"It's a lot more fun to learn plays for football," senior tailback Eion Hu said.

So maybe a strong connection does not exist. But we might as well clear up a few misperceptions while we're on the subject.

"My assignment's easy," Hu said. "I'm a running back, so I just have to know where to run. Pass plays and blocking assignments are a little more complicated, but football's not mentally tough for me. It's the offensive line and quarterbacks who have the hard job."

Hu's probably being modest as usual, but he also has a point about how complicated the offensive line is. Someone who does not realize the details of the position might insult linemen's intelligence, but the position involves as much thinking and awareness as any other on the field, both in terms of run blocking and pass blocking schemes.

"Each play is blocked differently against different defenses," captain Sean Riley said. "We go up against three or four different base defenses in a season, so we have to know how to block each of those."

By now, offensive linemen probably have come to grips with the fact that they will never receive the credit they deserve; only the blame when they blow an assignment. The people who do get the glory are the "skill-position" players, headlined, of course, by the quarterbacks.

"You have to sit down and read the book like a homework assignment," Snowden said. "But when the play's going 80 miles an hour, it's different from a lot of X's and O's on a sheet of paper."

"It's a lot more complicated than a high school offense," freshman quarterback Rich Linden said. "Early on during camp, I put in an hour a night studying the part of the playbook we'd practiced that day."

Whether players read the playbook like a textbook or not, everyone has at least one hour of meetings per day listening to coaches analyze tape and watching them diagram plays on the board.

So the next time someone calls a football player a dumb jock, ask him what a 35 Veer Right is. Then tell an offensive lineman what he just said.