Touted Wildcat just wants to enjoy game

OGDEN — You are a top-5 college football prospect in high school, according to some scouting services. You narrow your list of considerations to Miami, Notre Dame and Alabama. You move to Tuscaloosa, redshirt a year, and by the end of your freshman season, you're expecting to start at quarterback in the Independence Bowl.

Eight months later, you're at Weber State, gone from a place where they draw 92,000 to the spring game and 5,000 to practice to a school where they sometimes draw 5,000 to regular-season games.

Goodbye Alabama, hello Weber State.

"I love it here," says Jimmy Barnes.

He even sounds as though he means it.

It happed like this: Barnes, from Los Alamitos, Calif., went to Alabama to play for Mike Shula. But when Shula was fired at the end of the 2006 season ("Had he not been fired, I'd never have been here") and Nick Saban came in, things went south. So Barnes went north. Though Barnes won't say a lot about it, it's clear he didn't like Saban's style. A knee injury kept him out of the Independence Bowl, but by late spring his knee was

doing well and he had decided 'Bama — or rather Saban — wasn't for him.

"It's not the playing time," continues Barnes. "It's getting treated the way you should be."

Thus, one of the most coveted players in the nation out of high school landed fortuitously in the lap of Wildcats' coach Ron McBride, who, ironically, was desperately in need of a quarterback.

How was he to know his prayers would be answered so ... miraculously?

He didn't just get a quarterback. He won the lottery.

"Day 1, when he came here, he got together with the receivers, watched film, got things set up. He's almost like a coach," says McBride, ticking off his quarterback's qualities. "Great arm, understands coverage, what to look for in the pre-alignment reads. A very good feel for what he's supposed to be doing."

How good?

He can throw a football 75 yards, and has touch.

And he doesn't panic.

"He's for real," adds McBride.

Though it's tempting to assume this is the first and only time a big-time quarterback has played at Weber, don't. The Wildcats' quarterback history is actually fairly impressive. Jamie Martin and Jeff Carlson went from Weber to the NFL. Brad Otton played at Weber before moving on to play at USC and briefly with the Washington Redskins. Josh Heupel started at Weber, moved on to Snow College and eventually became Oklahoma's starting quarterback. He played briefly with the Miami Dolphins.

"We've been sending all these quarterbacks to big programs," chuckles sports information director Brad Larson. "It's about time they gave us one back."

The difference is, none of the other quarterbacks were top-5 college recruits before coming to Weber.