Rancho Cotate braces for Antioch's star running back Najee Harris

ROHNERT PARK

The Rancho Cotate football team got together Wednesday to watch a horror movie, full of chasing and slashing and collisions that left the ground strewn with victims. It was strictly for mature audiences.

“All right, hit the lights,” Cougars coach Ed Conroy said from the front of a classroom on the Rancho Cotate campus.

The fluorescent lights dimmed and Conroy began to work a laptop connected to a massive high-definition monitor, calling up plays via the Hudl video-sharing program and running them backward and forward to make his points. Between 30 and 35 boys crowded the room, wearing T-shirts and shorts or jeans, sipping from plastic bottles of water or Gatorade. For the most part, their eyes were glued to the screen.

Time after time, one figure commanded attention as he broke into open field, shed tackles and ran, ran, ran.

“Guys, it’s important you just don’t stare at No. 2 the whole time,” assistant coach Gehrig Hotaling interjected at one point. “Look at the guys trying to block you, their schemes, where you’re supposed to be. You know what No. 2 can do.”

A more appropriate question might be: What can’t Najee Harris do? As Rancho Cotate prepares for tonight’s home game against Antioch, it is tasked with stopping the unstoppable, or at least containing the uncontainable.

Conroy’s teams have faced some impressive running backs in recent years, Marin Catholic’s Kahlil Bell (who spent four years in the NFL) and Bethel’s C.J. Anderson (currently starting for the Denver Broncos) being a couple of prominent examples.

“At this point in his career, I think (Harris) is the best kid we’ve played against,” Conroy said.

Since taking over as the Panthers’ primary back as a sophomore, Najee Harris has run for 5,688 yards in 26 games, an average of 219 yards per game. He has scored 72 touchdowns in that span. Rivals.com, Sports Illustrated and Bleacher Report all rank Harris, an 18-year-old senior, as the No. 1 high school recruit in the nation. ESPN puts him at No. 3, USA Today at No. 5.

He’s a five-star prospect, because they don’t give six stars.

The colleges are swarming like hammerheads. Harris verbally committed to Alabama and Nick Saban before his junior season. But nothing is official until a recruit signs and delivers his letter of intent next February, so the universities keep talking to Harris, and he is listening. According to ESPN, of the schools currently in the Associated Press Top 25, 10 have offered scholarships to Harris. Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh and Notre Dame’s Brian Kelly, among others, have made pilgrimages to Antioch.

The media attention is super-sized. The San Francisco Chronicle is regularly checking in with the young player in a series it calls “The Najee Chronicles.”

It is into this atmosphere that Rancho Cotate is about to wade. Yes, it’s just a football game, and probably not as important to the student section as, say, battling Cardinal Newman. But there’s a different feel to tonight’s contest, which kicks off at 7:30 p.m.

Senior linebacker Tanielu Guerrero said Rancho students started buzzing about Harris’ appearance even before the Cougars’ previous game, a victory against Sequoia of Redwood City.

“My grandparents live down in the city, and the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle was Najee Harris,” senior defensive back Ryan Phillips said. “They called me up saying this kid from Antioch made the front cover. I said, ‘Yeah, we’re playing him next week.’ It’s crazy.”

The Cougars won’t be at the stadium to collect autographs, obviously. They have spent the week installing a game plan designed to keep Harris from running wild.

Easier said than done. Rancho traveled to Antioch for a game almost exactly a year ago and lost 54-14. It was 46-0 at halftime. Harris ran for 224 yards on 17 carries, in roughly two quarters of football.

What makes the guy such a handful? Start with his frame: 6-foot-2, 228 pounds and a body-fat percentage approaching zero. Harris will probably want to add a few pounds before he’s carrying the ball in the SEC. As high school players go, he is hard to bring down.

“A lot of times when you watch the film, he just pushes the first kid off of him,” Conroy said. “It’s one-on-one: ‘Get out of my way, little fella,’ and he keeps running.”

Next, add the appropriate dosage of speed. Some national scouting sites list breakaway speed as the only hole in Harris’ game. That might come as news to the defenders on that Hudl tape, many of whom wound up futilely chasing him from behind.

“That kid has like an extra gear,” Conroy said. “When it starts going bad, he like has extra acceleration, a little extra anger when he’s running. You’re kind of cruising along, cruising along, cruising along, then all of a sudden he goes off. He’s got that next level of ability that none of us have.”

Harris’ ball-carrying toolbox includes hurdling low tackles and the occasional spin move. He catches the ball and pass blocks, too. But as you watch the video, it’s clear that his gifts aren’t purely physical. Harris shows tremendous patience in waiting for holes to open, and a reliable knack for cutting back to open space.

“When you watch the film, that’s where the play’s supposed to go, huh?” Conroy said to his players as he broke down video of a particular snap. “That’s where all the blocking goes. But as you guys watch, didn’t always go there. Right? He’s like going where the hole opens up.”

The Cougars players are believers.

“He’s a strong, powerful runner. Very agile,” said Phillips, who missed last year’s game after undergoing shoulder injury. “He has the quickness, no doubt, and he’s not afraid to go above a person or run the person over.”

“He’s also the type of runner to take a broken-down play into a touchdown,” Guerrero added.

The challenge wouldn’t be so immense if Harris were a one-man show, but the Panthers have assembled a very good team around him. They have been throwing the ball about 20 times a game this year, putting tremendous pressure on defenses that are geared up to stop the halfback.

Antioch’s only loss last year was 55-54 to Foothill (Pleasanton) in a North Coast Section Division 1 semifinal playoff game. (Harris was spectacular in defeat, running for 390 yards and six touchdowns.) The Panthers lost at Milpitas two weeks ago, 49-28, but bounced back with a 48-14 win against San Leandro.

The Rancho players seem eager for the challenge.

“How many times can you say, yeah, I played against an Alabama running back? Or in the future, if he goes in the NFL, that I played against an NFL running back,” Phillips said.

“And if we end up beating him, that’s just a bigger story,” Guerrero noted.

But Conroy knows there’s a flip side to history, too. Rancho Cotate clearly has some firepower, having scored 112 points in its first two games of the season. But the Cougars defense is a work in progress; they lost 63-46 at Analy in the season opener. If the Rancho defenders aren’t focused, disciplined and aggressive in tonight’s game, this one could get away from them in a hurry.

“I showed my kids, in the paper, his coaches want him to have the greatest single-game rushing in California,” Conroy said of Harris. “And they, I think, want him to break their career rushing record. So he has some goals, and his coaches have some goals for him. I don’t want to be that school that does that for him.”