Conventional wisdom will have you believe that players from small
colleges can’t make it at the professional level because they didn’t
play against a level of competition that adequately prepared them for
the pros — as did the football players at top-rated programs like
Florida State, Michigan, and Nebraska.
Based on that premise, the fact that Fred Lane is playing pro ball
at all might be considered a miracle, much less being considered an
up-and-coming running back for the Carolina Panthers.
The twenty-two-year-old rookie played at Lane College in Tennessee,
which is hardly considered a heavyweight in the college football
universe. Yet with the NFL’s regular season winding down, Lane — the
first player from his school to make an NFL team — has established
himself as a legitimate performer.
“He’s gonna be real good,”‘ says Ed Hardin, a North Carolina-based
sportswriter who covers the NFL. “Yeah, he still has things to learn,
but he’s young and he’ll get bigger.
“He’s a good fit for what the Panthers like to do offensively,”
adds Hardin. “He runs well and gets the job done. I think he’s gonna be
around for awhile.”
Richard Lawson, who was Lane College’s offensive coordinator during
Lane’s senior year, isn’t a bit surprised that the rookie is making
people around the NFL sit up and take notice.
“The biggest concern I had about Fred was whether or not he would
get a legitimate chance to show what he could do,” explains Lawson. “A
lot of times players from small schools don’t get that chance because
coaches and scouts look at the level of competition they played against
in college and say they don’t have the talent to make it at that level.
