— The road to becoming the No. 1 running back for the No. 1 team in the country has been anything but conventional for Dominique Whaley.

Perhaps there is something to that. Maybe Whaley's long, strange trip to Oklahoma's backfield is why he is there. When a person has literally been halfway around the world and back, determination and adaptability become part of the hardwiring.

Whaley's start point: Miami. To Georgia. To Texas. To Germany. To Lawton. To Langston. Back to Texas. Whaley's end point: OU.

Got all that? Put it in your GPS, and the computerized voice might start cursing at you. It's incalculable, that route. And it doesn't really even take into account Whaley's difficulty as a walk-on to climb the Sooners' depth chart, in time moving past scholarship athletes who were coveted and recruited for several years by the storied program.