Jeremy Hill Is A Beast. Does His Past Matter? 125 FBS Teams, Ranked.

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3. LSU (4–0). Herculean tailback Jeremy Hill is going to be a star, meaning everyone who is now obligated to write or talk about him is also obligated to decide how much they care that Hill has pleaded guilty to two violent crimes in the past three years. I bring it up selfishly, because I am one of those people, and after watching him eviscerate Auburn for 183 yards and three touchdowns on Saturday night, I'd like to be able to talk about him as the centerpiece of a championship-caliber offense without having to attach a permanent disclaimer acknowledging the moral purgatory that one enters when heaping praise on a violent offender for being good at football. We're not talking about weed or some arbitrary NCAA controversy here: I can't recall another player on the college level with Hill's profile who has played with anything as serious as a sexual battery rap in his background, much less an additional battery charge after arriving on campus.

That's not an argument that he shouldn't be playing—quite the opposite. My policy on that kind of moralizing is that if the legal system, the university, and the coaches are okay with letting a borderline kid continue to play, that's their call. (In this case, the decision was also up to Hill's teammates, who voted to allow him back this summer.) If not, also their call. They have assumed a role in his development as a citizen and a human. I'm interested in the kid as a player. And Hill is a hell of a player. Like most people, the best I can do at reconciling these competing impulses is to nod in the general direction of Cecil Collins, another talented, troubled LSU running back who shone so brightly in such a brief window of time—he saw the field in a grand total of four games in 1997—that his ongoing legal odyssey still makes local headlines more than 15 years later. How good could "The Diesel" have been, if he'd remained healthy and out of handcuffs? Jeremy Hill is in the process of showing us. Whether or not he deserves the opportunity, I'd still prefer we never wind up asking the same question about him.

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