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George Aston didn’t come to Pitt to be a folk hero.

He didn’t come to run jet sweeps or catch shovel passes. He didn’t even come to play fullback.

George Aston came to Pitt to be a linebacker, and when Paul Chryst’s coaching staff decided on the second or third day of training camp in his freshman year to move him to offense, the Stephens City (Va.) native wasn’t too happy.

“I was extremely upset about it at first because I’ve never played fullback or anything like that in my entire life,” Aston said this week. “But even though I was upset, I was still working my butt off every day. Then this coaching staff came along and gave me a shot that spring and I earned a starting spot.”

That’s the kind of answer a fullback should give: always working hard, always keeping his head down and always grinding away.

But there’s more to it than that. Aston isn’t just another Pittsburgh archetype, the kind of fullback who serves as a muse for steel mill analogies as he buckles his chin strap and puts on his hard hat and uses his lunch pail to knock defenders out of the way, carving out a path to glory for the ball-carrier while he toils in the blue collar shadows he prefers.

Sure, Aston does those things, too, and that’s why James Conner, after rushing for 117 yards and a touchdown in Pitt’s 42-39 win over Penn State last September, insisted that Aston join him with the team’s offensive linemen at his post-game press conference. The human beings on that riser in the bowels of Heinz Field weighed nearly a ton, and they included future NFL linemen and a running back who captured the interest of all of college football, but Aston still stood out.

Not because he was the shortest player at that press conference, but for the simple reason that there just isn’t anybody else - not on that riser, not on the team and, quite frankly, not too many in the country - who does what Aston does.

Even Aston himself hesitates when describing his position.

“I play a little bit of fullback and, I guess, mostly H-back,” he says. “It moves around, plays a little wing. I rarely have my hand down in the backfield. There were a couple games when I was never in the backfield at all, just kind of the wing set.”

And that’s the uniqueness of Aston’s position, a role so unique that the coaches have already recruited a player - 2018 commit Jay Symonds - specifically to be “the next George Aston.” Pitt lists Aston as a fullback on the roster and Pat Narduzzi prefers that term for the role, but as Aston said, he was all over the place last season, lining up at various positions as offensive coordinator Matt Canada created new ways to get him the ball and keep defenses guessing.

The results were hard to dispute: Aston rushed 22 times for 75 yards and five touchdowns and caught 22 passes for 169 yards and five touchdowns. He was one of eight players nationally who had at least five rushing touchdowns and at least five receiving touchdowns last season. Only one other player in the ACC hit that mark: Jaylen Samuels, N.C. State’s versatile tight end whose role was developed by Canada in 2015.

But Samuels, who had six rushing touchdowns and seven receiving scores, did his work on twice the touches: he had 88 total (33 rushes, 55 receptions) as opposed to Aston’s 44. Aston made those 44 count, too, scoring 10 touchdowns and picking up 14 additional first downs.

That’s a touchdown one out of every four times he touched the ball and a touchdown or a first down on more than half of his touches.

“He can do anything,” Narduzzi said.

It’s true: Canada asked Aston to just about anything, and Aston was more than willing to oblige.

“All of a sudden, I was getting handoffs on jets and stuff, and that was something I’ve never done before in my life,” Aston said. “It was pretty fun.”

2016 looked like fun for Aston. Consider the former linebacker, who had no scholarship offers and only one preferred walk-on opportunity aside from Pitt (it was James Madison), who finds himself scoring a pair of touchdowns in Death Valley against a defense built on four and five-star future NFL players.

That was Aston, and he scored touchdowns in eight of the 12 games he played last season.

“I didn’t pay attention to their body language too much,” Aston said of opponents who underestimated his ability last season. “But I think it’s pretty cool to have a walk-on fullback scoring on defenses. I can imagine it’s not too exciting for them to happen.”

(For what it’s worth, Aston is no longer a walk-on; Narduzzi put him on scholarship prior to the 2015 season.)

Now Aston is looking to carry over the success from 2016. Like the rest of his teammates, he’s in a new offense after Canada coordinated the most potent Pitt attack in history and then bolted for LSU in December. Shawn Watson is calling the offense now, but he took note of the redshirt junior and his production at fullback or H-back or, as Watson says to invoke an old football term, adjuster.

“You talk about our adjuster, I don’t know if there’s a better player at what he does in the country than George,” Watson said prior to spring camp. “George is an extraordinary player. I’ve been lucky enough to be around some great ones that played a similar type of position, and he reminds me of a kid that we had at Colorado named Lawrence Vickers, who ended up becoming a really good pro player because he was a multi-faceted guy, which is what George is. And he plays with such a high motor.”

Vickers was a sixth-round pick in the 2006 NFL Draft and stuck around in the league until 2012. The fullback position has been one of the casualties of pro football’s move toward more wide-open passing offenses, but it’s not totally dead yet. Official rosters on NFL.com show 23 teams listing players at the position, and seven players listed as fullbacks have been drafted over the last two years.

Perhaps the versatility Aston developed and showed over the last year will help him when the time comes to try at the next level.

“Nowadays, almost every single game you see, every team has a fullback or H-back type of guy,” he said. “That would be a dream come true to play at the next level, but obviously you have to get a lot better to have a chance at that.”

So Aston will go back to work in spring camp and through the offseason into his redshirt junior year at Pitt. If Watson continues to use him like Canada did, Aston will likely build a place in Pittsburgh sports folklore. After all, the town loves a hard-nosed fullback - even he tends to do some things that are a little unique, a little different.

“I just love playing football,” he says. “I can play any position - if I’m on the field, I’m having the time of my life, really.”