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James Conner wasn’t acting like a player who just scored three touchdowns and helped his team win the highest-scoring regulation game in FBS history.
After Pitt’s 76-61 win over Syracuse at Heinz Field in the 2016 regular-season finale, Conner was quiet, reserved and emotional - in other words, he didn’t seem to be himself.
“I just want to finish. I’m a team guy, so I just wanted to finish the game a little bit better,” Conner said after the game when asked why he seemed to be emotional. “That’s the only reason. But we got a victory; at the end of the day, that’s the only thing that matters. I just wanted us to finish a little bit better.”
Finishing - the act of ending something - was likely weighing on Conner, but it’s hard not to imagine that the finish he was emotional about had little to do with the final score of Saturday’s game. There’s a real possibility that the win over Syracuse was Conner’s final game at Heinz Field in a Pitt uniform.
Throughout the week and again on Saturday afternoon, Conner has said that no decision has been made regarding his future. He can leave Pitt and enter the 2018 NFL Draft, a decision he was likely to make last year before a knee injury and a diagnosis of Hodgkin lymphoma put those plans on hold.
Or he can return to Pitt, play his fifth season as a Panther and, as he put it on Tuesday, “[add] to the legacy.” According to the Erie native, that’s a decision that is yet to be made.
“I’m not sure yet. I’m a redshirt junior right now, so I’m trying finish out strong with this bowl game and then I’ll make a decision after that. Right after the bowl game, I’ll make a decision for everybody.”
Conner already has 3,701 career rushing yards; that’s about 2,800 behind all-time leader Tony Dorsett, but while the rushing title is probably out of reach, Conner’s total of 56 career touchdowns stands just seven off Dorsett’s record, so that could be surpassed with another season.
But there’s more to it for Conner. He was already active in community outreach before last November’s cancer diagnosis, and that experience drew even more out of him. So while he values the times his name appears in Pitt’s record book - and he hopes to one day see his name hanging from the rotundas at Heinz Field next to Dorsett, Marino, Ditka, Fitzgerald and the rest - he would like his legacy to be more than what has happened on the football field.
“My main goal is to, when they talk about somebody who had a positive impact on the university, they mention my name. That’s my job, to run the football, and they gave me a scholarship to score touchdowns. So when they talk about people who made a positive impact, I hope they mention my name. That’s my main goal.”
On Saturday, Conner was one of the driving forces behind Pitt’s monster scoring outburst. He ran 19 times for 115 yards and two touchdowns and caught two passes for 45 yards and a score. That was the latest in a long line of standout performances from Conner, who topped 100 rushing yards six times this season, who had eight games with 100+ yards of total offense and who scored a touchdown in 11 of Pitt’s 12 games.
The game also gave Conner his second season with 1,000 rushing yards (he ran for 1,765 in 2014). Only four other players in Pitt history have recorded multiple 1,000-yard seasons: Dorsett, Curvin Richards, LeSean McCoy and Dion Lewis.
