Two of the country’s top aerial acrobats will spend their Saturdays this fall effortlessly twisting and contorting, sprinting and leaping, catching and scoring. Colorado State’s Rashard Higgins and Colorado’s Nelson Spruce are two of the best wide receivers in college football, as evidenced by the eye-popping numbers they put up a season ago.
By season’s end, they’ll probably own every significant receiving record at their school. But on a recent scorching summer day on the Metro State campus in Denver, they looked downright, well, human. As it turns out, the balletic poses of a receiver don’t come quite as easily during a photo shoot as they do on game day.
“Man, you guys are working me out,” said Higgins, sweat pouring from beneath his multicolored hair as he jumped and twisted his body.
“I probably needed to stretch for this,” Spruce said after leaping on an invisible mark on the cement and craning his frame in front of the lens.
After getting their feet beneath them, both defied gravity long enough to do what wide receivers of their elite caliber do best: make the flash bulbs pop.
Your nickname can only be “Hollywood” if you enjoy the spotlight. Higgins craves it. To him, the field is a stage.
“It’s a thrill when you’ve got the ball in your hands and you’re able to show your talent,” said Higgins, a 6-foot-2 junior. “When you have the ball in your hands, it’s a different level. Everyone’s coming toward you, the crowd’s watching you and the spotlight’s on you. There’s just something about having the ball in your hands.”
Higgins and Spruce are different in almost every respect, from personality to playing style. But there is a common bond between both: an unconditional love for the position.
For all their vast and diverse skills — whether it’s Higgins’ explosiveness or Spruce’s vacuum hands — a thirst to excel links two of the best receivers ever to come through their respective programs.
Spruce, a 6-foot-1 senior, relishes the on-an-island, you-versus-me nature of playing wide receiver.
“More than any other position on the field, it’s just that one-on-one battle — you and the cornerback,” Spruce said. “Every play, you are competing. There is a lot bigger mental side of it than a lot of people think. I think of myself as an intelligent player, so every play you have to come with something different to win your individual matchup.”
Higgins’ first love growing up in Dallas was basketball. When he got to high school, where the point guard on his basketball team was also the quarterback on the football team, he discovered the adrenaline rush of making a big catch.
“We were playing 7-on-7 football, and I used to fade on people all the time,” he said. “It’s like he was just throwing the ball up, like a basketball, and I went up and got it. That made me better.”
Releasing a beast
If Sefo Liufau, the Buffaloes’ third-year starting quarterback, had to pick the winner of a footrace among his CU teammates, his favorite receiver wouldn’t be his first choice.
“(Spruce) is not the fastest by any stretch, but his route-running, I don’t know if anyone on the team is better,” Liufau said. “He beat a lot of one-on-one coverages last year, beat a lot of zone coverages last year, and that’s a tribute to the hard work he puts in.”
Spruce is a master of the “release.” It’s a word CU receivers coach Troy Walters brings up often when discussing his star pupil.
In short, Spruce gets off the line of scrimmage, regardless of the type of scheme or coverage a defense presents, excelling at a subtle but vitally important aspect of playing wide receiver through a combination of creativity, athleticism and sheer will.
“What I teach the guys is to have multiple moves,” Walters said. “So he works on different releases every day, so he knows he has five or six that he can go to. He does a great job of reacting. We may try to release outside, but the (defensive back) jumps outside, so he’ll react and go back inside, or vice versa. He does a great job with that. He’s strong, uses his hands well. All those things help him to get good releases.”
A split-second jump is typically all Spruce needs to create a catch radius that isn’t hard for Liufau to find. And if it’s in Spruce’s neighborhood, he usually catches it.
“He makes one-handed catches look easy,” Liufau said.
Added Walters: “I’ve been around great receivers, in college and the NFL, and his hands are right up there with the best. He has the hand-eye coordination, strong hands, so even low balls, bad balls, he’s able to pluck them.”
Keeping them guessing
As a safety, Colorado State’s Kevin Pierre-Louis engages in his fair share of smack talk with Higgins during the Rams’ practices — banter both players say “is all love.”
Higgins always brings fresh barbs to the table, but it’s nothing compared to the creativity he exhibits in the open field.
“He’s unpredictable, and I think that’s the biggest challenge,” Pierre-Louis said. “You never know what he’s doing, and he changes it up every time.”
Higgins is a jazz improvisationalist, constantly mixing up the way he attacks defenses both out of his routes and after he catches the ball in space. His elite speed helps to make him an All-American.
“I’ve coached and been a part of teams that have had some good receivers in the past,” first-year CSU coach Mike Bobo said, “but rarely do you have a guy who can stretch the field vertically and make huge plays. You see him catch post after post after post, big plays. Then you see him make plays in space, on quick slants on hitches on quick screens.
“Not everybody has an explosive player. We have an explosive player who can change the game in a heartbeat.”
Catching a mental edge
For all their prolific talent, Higgins and Spruce said they had to sharpen themselves mentally to reach the status they did a season ago.
Spruce had to convince himself he was a No. 1 receiver after two years backing up Paul Richardson, now with the Seattle Seahawks.
Then Spruce went out and caught seven passes for 104 yards and two acrobatic touchdowns against CSU in the Rocky Mountain Showdown to open the season, and he took off from there.
“You have to be tough to play this position,” he said. “If you’re able to get the mental edge on someone, you can really control that matchup, especially as the game wears on.”
Higgins, asked what mind-set it takes for a receiver to do what he did last season, pondered the question. Then, that Hollywood smile slowly crept across his face.
“When the ball is in the air, it’s mine,” he said. “That’s the mind-set that I have. I’m not going to let nobody take my money, man.”
Nick Kosmider: 303-954-1516, nkosmider@denverpost.com or
CSU’s Rashard Higgins
Class: Junior
Height: 6-foot-2
Weight: 190
Hometown: Dallas
2014 stats
Receptions: 96
Yards: 1,750
Touchdowns: 17
CU’s Nelson Spruce
Class: Senior
Height: 6-foot-1
Weight: 195
Hometown:
Westlake Village, Calif.
2014 stats
Receptions: 106
Yards: 1,198
Touchdowns: 12
