Donnel Pumphrey checklist: Win Las Vegas Bowl, set rushing record, avoid asterisk

Of all the shift key symbols on the top row of the keyboard, the asterisk probably gets the worst rap. This is especially true in sports.

Sure, if you covered the Dodgers back in the day, and Dave Kingman went off with three or four home runs, you might have to use the !@#$% in concert to convey what Tommy Lasorda thought about it. But it’s easier for five symbols to share the blame.

The asterisk pretty much stands alone. You see an asterisk attached to your name, controversy is soon to follow.

And now some football people want to attach an asterisk to Donnel Pumphrey’s name.

Pumphrey is the pint-sized running back from Canyon Springs High School who has rushed for 6,290 yards during a brilliant career at San Diego State. Which is a lot of yards for a little guy.

Ron Dayne is the 3-liter-sized running back from New Jersey who rushed for 6,397 yards during a similarly brilliant career at Wisconsin from 1996 to 1999. Which is a lot of yards for a big guy.

Tack on bowl games, and Dayne’s total rises to 7,125 yards.

But the NCAA says Dayne cannot tack on the yards he gained in bowl games to his career rushing total after the fact. And so now there’s controversy, be it real or contrived.

The rule was changed in 2002, probably because where there once were fewer bowl games, and not everybody got to play in one, by then there were a bazillion bowls, and virtually every backup nose tackle from Akron to Youngstown State was taking home a swag bag.

So the official rushing record, the one Pumphrey is shooting for against Houston in Saturday’s Las Vegas Bowl at Sam Boyd Stadium, is 6,290 yards. He needs 108 yards. Were Dayne’s postseason yards tacked on, Pumphrey would be 836 yards short. He would have needed a cannon to shoot at the record.

“He’s gonna have (an asterisk) by his name if he breaks the record anyway,” Dayne said on a recent Wisconsin State Journal podcast. “They didn’t use none of my bowl games.”

It would be easy to make a case for Dayne. But then where do you draw the line?

Pete Maravich scored 3,667 points during his career at Louisiana State, and 46 years later, his record still stands. Maravich played only three seasons. Freshmen weren’t eligible in his day. If they were, you’d need about six cannons to shoot at Pistol Pete’s record.

But if somebody comes along and scores more points in four years than Pete scored in three, is the new kid going to get the asterisk?

And then what do you do with the 3-point shot? A huge percentage of Maravich’s field goals came on long shots that would have counted three points today. Will the kid who breaks his record receive the dreaded double asterisk?

Not likely.

When Mark McGwire broke baseball’s hallowed single-season home run record in 1998, it was Roger Maris’ mark of 61 in 162 games that he broke — not Babe Ruth’s 60 in 154.

Maris was the original asterisk guy; it wasn’t until 1991 that a committee voted to remove it from his name in the record book. By then, Roger was dead of cancer.

Before he died, this is what Maris said: “I didn’t make the schedule. And do you know any other records that have been broken since the 162-game schedule that have an asterisk? I don’t.”

Exactly.

Pumphrey could have said the same thing after the Aztecs practiced at Rebel Park this week. He didn’t. For starters, he doesn’t own the record yet, and it’s no sure thing he gets it, because the Houston defense allows only 97.9 rushing yards per game, and he needs 108 by his lonesome.

Beyond that and by all accounts, this is a classy young man not given to braggadocio.

“I know of Ron Dayne. I was a young guy when he was still running the ball. It’s just an honor, really, to be on a list with such greats like these guys,” a smiling Pumphrey said before switching gears, as if he had just broken into the San Jose State secondary.

“It’s been an amazing four years. Just being around my teammates has been the best. I get to play in front of all my friends and family out here. This is where it all started. Just to be able to finish my college career here, it’s gonna be a fun one.”

That’s how one handles the asterisk question. One acknowledges it, deftly sidesteps it. Credit the other guy. Say nice things about your teammates. Give a shout-out to friends and family.

By the end of the aforementioned podcast, even big Ron Dayne seemed to be evolving on the asterisk.

He wished Donnel Pumphrey luck. He said records are made to be broken.

Period.

No shift key.

No asterisk.

Contact Ron Kantowski at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow @ronkantowski on Twitter.