Ki-Jana Carter opinions are probably wrong

What do you know?

What do you remember?

The two aren't mutually inclusive. Memories are colorized, cropped and preserved in a very individual fashion. What we know can be shaded, pushed to the background. It's there, but nearly irrelevant.

Ki-Jana Carter exists in those purposefully flawed edges.

What do you know of him? And what do you remember, nearly two decades after that night in Detroit on Aug. 17, 1995, because they are not one and the same.

It's hard, after all this time, to think your memories of him may be false; that what you know of him before, and after, that torn ACL has been smudged. It's hard to have to rethink this.

But it's worth a try.

**

One play could sum up Ki-Jana Carter's 1994 season at Penn State University. No, one step. On the Nittany Lions' first play from scrimmage in the 1995 Rose Bowl against Oregon, a stumbling Carter ran over an unblocked Herman O'Berry, was turned perpendicular to the line, and in a shuffle and one step – one – Oregon was left reaching at contrails.

"He could make a great cut and then sidestep in the hole and accelerate quickly," said former Oregon head coach Rich Brooks. "He was so thick. And it showed it on that very first play.

"Then it was Katy-bar-the-door and we're done."

Carter's 156-yard, three-touchdown MVP performance in Penn State's 38-20 Rose Bowl victory was the cap on a 1994 season in which he ran 198 times for 1,539 yards, good for 7.8 yards per carry.

"He was powerful," said Marlon Kerner, a Columbus native and Ohio State alumnus who played against Carter in high school, college and then in the NFL as a Buffalo Bills defensive back. "Kind of like – I don't like to compare people – but everybody talk about Bo Jackson, like when you hit him and how he was so hard to bring down."

But for as good as Carter was, he earned little hardware. Why? Carter often spent the second half of games as a spectator as the Nittany Lions' offense averaged 47 points per game and won by an average of 23.8 points. But that in itself was noteworthy, at least at the time.

"People think of the SEC now – that was the Big Ten then," said former Chicago Tribune national football writer Andrew Bagnato, who currently owns a communications firm in Arizona. "When you look at the Big Ten in that stretch when Ki-Jana Carter played, that was the best league in the country."

With his yards-per-carry average that year, should he have gotten an extra 100 carries, Carter easily tops 2,000 yards and the stats of 1994 Heisman winner Rashaan Salaam. If you give Carter the 344 attempts Barry Sanders had in 1988 at Oklahoma State, Carter sets the all-time NCAA rushing record.

"You can argue that, in some ways, he did it somewhat quietly in that offense because they just had so many weapons," Bagnato said.

What do you remember?

"I didn't see another player like him that year, anywhere," former Northwestern head coach Gary Barnett said. "In one step, he was full speed. He was the most explosive player in our league at that time. I mean there wasn't anybody close."

Naturally, his teammates felt the same way. Jeff Hartings blocked for Carter at Penn State and went on to an All-Pro career opening holes for two Hall of Famers – Sanders in Detroit and Jerome Bettis in Pittsburgh. He tossed out the names of Walter Payton and Emmitt Smith when it came to the talent Carter had, and how it would've translated to the NFL.

"Aw, man, the first thing that comes to your mind is explosive," said Bobby Engram, Carter's former roommate at Penn State and a 14-year NFL veteran who is now the wide receivers coach in Baltimore. "He was fast. He was powerful. He had good vision. He was a legit, a low 4.3. I saw him run it on the Accutrak, so it wasn't any hand-held time. Then you saw in the speed in practice, man, from the first day we stepped on campus."

NFL executives agreed, too.

"He had that Barry Sanders sort of lateral movement," said Michael Huyghue, the vice president of football operations for the Jacksonville Jaguars in 1995. "I just spent two years watching that every day in practice (in Detroit) and that's what he reminded me of in some measure."

Added Bengals president Mike Brown: "He was the Barry Sanders of his year in college. He had quickness, acceleration, balance. He was an exciting player."

Former Bengals director of football operations Jim Lippincott told The Enquirer about a scouting report on Carter he received from Sid Hall of the New York Jets.

"I've watched (Walter) Payton, O.J. (Simpson), (Barry) Sanders," Hall told Lippincott. "All those guys were great, but Ki-Jana was better than great. He was special."

For a brief time, Bengals saw 'special'

In the short time between a two-day holdout and a right Achilles strain that forced Carter to miss the first two preseason games, at least for a bit, for a while, the Bengals saw … special.

