Feed Jarquez
Jarquez Hunter was productive against everyone Auburn faced in the first half of the season. Just 13 carries per game doesn't feel like enough.
RB Jarquez Hunter (Austin Perryman/Auburn Tigers)
ATHENS, Ga. — In 2012, during Hugh Freeze’s first season at Ole Miss, the phrase “Feed Moncrief” was everywhere.
The “Moncrief” was Donte Moncrief, the Rebels’ top wide receiver. “Feed Moncrief” was a plea in the form of a very early-2010s rap song by a pair of Ole Miss students. They wanted to see Moncrief touch the ball more often.
The song went viral, and it was played several times in the stadium during the Egg Bowl, when Moncrief had seven catches for 173 yards and three touchdowns. Red “Free Moncrief” t-shirts started popping up everywhere around Oxford.
A dozen years later, Freeze is the head coach at Auburn. And, while goofy rap tracks for YouTube by college students about their football teams aren’t in fashion anymore, maybe some folks on the Plains could start a similar campaign for the Tigers’ own star.
Jarquez Hunter is about to enter the second half of his final season of college football. In his next game, he will be practically guaranteed to pass Ronnie Brown and enter the top 10 for the most career rushing yards at Auburn.
The Mississippi native and the last man standing from a doomed Bryan Harsin recruiting class will go down as one of the most productive backs to ever play for the Tigers.
Through six games, Hunter is one of only five SEC players to have reached 500 rushing yards already this season. According to Pro Football Focus, he leads the league in missed tackles forced (31) and designed runs of 15-plus yards (12). He is a close second in yards after contact (381), trailing by only two.
“Proud of Jarquez,” Freeze said Saturday. “Love his effort. He’s never going to quit, and he’s going to practice his tail off every single time. Glad to see him having success.”
Hunter is averaging a healthy 6.77 yards per carry, and that’s not a product of teeing off against bad competition, either.
He averaged 5.58 yards per carry against Arkansas, which hasn’t allowed more than 4.8 against anybody else this season. He averaged 5.71 yards per carry against Oklahoma, which is No. 5 nationally in rushing defense.
And he averaged an even 7 yards per carry against Georgia, which was one of the best performances for a lead back against the Bulldogs in several years. He scored Auburn’s lone touchdown of the game, breaking away for a 39-yarder.
“We saw in film they do a lot of moving around, of moving out of gaps,” Hunter said of Georgia on Saturday. “So, we feel like we had opportunities in the run game that we could have used against them. Early in the game, we had a couple big runs, and then later in the game, we had a couple of big runs.
“I mean, we could have ran the ball all day.”
But Hunter is only averaging 13 carries per game — the fewest of any SEC running back with 500-plus yards. In overall carries, he trails the next-closest man by 10.
Seems low, doesn’t it?