Anthony’s potential high on, off field

ELY -- He did not grow up sprinting through rows of sugarcane, darting this way and that, diving into a sea of black muck, hoping to snare a small rabbit. He did not experience the legend that is said to have made high school football players in Florida faster than any nationally.

His was a town known for a different crop.

''Tomatoes,'' Rodelin Anthony said. ''If I would have run through them, I would have been slipping and sliding all over the place.''

How logical. You get that from Anthony.

Not a surprise. The kid just might be president one day.

Take the negative stereotypes you have heard or read or witnessed about a college athlete, put them in a coffee grinder and turn it on. Anthony doesn't fit any, right down to the classical music he meditates to minutes before kickoff.

UNLV has a chance this season to feature one of the best offenses in the Mountain West Conference, to improve on numbers from last year such as 25.6 points and 345 yards and, most important, five wins.

The Rebels can be very good moving the ball.

To be great, they need to discover a running game not on life support and trust that in his final season, Rodelin Anthony finally gets it.

You can't overstate the importance of a consistent third wide receiver to the scoring potential of a spread offense. UNLV has one of the country's best (Ryan Wolfe) and one of the league's most exciting (Phillip Payne). But you can successfully scheme against two dependable receivers. Three makes things a lot trickier.

Anthony looks the part. He's 6 feet 5 inches, 230 pounds, with a smile wide enough to cover this historic mining town where the Rebels have again come to escape the heat while preparing for the season.

But in 36 career games, Anthony's numbers are a modest 53 receptions for 762 yards and eight touchdowns. The presence of Wolfe and the departed Casey Flair the past several seasons played a part in such ordinary production, but so did this:

Anthony has had a problem with dropping the ball. He does it too often.

''I'm disappointed with what I have done here so far,'' Anthony said. ''I'm a realist. I know I could have done much better than what the numbers are. I always expect more of myself.''

He is a thinker. An organizer. In every year at UNLV he has been a member of the Rebel Leadership Committee, and he represented the athletic department at a 2008 NCAA National Leadership Development Conference for student-athletes in Orlando.

He has served internships in an ESPN regional office for the Las Vegas Bowl and another with the Environmental Protection Agency. He holds a dual major in political science and journalism.

He wants to host his own political talk show. Or become an attorney. Or a television reporter covering Washington. Or perhaps hold the most important job of all.

''He wants to be president,'' UNLV coach Mike Sanford said. ''He sees himself as a leader. He is very well spoken, very likable, a guy with very high goals.

''For him, this is a big year football-wise. He has a chance to have a great year. He has had moments of brilliance for us and moments of difficulty. Some of it is concentration. He tends to have lapses in focus. But he really came on strong near the end of last season and we'd like that to now carry through this entire year.''

Effort isn't an issue. Watch him warm up. Even during a simple jogging drill, Anthony requests of quarterbacks and coaches to throw him bad balls -- high, low, inside, outside -- so that he might better improve that concentration.

It's almost as if he analyzes the point too much, that maybe things would come easier on the field if he didn't think as much. Problem. He's always thinking. Always planning. Always striving to improve.

You don't earn a 4.5 grade-point average in high school by faking your way through classes. You don't become a three-time all-academic conference selection by merely showing up. You don't make the Dean's List twice by accident.

Anthony didn't chase rabbits growing up in Immokalee, Fla. But what he did was build a base for what appears a promising future.

''The whole (becoming president) thing -- why not, if I get the opportunity,'' he said. ''I would do my best to take advantage of it.

''I will always shoot for the stars. If I miss, I will still be amongst them.''

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ed Graney can be reached at egraney@reviewjornal.com or 702-383-4618. He also can be heard weeknights from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. on ''The Sports Scribes'' on KDWN (720 AM).