BOWLING GREEN — In the fall of 2013, word arrived to Gary Kornfeld that he just had to see a running back on the freshman football team.

The longtime former St. Louis University High School football coach made his way to one of the games, and it was true.

A diminutive 14-year-old seemed to be playing at a different pace than everyone else on the field. The back wasn’t big and he didn’t posses sprinter speed, but the defense couldn’t seem to ever put a good hit on him. He occasionally fielded punts in borderline impossible situations and still somehow managed evade the oncoming swarm.

He just wasn’t the same player Kornfeld initially came to watch. Kornfeld let the other coaches know as much.

“I said, ‘Listen, I like the one kid you are all talking about — but this other kid is a frickin’ player,’ ” Kornfeld recalled. “The other kid was Andrew Clair.”

Five years later, what Kornfeld saw seems prophetic. Clair is Bowling Green’s No. 1 running back, and the true sophomore has built his reputation on his ability to break tackles.

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Clair, according to football analysis website Pro Football Focus, averaged 4.5 yards per carry after contact as a freshman, which was the best mark in the Mid-American Conference and fifth-best nationally among all returning running backs coming into the season. That’s a big reason why he averaged 6.8 yards per carry in 2017, a BGSU single-season record.

Clair ended up as a Division I running back largely because he was stubborn about his position. Many college programs saw Clair as a Football Bowl Subdivision athlete — but there was very little consensus on what position he should play in college.

A few teams made a generic scholarship offer to Clair with the intention of picking his position when he arrived in college. Iowa, which was set at running back in Clair’s recruiting class, wanted Clair to play defensive back.

But Clair knew all along where he wanted to play.

“I was like, ‘Nah, I don’t really want to play DB in the Big Ten,’ ” Clair said, laughing. “I like to have the ball in my hands, I like to make plays, and I like to put on that type of show. At DB, you really couldn’t do it.”

From the start, Clair reminded Falcons coach Mike Jinks of DeAndre Washington, a former Texas Tech running back who now plays for the Oakland Raiders. What separates Clair, Jinks said, is that he consistently forces missed tackles in tight spaces.

Clair’s tape is full of him stretching a play from no gain into two or three yards, or from five yards to a big gain, and over the course of a game, that yardage adds up.

“That’s an ability that he has,” Jinks said, “and it’s not normal.” 

Jinks said he saw the running back’s innate ability in Clair’s his very first game at BG, a trip last season to Michigan State, which ranked among the top run defenses in college football. On his first two offensive touches, Clair squeezed 18 yards out of back-to-back plays that looked doomed along the line of scrimmage.

“Against what was considered one of the better defenses in the Big Ten, nobody could touch him,” Jinks said. “Because we didn’t block anybody. Go back and watch the first couple times we give him the ball, he gets almost 20 yards on two carries and we don’t touch anybody.”

Clair ranks among the nation’s more elusive running backs not because of raw speed or power, but most often because he finds a way to wriggle through tight spaces and rarely goes down on the first touch. BGSU running backs coach Marcus White said Clair is difficult to track because he can read defensive concepts.

“He understands where the ball is supposed to be ran,” White said.

“He can set you up,” White said, feigning to one side, “knowing the whole time that he’s coming back this way,” then darting his hands in the other direction. “It’s almost like a quarterback looking off a safety.”

Kornfeld, Clair’s high school coach, said he thinks Clair could have been a standout defensive player if he had wanted.

But Clair always has felt most emotionally connected to running back, which led him to BG. If Clair gains 28 yards on 17 or fewer carries this week against Miami (Ohio), he will break the 1,000-yard mark in fewer than 200 career carries.

Clair knew exactly what he wanted to play and exactly how he wanted to play it, and his self-realization has meant consistent yards for the Falcons.

“I’m not a big back who’s going to run a person over. I’m not a back who’s going to outrun you,” said Clair, who has 247 rushing yards in the season’s first three games. “I’m going to be the back who makes you miss, or I’m going to put my body into you and drive for a couple yards.

“It’s really just about knowing who you are as a player and knowing what you can and can’t do. I just know who I am.”

Contact Nicholas Piotrowicz at npiotrowicz@theblade.com, 419-724-6110 or on Twitter @NickPiotrowicz

First Published September 19, 2018, 7:40 p.m.