At The Speed Of Bryce

What’s it like to spend a day in the shoes of Stanford’s Bryce Love, the fastest running back in college football? To find out, first you have to get him to slow down.

- Molly Knight

At 6 a.m., I’m already in trouble.¶ The sun is just beginning to peek through the thick trees that surround Stanford’s campus, and I’m shivering in the parking lot behind Bryce Love’s dormitory, watching Love pedal away on a black electric bicycle. Even riding shotgun in a Stanford-issue golf cart, I have no prayer of catching up. That’s when I realize this assignment—to shadow the fastest running back in college football from daybreak to lights out—will reveal Love in exactly the way most Pac-12 defenses see him. Which is to say, I’ll have an excellent view of his back.¶ For much of the day, that back is seated on his electric bike—not that Love, 21, needs any help getting faster; I’m fairly certain the bike actually slows him down. As a 12-year-old in Wake Forest, North Carolina, he ran the 100 meters in 11.64 seconds, the 200 in 23.37 seconds and the 400 in 50.75 seconds. (His times in the 100 and 400 still stand as national age-group records.)

Those legs made him a four-star recruit as a senior at Wake Forest High, even though he stood 5-foot-9 and weighed a smidge under 180. He chose Stanford over most of the SEC, ACC and Big Ten despite never having heard of the school until head coach David Shaw offered him a scholarship in his sophomore year. (“He might not have heard of Stanford, but I can tell you that his parents had definitely heard of Stanford,” his mother, Angela, says.) After visiting the Northern California campus, Love fell in love with all those trees and the pink sunsets over the foothills and the nerdy football players who had interests outside of sports, just like he did.