At the combine in March, heading into a draft rich with running back talent -- Leonard Fournette, Christian McCaffrey, Dalvin Cook, for starters -- scouts whispered Barkley's name as a top-five pick in 2018. Nick Laham for ESPN

Before he was a 5-foot-11, 230-pound specimen, before he found viral fame power-cleaning 405 pounds, before he became the focal point of Penn State's offense, Barkley was really just a collection of physical insecurities.

He used to run out of the room, hurt when his siblings teased him for being short, and for using a pacifier until he was 5, and for the way that pacifier shaped his mouth into an oval. He would skip squat day in high school, feigning back pain, to avoid the weight room, where he still doubted himself. He split reps his first two years at Whitehall High, breaking through only after an injury to the Zephyrs' starter.

Even after his two years at Penn State, there's not much distance between Barkley and those insecurities, which is perhaps why he seems sheepish about all the sudden fuss. "It's almost like Saquon is naive to how good he is," Franklin says.

But the word is out elsewhere. Barkley has landed on practically every Heisman oddsmaker's shortlist and remains Mel Kiper Jr.'s top-ranked eligible running back for next April's draft.

That's the power -- and danger -- of a play like Barkley's Rose Bowl run.

In 2013, Jadeveon Clowney was a South Carolina sophomore when he ripped a Michigan running back's helmet off via a bone-rattling tackle in the Outback Bowl. The hit was rechristened The Hit, and Clowney -- and his legend -- grew for the next 16 months. The long coronation of the Next No. 1 Pick, it turned out, proved treacherous. He spent his third year in Columbia struggling through double- and triple-teams. Worse, after the Texans made him the top pick of the 2014 draft, he spent his first two years in the league branded as an injury-plagued bust. Last season, though, Clowney cashed in his first Pro Bowl appearance.

Which raises the question: Can such a freakish highlight become an unfair burden? "It doesn't impact me at all," Barkley says of his famous run. "Except now it's expected every single time. There will be plays where you've got to just lower your shoulder and get 1 yard."

Late last October, two months before the Rose Bowl, Barkley burst up the right sideline against Purdue and, with nary a defender within 5 yards, cruised into the end zone. He sprinted for 81 yards -- the longest rush of his career -- then ran straight to Charles Huff, Penn State's running backs coach.

"Coach, if I went out of bounds on the 1-yard line, would you have been mad?" asked Barkley, who said he wanted to give one of the other backs a chance to score.

"Yes," Huff told him. "I would have."

Those in his orbit say Barkley is so nice and self-effacing it borders on pathological. But it's not for lack of reassurance.

"Let them know you're a god," Alibay tells his son before every game. "Don't be ashamed of it."

Humility is fine, his parents say, but owning who you are is everything. Alibay, 48, and Tonya Johnson, 46, have always chosen to be candid about their past. "Raw honesty," Tonya says. "They know everything."

Barkley knows that his father spent a year at Rikers Island for a gun charge as a teenager. He knows that the moment his mother decided she couldn't live in the Bronx anymore was when drug dealers took over her family's apartment building and wouldn't let them inside. He knows that after they left New York for Pennsylvania when he was about 3 or 4, his family was left homeless for over a year and had to scatter -- his younger brother and sister living with his parents at a relative's house; he and his older sister, Quona, at a neighbor's; his older brother with a friend -- and that even once they did manage to find a home in Allentown, the mice and the bugs and the crime didn't feel all that different from the place they left behind.

"We could have just stayed in the Bronx," Alibay says.

Just this past year, Alibay was arrested in Allentown after he says he was stunned with a Taser and forcibly removed from a public bus. He paid for an all-day bus pass, he says, but the driver insisted he hadn't and called police to defuse the situation. Alibay says that officers destroyed his ticket before accusing him of theft. (Charges were dismissed against Alibay, and he's currently suing the bus company and police department for discrimination and excessive force.) "If you feel you are being treated unfairly in any situation," Tonya wants her son to know, "you speak up. Have a voice."

It doesn't elude Barkley that Alibay -- the person who always told Barkley to learn from his mistakes, to "try your best to be better" -- still has battles to fight. Barkley declines to discuss the bus incident other than to say, "That's my father, the person I've been working for my whole life. The way that was handled, I feel some type of way about that." He'd rather focus on what he's learned from his father: "My dad always told me, 'Don't try to be the next anybody," he says. "Make people want to be the next you."

Five months removed from Pasadena, Barkley settles into a black leather armchair in Penn State's team meeting room. Summer training camp is nine weeks away. He's watched that Rose Bowl touchdown at least 10 times.

"Sometimes you watch yourself and you think, 'Oh, wow,'" he admits.

Barkley is prone to obsessing over football. On his second day on campus two summers ago, he knocked on Christian Hackenberg's door and asked the veteran QB if he could come back later that night to break down film. That same year, teammates took to calling him "21 Questions," because Barkley wore No. 21 in high school and exhausted them with an endless stream of queries.

Then there's his fixation with his rivals. He was ranked the 24th-best running back coming out of high school, which rankled him so much that one year later he could recite the name of every last recruit ahead of him, Franklin says. "I just become obsessed with players," Barkley says.

This summer that fixation has found a new focus: LSU's Derrius Guice, the name most mentioned alongside Barkley's as the nation's best back. Still sitting in the black armchair, he brandishes his iPad. He asked Jevin Stone, Penn State's video and highlight guru, to pull together Guice's reel, and now he can binge-watch it anytime he wants. "I'm going to break down his film," he says, thumbing through his iPad, "and watch every single one of his runs."

Guice runs angry, a determination that Barkley makes after poring over clip after clip in the team meeting room and later in his off-campus town house. He wants to know where, exactly, he has to be to outrun the competition -- whether that competition is Guice or just himself.

As Barkley keeps scrolling, his compulsion guiding him from one Guice play to the next, you can practically hear him say it, the words racing through his head like they did on a field in California just a few months earlier. Where is he?