If you didn’t know anything about football and just relied upon what you read, you would tend to believe great running backs are super human players who carry the rest of their teammates along to whatever success they all enjoy on the field.

We writers are guilty of perpetuating the “super back” image, mostly because football is so unwieldy to write about. You never read a story in the paper about a college football game that begins: “Senior offensive guard Joe Blockowski successfully executed 19 down blocks, eight pull-and-leads, and racked up 12 pancakes, opening enough holes for tailback Rip Roadrunner to gain 294 yards and score six touchdowns….”

A football offense simply has too many moving parts to describe, many of which never touch the ball. So we oversimplify, and you wind up reading about the backs. The image of the heroic individual is reinforced.

University of Maine football fans learned just how misleading the “super back” image can be – and how vital the other 10 offensive players are to a back’s success – from Carl Smith, who carried the ball for the Black Bears from 1988-91.

In his first two seasons, during which he ran behind a veteran offensive line and took handoffs in between passes thrown by one of the great Yankee Conference quarterbacks in history in Mike Buck, Smith fairly flew to 2,590 yards. He scored 26 TDs in 21 games. That’s 123 yards and more than one TD per contest.

But following the 1989 season, during which he led Division I-AA in rushing and scoring, Smith watched as Buck and top offensive lineman Scott Hough graduated. The personnel and coaching staff changed. Over his final two seasons, Smith had to scratch and claw for 1,435 yards. He scored 10 TDs in his last 21 games. That’s 68.3 yards per game and less than one TD every two contests, a far cry from his earlier success.

Saturday in Orono, there will be another running back burdened with the “super” image playing on Alumni field. He will carry the ball for the New Hampshire Wildcats when they battle Maine in the season opener. Barry Bourassa, a 5-foot-7, 165-pound senior, led I-AA in all-purpose yardage the past two seasons. Bourassa knows all about success. He also knows what happened to Carl Smith.

“Yeah, I do,” said Bourassa, a native of Weymouth, Mass. “There’s been a lot of talk around here about that. A lot of people have analyzed Carl Smith and me.”

The analysis stems from the parallels in the team situations. Like Smith in 1990, Bourassa is entering the ’92 season having watched his team change drastically. Four UNH offensive linemen and the quarterback graduated from last year’s conference tri-champions. Everywhere he looks in the huddle this season, Bourassa sees new faces.

What Bourassa doesn’t know yet, and won’t know until the season unfolds beginning today, is whether he will share Smith’s fate of reduced effectiveness.

“That’s something we’re going to have to wait and see on. I’m just going out there trying to be an athlete. I’m just going to try and make plays. I can’t sit here and worry if the line is going to block. No one can tell that until we play,” Bourassa said.

Like Smith, Bourassa can count on being a man marked by opposing defenses. You don’t lead the nation and blend into the background. The prospect, he said, doesn’t worry him. He got used to wearing an invisible bullseye on his jersey with the No. 34 on it a year ago.

“I feel like I was pretty much a target last year,” said Bourassa, who rushed for 1,185 yards and scored 21 TDs in 12 games in ’91. “We did have a lot of offensive weapons, though. And the line did a tremendous job blocking.

“We have some talent on this team, too,” he continued. “Now, we’ll see how the younger kids step up.”

And if they don’t, at least not enough to provide Bourassa with the level of success UNH fans have come to expect from him?

“I don’t worry about it. I feel like I’ve obtained a lot of goals. I’m just going to go out there and try to help us be successful,” said Barry Bourassa, “super back.” And target.