphia. And while he was mostly a short-burst stalwart against the Falcons and the Bears — averaging barely 3.0 yards a carry in 47 carries — he has helped give the Packers a ground presence they had missed ever since Ryan Grant suffered a season-ending ankle injury in Week 1, and he’s yet to put the ball on the ground.
“It’s just a great story,” Packers offensive coordinator Joe Philbin said. “I’d be lying if I said we knew what we were hiding with him, because frankly we just didn’t see him a lot because he was so banged up. But we’d seen him work, we know he’s a bright kid, he got a chance to prove himself and that’s exactly what he’s done. It’s hard not to root for a kid like that, for a story like this.”
If there is one comparable story, it’s probably Timmy Smith, who gained a total of 596 yards in his regular-season NFL career, yet as a rookie in Super Bowl XXII, set a record with 202 yards for the Redskins after gaining 76 fewer yards than that in his entire debut season. Smith’s story, of course, ended badly, not only on the field (he is the Dexy’s Midnight Runners of NFL runners, a one-hit wonder who never again replicated his Super Bowl effort) and off (a cocaine bust six years ago).
Starks was asked about Smith yesterday, and his puzzled look verified that he wasn’t familiar with any of that story. Which, truth be told, probably isn’t a bad thing.
