College Football Countdown: 96 Days
By Matt Green
There’s 96 days remaining in our College Football Countdown, and we continue yesterday’s trend of running the football.
The best running back in the SEC in 2016 played for the LSU Tigers, but it was not the guy that was drafted fourth overall by the Jacksonville Jaguars in April’s NFL Draft.
Leonard Fournette entered 2016 as one of the favorites to win the Heisman Trophy, but injuries hindered his junior season. And those injuries also allowed Derrius Guice to introduce himself to the college football world. And that leads us to today’s number on the College Football Countdown, which highlights one of Guice’s most outstanding plays from last season.
96
96-yard touchdown run for LSU’s Derrius Guice against Arkansas in 2016.
Guice started just six of LSU’s 12 games in 2016, and he still managed to lead the SEC with 1,387 rushing yards, and he was second in the SEC with 15 rushing touchdowns.
Guice averaged 115.6 rushing yards per game for the season, but that only tells half the story. In the six games that Guice started, he rushed for 11 touchdowns and averaged 146.8 yards per game. And that doesn’t even include the Arkansas game, where Guice carried 21 times for 252 yards and two touchdowns, including that 96-yarder.
Against Arkansas, Guice’s 96-yard touchdown served as the nail in the Razorbacks’ coffin. With the Tigers leading 31-10 midway through the fourth quarter, Guice put the cherry on top of his already stellar performance.
This season, Guice will try to pick up where he and his former running mate left off. Guice will enter the 2017 season with similar expectations to what Fournette had a year ago, and if he can stay healthy, we’ll se a lot more of those highlight reel runs this season.