"From the very first day we were just shaking our head all the stuff this kid could do on the field," former Bengals offensive coordinator Bruce Coslet said. "I mean, just, we'd look at each other and say 'Whoa, what do we have here?' "

Tony McGee was entering his third year with the Bengals and saw the physical attributes everyone else had – tree trunk legs and calves – and a distinct gallop.

"It was like he was gliding a little bit, it was almost like he wasn't touching the ground," McGee said. "That was something. For a guy to be that big, he was pretty big – he was 220, 225, I believe – to be that big and to just kind of move like that, that was pretty impressive."

It's not quite the stuff of legend – there wasn't enough time for that. But, only a year prior to Carter's arrival in Cincinnati, Katie Couric famously asked a producer of the Today Show to explain what the Internet was. The world was still large. There were no tweets or Instagrams to cull, no camp highlights or look-ins to catalog.

Only team personnel and the daily media contingent could observe the healthy moments of Carter's first workouts with the team.

What they remember, really, is now all we know of that player.

"I thought that was one of the best picks the Bengals ever made," Coslet said. "He was showing us stuff in training camp that we had never seen before."

Even today, Coslet spoke rapidly, excitedly. He said he was incorporating some of Carter's most effective plays from Penn State into the offense.

"It would've been up to me just to figure out how to use him to the best of his abilities and for the betterment of the team. That would've been an easy job, quite frankly, because he could do it all."

Truth should matter, because it should

David Shula knows, and remembers.

"15 Zone" was the play, seven Bengals along the line of scrimmage. Carter was the single setback behind quarterback Jeff Blake.

"I remember where I was on the sideline," the former Bengals head coach began. "I remember where the ball was on the field. I remember it was in Detroit's Silverdome. I can remember what the play was. I remember the cut. I remember him going down. I remember him not getting up. And just that sickening feeling that you knew that it was a serious injury. I can almost smell the air in the dome now."

Now, Google says it all: He's in the top 10 worst first picks, a bona fide bust.

Yet …

"There's always much more nuance in this than a simple label," said former Carolina general manager Bill Polian, who traded the No. 1 pick to the Bengals in 1995.

Polian is now a Hall of Famer and ESPN analyst.

"This is the way things are without any facts, background, history, analysis – drives me crazy," Polian continued. "Ki-Jana Carter can be labeled whatever someone wants to label him. Bottom line is, he was a great football player at Penn State who suffered a serious and debilitating injury which curtailed his pro career. That to me is the story is Ki-Jana Carter in the National Football League. Nothing more, nothing less."

What do you know?

Here's what's true: Carter played seven years in the NFL after Aug. 17, 1995, but just one full 16-game schedule. He appeared in 59 games, carrying the ball 319 times for 1,144 yards and 20 touchdowns.

Simply, those are not the numbers of even an average running back.

But those numbers lead to real memories: Carter, prone on the turf, holding his wrist. Or, on the sidelines, injured or waiting for an opportunity.

"I always think first about Ki-Jana himself and what he could have been," Shula said. "As it turned out, he never really came back to the guy that we drafted, through no fault of his own. I know he worked hard in his rehab and everything. It just was hard."

This is where memories get tricky, because they are individual. Those directly affected, or the fans of a team, or of the league, believe their truth in the numbers, in the weight of expectations.

Part of the reason those in the game hesitate to label Carter is that, in the end, what they know is he was an active player in the league for nearly a decade, who missed three full seasons due to injury but came back to play each time.

"It's just amazing," said Kerner, a third-round pick in the 1995 draft whose own career ended prematurely due to injury. "You think like, man, we grew up in Ohio, and we're kids that all dreamed of playing the game and achieving our dream of playing in the NFL. We achieved our dream of being in the league."

Carter did not respond to a multitude of requests for an interview by The Enquirer, but in the NFL Network documentary entitled "Caught in the Draft: 1995," Carter admitted the label he's been saddled with has worn heavy.

"It makes me mad a little bit," Carter said. "Does that make somebody a bust? It wasn't 'cause of my talent. It was 'cause of injuries. And it just so happened that it was one injury after another after another and they never really got to see the type of player I think I could have been in the league."

Is it fair, that what we think we know has been reduced to an artificial memory cached in listicle form?

"He's a friend, so I think differently, but as far as the football world, the media, the fact of the matter is nobody cares," Engram said. "They want to know what did you do, not what could you have done."

So, what do you know, and what do you remember?

This can get muddled when you try to reconcile what you never saw with what you know. Hold on to the fuzzy YouTube of the Rose Bowl, the image of Carter in Detroit, or any list you can find, but there is one overriding sentiment that even Carter himself will agree with: "With the injury, there was no way anybody got to see the kind of player he was going to be," Hartings said.

That much we know.