Stanford’s Bryce Love is hooked on football — and medicine

If this were baseball, Bryce Love would be walked almost every time he came to the plate. But it’s college football, so he’s a threat to score on any play.

There’s a lot more to Stanford’s junior tailback than the shiftiness, the power to break 25 tackles in a single game (Arizona State) and the gasp-inducing speed.

Back home in Wake Forest, N.C., he decided when he was about 5 that, one, football was his game and, two, he wanted to become a doctor.

He played saxophone in his middle-school band. Around the same time, he stopped going by his first name, Jonathon, preferring his middle name because, according to his father, he “felt ‘Bryce’ was more mature.”

YouTube videos show him, as a youngster, leaving other great young sprinters far behind in national-championship track meets.

“He was considered a national phenom at age 11-12,” said his father, Chris, who coached him in track and football. “But his focus was always on football. Once he scored his first touchdown in flag football at age 5, he was hooked.”

Chris, an information-technology consultant, was a sprinter and a reserve defensive back at South Carolina, where he had to cover future pros Sterling Sharpe and Robert Brooks in practice.

Growing up, Bryce loved tailbacks like Barry Sanders, Reggie Bush and Adrian Peterson. He loved Tom Brady, too. Like Marshawn Lynch, he also loved Skittles.

“He was the original Skittles guy,” Danny Peoples, his coach with the Carolina Elite track club, said. “When he ran well, everybody gave him Skittles. He was a Skittles fanatic.”

All true, Love said. “It’s funny because I had braces at the time, so I wasn’t supposed to be eating Skittles and stuff like that. Coach Peoples used it as a motivator. It definitely worked.”

So well, in fact, that in terms of USA Track and Field records, he was the fastest 11-year-old ever. He was dubbed “Baby Bolt” after Usain Bolt, the great Jamaican sprinter.

In Pop Warner football, Love was a threat not only at tailback but at safety. Warren Marshall, his coach with the North Raleigh Bulldogs, said his exploits were hard to believe.

“We had a game where he was breaking so many tackles that the coach of the other team asked the ref to see if Bryce had grease on his jersey,” Marshall said.

“They’d stack the box, but we’d go student-body right and student-body left.” And pretty soon Love would be in the end zone. On defense, Peoples said, “It would make me cringe to see how he destroyed running backs.”

His mother, Angela, saw another side of him. “He’s very genuine. He’s the ultimate teammate,” she said. “He brings that out of other people too — a great spirit, warm, kind, giving.”

When he got to Wake Forest High, everybody knew “from Day 1” that he was a special athlete, head coach Reggie Lucas said. “To be so humble and so smart — we called him the complete package.”

Love and his older brother, Chris, now a starting cornerback at East Carolina, competed against each other at everything growing up. Quiet and reserved off the field, Bryce became a beast on it.

In 2014, Wake Forest lost a rain-soaked game to Sanderson-Raleigh when a Wake player intercepted a pass and, instead of taking a knee and running out the clock, tried to run it back. He fumbled, and the other team scored a game-winning touchdown.

Afterward, Love’s parents couldn’t find him. The trainers couldn’t, either. Finally, he was seen running drills on a machine called a Blaster on a practice field. He was still in uniform. It was still raining.

It wasn’t the unfortunate fumble that cost Wake Forest the game, Love decided. He blamed the loss on himself, that he hadn’t done enough.

Besides being a straight-A student, he left high school with 5,372 career rushing yards and 71 touchdowns. He averaged 10.5 yards per rush. Five games into his junior year at Stanford, he is averaging 11.1 yards per carry this season. He has run for 1,088 yards and eight touchdowns.

“He’s never going to take credit,” Lucas said. “He’s going to make his teammates be part of his success.”

Thanks to an open date in the Wake Forest schedule, Lucas was able to watch Love’s record-breaking 301-yard performance against Arizona State on Saturday in person, along with four of his assistant coaches, the school principal and the athletic director.

Afterward, Love received the game ball from head coach David Shaw. Emerging from the locker room, he handed the ball to Lucas and told him to take it back to the school. “We wouldn’t let him give it up,” Lucas said.

When Love was about 6 or 7, he had pneumonia. “The doctor made me feel better, so I wanted one day to be like that,” he said. “That’s what started it. In middle school, I developed that desire to work with people in my community.”

He’s especially interested in pediatrics, stem-cell research and genetics.

He’s a student of football too and learned valuable lessons from Heisman Trophy runner-up Christian McCaffrey, specifically “running with a lot more patience, setting up blockers, understanding you have to take what the defense gives you,” Love said.

Amazingly, Stanford had the most electrifying tailback in college football the past two years and replaced him with someone with just as much voltage.

By the numbers with Love

A quick 1,000 yards: Stanford junior Bryce Love’s 1,088 rushing yards through five games are the fourth-most by any player in FBS history — Garrett Wolfe (1,181 in 2006), Marcus Allen (1,136 in 1981), Byron Hanspard (1,112 in 1996).

A streak of excellence: Love has rushed for 100 yards in seven straight games (second-longest streak in school history) and is the only Cardinal player in the last 20 years with a rush of 50 or more yards in seven straight games.

The 300-yard club: Last week in a 301-yard performance against Arizona State, he became the ninth Pac-12 running back all-time to rush for 300 or more yards in a game.

How Love compares

Stanford running back Bryce Love has posted more rushing yards through five games — and a much higher yards-per-carry average — than the five running backs who have won the Heisman Trophy over the past 20 years: