A Hitch in the Step : Knee Injury Prevented Farmer From Meeting Expectations in His Only Season at Northridge

When Jamal Farmer stepped onto the playing field 11 weeks ago for the first game of the season wearing the black and red uniform of Cal State Northridge, the horns of angels echoed from the heavens.

OK, the horns were actually dented trumpets being played by members of the Cal State Fullerton band. And they weren’t in the heavens, they were in the end zone of Fullerton’s new football field. And the music was directed at their team.

But the point is, Farmer’s arrival was a big deal.

Northridge Coach Bob Burt should have been renamed Bob Burst with the overflowing enthusiasm he expressed for the biggest catch he had made in six plus years at the school. Farmer, who ran NCAA Division I defenses silly in three years at the University of Hawaii, was a Division II Matador.

Farmer himself could hardly control his excitement. At 225 pounds of concrete-hard muscle, he wondered quietly whether he might be able to knock a linebacker from places like Cal Poly San Luis Obispo or Cal State Sacramento clear off the playing field, perhaps onto the top of the poor lad’s team bus in the parking lot. When pressed, he whispered his dreams: 2,000 yards . . . 20 touchdowns ... a pack of drooling, wide-eyed NFL scouts.

The season’s over now, gone in a blur, a blend of shining moments but heavy with the struggles of a knee injury, of collisions with linebackers who didn’t get knocked anywhere, of finishing the season with just a handful of touchdowns, of not even rushing for 2,000 feet , of being outgained by fellow Western Football Conference players Rais Aho (Portland State), Pedro Lewis (Cal State Sacramento) and Brian Fitz (Cal Poly San Luis Obispo), guys who will see the NFL like most of us do, on TV. And for Farmer, a not-so-prestigious place on the all-conference second team.

Most significantly, there was the moment a surgeon probed deep into Farmer’s left knee. And the many moments of pain and doubt that ensued.

The NFL scouts? Well, they came, as predicted. They watched Farmer practice and they watched him play, both live and on film. Mostly, they liked what they saw. But none went as far as to drool. And if they were wide-eyed it was only because the lighting at CSUN’s North Campus Stadium is so bad.

Farmer’s final stats: 610 yards rushing, five touchdowns. Nine catches for 94 yards. The team had a 5-5 record.

Not exactly what Farmer and Burt had in mind. “I had bigger hopes for the season,” Burt said. “And so did he.”

There were brief glimpses of what Farmer and Burt had anticipated.

Against Santa Clara on Oct. 17, Farmer gained 208 yards in 19 carries, a man running against children. On one play he broke through the middle, dropped a linebacker with a fall-out-of-your-cleats fake and romped 69 yards. Later, with a similar move at the line of scrimmage, he ran 59 yards for a touchdown. He probably could have gained more than 300 yards, but he shared playing time with Robert Trice.

Before that game, Farmer had piled up all of 21 yards in 22 carries. His problems started early. Very early. On the first play of the first game--at Fullerton--he twisted his left knee returning the kickoff. The pain grew more intense as the game wore on, but he played until the end.

On Sept. 16, he underwent arthroscopic surgery to remove torn cartilage. He missed the next three games and came back against Idaho. Sort of. He gained 14 yards in 10 carries during a 30-7 defeat. The pain lingered.

“When I hurt my knee, I didn’t think it was anything,” Farmer said. “But after the game (against Fullerton), it got stiff. Then they told me I needed surgery. . . . When I came back, it still bothered me. I had no confidence in the knee anymore.”

He got it back in a hurry against Santa Clara. “The 69-yard run felt good,” he said. “But to be honest, that’s not my thing. My game is making people miss or running them over. The inside game, that’s my game.”

Each week after the Santa Clara game, Farmer showed the confidence and the punishing inside game. Where he had hesitated, he now put his head down and tried to crush people. His knee had healed, and his mind had followed.

In the last game, Saturday night at home against Cal State Sacramento, what Farmer had hoped would happen in every game, what had happened against Santa Clara, happened again.

He dominated.

Pounding the ball 24 times into a Sacramento defense ranked No. 1 in the conference against the run, Farmer piled up 146 yards. He also caught a swing pass and romped 51 yards.

Early in the second quarter, Farmer showed the power that could, possibly, vault him into the NFL.

He took a handoff from quarterback Marty Fisher and quickly was confronted by left tackle Jon Kirksey, who is 6-foot-5, 335 pounds. Farmer spun the huge man around and deposited him on the ground.

Two steps later he did the same thing to 235-pound linebacker Sean Chandler and after that he plowed over free safety Rod McMasters, doing to the 212-pound senior what the bulls do to slow people in Pamplona.

Farmer gained 19 yards on the play. And much more. He also got all of his confidence back, a sometimes-raging confidence that caused great friction between himself and his coaches at Hawaii and hastened his departure from the islands, but a confidence necessary to go beyond college football.

“The highlight of the season for me was the last game,” he said. “Even though I had a game with more yards earlier, the last game I felt my old self coming back. I was making things happen, doing what I wanted to do against the defense. For the first time, I wasn’t catering to my knee anymore. That last game, that was Jamal Farmer.”

Burt said he always will wonder what a healthy Farmer might have achieved, running wild in 10 games instead of in only a few.

“Basically, he got hurt,” Burt said. “He was hurt throughout the Fullerton game, so he only played, really, in six games. And he got close to 700 yards rushing. He would easily have had 1,100 or 1,200 yards if he was healthy.”

And to the critics who said Farmer’s attitude would cause problems among the Matadors, that his problems at Hawaii were more than a player-coach personality feud, Burt laughs. “We got along really well,” Burt said. “Really well. He was our leader.”

Because of Farmer’s impressive numbers in three years at Hawaii (2,124 yards in 440 carries), starting with a freshman season in which he set one NCAA record and five school records with 986 yards and 18 touchdowns, the graduate of Granada Hills High was on most NFL scouting lists this year.

More than a dozen scouts came to watch him, including representatives of the Minnesota Vikings, New York Jets, Detroit Lions and Miami Dolphins.

Farmer likely will get an invitation to the NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis in the spring, a strength and speed evaluation camp for the nation’s top NFL prospects.

And that, said Farmer, is all he wanted.

“That is what it will all come down to,” he said. “All my life I’ve played for this, for this one chance. I’ve been dedicated to this moment since early in high school.

“There are a lot of guys in the NFL who you never heard of in college. A lot of them. I’m going to be another one of them.”