College football's top workout freaks 
February, 22, 2006
02/22/06
8:51
AM ET
As the NFL combine kicks off this week, time to unveil my list of college football's top workout freaks. Last year's top guy was Miami (Ohio) LB Terna Nande, who I'm expecting will bench 225 pounds around 171 times for the NFL scouts. Maryland TE Vernon Davis, last year's No. 2, figures to create a Shawne Merriman-like buzz at the RCA Dome. Other "freaks" from last year's list who will be on display in Indy are NC State's Manny Lawson, Miami's Sinorice Moss, Boise State's Daryn Colledge, USC's Winston Justice and Florida State powerhouse OG Matt Meinrod, who coincidentally has some training video floating around the Web.
1. Owen Schmitt, FB, West Virginia: Actually, freak doesn't seem to do the 6-foot-3, 255-pound junior justice. "He's a mutant," says Mike Barwis, WVU's loquacious strength coach. Schmitt is a helluva walk-on story. He's a former 1,000-yard tailback at Division III Wisconsin-River Falls who decided to see if he could play at a higher level. He shopped himself around, reportedly twice approaching Maryland, which finally said they had no use for him. Maybe the UnderArmour school should've at least offered to use him as the company's new pitchman.
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Bruce Feldman
Bruce Feldman is a senior writer at ESPN The Magazine. He started at ESPN in 1994. He spent a good portion of two years in the South working on his book, "Meat Market: Inside the Smash-Mouth World of College Football Recruiting."
His first book, "Cane Mutiny: How the Miami Hurricanes Overturned the Football Establishment," made it to No. 1 among sports titles in the fall of 2004.
Bruce can be reached via Twitter at @BFeldmanESPN. and his full ESPN.Com archives are located here.
