The running back every school wanted felt like he needed to move on with his life.

Billy Sims was convinced Oklahoma was where he could thrive in Barry Switzer’s wishbone offense, but he carried the ball just 15 times his freshman season as Joe “Silver Shoes” Washington’s understudy in 1975. He then suffered a season-ending injury in his first appearance as a sophomore, leaving the Sooners to place a medical redshirt on their prized running back from Hooks, Texas.

The honeymoon between the Sooners and Sims was over. He was no longer the player every school in America was chasing. He wasn’t receiving the same attention from the coaching staff. He barely saw the field before he was forced to redshirt. So No. 20 made a decision.

Sims quit Oklahoma’s football team.

“I wasn’t playing, I was highly recruited,” Sims said. “All of a sudden, I got hurt.”

He can’t remember specifically what Switzer told him that made him stay, but it was the confidence instilled in Sims by Switzer, the Sooners’ head football coach from 1973–1988, that helped him get through the rough beginning to his collegiate career.

It was the motivation he needed to rededicate himself to football.

A healthy Sims scorched defenses his junior season for a program-record 1,896 yards rushing, which held for 26 years until Adrian Peterson broke it in 2004. He scored 22 rushing touchdowns, the third most in a single season in school history, before tying Steve Owens’ record of 23 a year later. He also averaged 7.41 yards per carry, making him one of three Sooners ever to average 7-or-more yards per rushing attempt in a season after Greg Pruitt (8.98) and Marcus Dupree (7.84).

His remarkable year ultimately led Sims to capturing college football’s most prestigious individual honor, the Heisman Trophy, in 1978 as Oklahoma’s third winner.

“I thought I was just going to go back and pump gas the rest of my life,” Sims said, “but coach Switzer saw more in me than I saw in myself.”