What's it like being Eric Crouch in Lincoln, Neb.? "Let me put it this way." says Crouch, the Cornhuskers' senior quarterback. "The fans know what doors I come out of and what days I come out of them."

Three evenings a week, after dining at the trainimg table. Crouch heads to class. As he left the football complex on just such a walk last Thursday, he was approached by a dozen or so autograph seekers. During the five-minute trip he made small talk and signed his name. "It pretty intense, and that's O.K.," says Crouch. "I understand my role here, I find the joy in it."

Leading the Cornhuskers to an 11-0 record and a No. 1 ranking in the BCS ratings, as Crouch has done, is but one facet of that role. Between discharging his football duties and carrying 11 credit hours (including working as a lab instructor overseeing 30 students in an exercise-science and health behavior class), Crouch, an exercise-science major, is winning games but losing sleep. "I'm putting in, on average, 16-hour days," he says.

It doesn't help that he finds himself unable to turn down miscelleneous requests, such as one made recently by one of his students, whose young nephews had been misbehaving in elementary school. Could Crouch speak to them? Of course he could. "It worked out pretty well," says Crouch, "but I don't think people realize how much time I don't have."

Last month he stopped by a Lincoln hospital to cheer up one patient but ended up visiting everyone on the floor. He's gregarious to a fault-until the conversation turns to his child. Crouch lives with his longtime girlfriend, Nicole Kousgaard, and their two-year-old daughter, Alexi. Raise the subject of Alexi, and the usually chatty Crouch chooses his words carefully. "I'm very proud of Lexi. I love both my girls," says Eric, who dated Kousgaard since they were students at Omaha Millard North High. "The only downside about what I do is that I have almost no privacy. I have to feel there's something in my life that everyone else doesn't have."

It's a source of pride to his mother, Susan Sanchez, that as a popular grade school kid. Eric often befriended students whom others teased. "I talk to them, become friends with them," he would tell his mother, "and they don't get picked on anymore." Who would have thought that such a good guy would be such a badass on the field? Who could have predicted that this prettyboy would play the game with such a mean streak?

Not the Creighton Prep fullback whom Crouch knocked out of the game as a high school sophomore in 1994. While filling in for an injured safety, Crouch "came low and kind of splattered the kid," recalls Millard North coach Fred Petito. And not the Iowa safety who met Crouch at the goal line two years ago. "It was at the end of a 40-yard run," says Nebraska left tackle David Volk, "and Eric dropped his shoulder, laid the guy out and went in standing up."

As it turns out, the 6-1, 192-pound Crouch, who until this season had spent most of his Nebraska career playing hurt and who prides himself on his stoicism, shed some of the most storied tears in Cornhuskers history. It happened in August 1999, when coach Frank Solich gave junior Bobby Newcombe the starting quarterback job. Crouch, then a sophomore, felt he'd outperformed Newcombe in preseason camp, and got in his car and headed home. Rumors that he'd quit the team were soon flying. "He just wanted to come home and be with someone who cared about him," says Sanchez. Anybody who knows Eric he's not a quitter. Everyone's entitled to cry once in a while."

Solich got on I-80 East and drove 47 miles to Omaha to find Crouch. They met in Petito's office at Millard North, where Solich assured the distraught Crouch that he would be an integral part of the Cornhuskers. Later, when it was only the two coaches in the room, Petito recalls, Solich slumped in his chair and said, "No one told me there'd be days like this."

Certainly not his predecessor. Having won his third national championship in four years, legendary coach Tom Osborne had retired following the 1997 season, taking a 255-49-3 record with him and leaving the pantry half-stocked for his longtime assistant and former player, who knew he could ill afford to lose Crouch. So Solich never gave up on him. Sure enough, in the second game of the season, against Cal, Crouch spelled Newcombe, who was struggling. In one remarkable quarter Crouch ran for a one-yard touchdown, threw a 70-yard scoring pass and, with Newcombe under center, caught a 60-yard touchdown pass. Solich replaced Newcombe with Crouch the following week, and a career was launched.

On a recent afternoon at Millard North, Petito recounted the fateful summit that occurred in his office. After rummaging through a cabinet, he pulled out a videocassette. It was Crouch's highlight tape from his junior year in high school-the one he sent to colleges. There's Crouch, returning six punts for touchdowns. "After a while people stopped kicking to him," says Petito. Every other player on both teams, it seems, is running in slow motion-Crouch is that fast. At a football camp at Notre Dame the summer before his senior year, he ran a 4.3 in the 40. The Irish coaches told him they were recruiting him "as an athlete" rather than a quarterback. Goodby, Golden Dome. "Eric is probably the fastest quarterback we've ever had," says Osborne over the phone from Washington, where he's a freshman Congressman.

"There he is, kinda nasty," says Petito, as the videotaped Crouch bowls over a would-be tackler. "I've never seen him slide or angle for the sideline," says Nebraska senior rover Mic Boettner, who played with Crouch at Millard North. "He'd rather meet a guy head-on than go out-of-bounds.

On another taped play Crouch fakes a handoff to the fullback, seems to consider pitching to his tailback and then tucks the ball away for a 30-yard gain. Even in high school he ran the option with precision and panache. Crouch has no peer in the college game at running the option, which is the main reason why he's the leading candidate for the Heisman Trophy. Iowa State coach Dan McCarney says that Crouch is the best offensive player he's ever coached against. Adds Kansas State coach Bill Snyder, "If you get just a little bit out of position, he makes you look like a fourth-grader."

Going into Nebraska's final regular season game, at Colorado on Thanksgiving Friday, Crouch has rushed for 57 touchdowns, an NCAA rocord for a quarterback. His 7,555 yards of total offense (3,272 yards rushing, 4,283 passing) are the most ever by a Cornhusker. His 95-yard run carnival ride of a run against Missouri on Sept. 29-the longest by a Nebraska player-actually went 103 yards. After having taken the snap at his own five-yard line, Crouch dropped back into the end zone and barely missed being sacked for a safety before zigzagging his way to one of the most remarkable plays of the season.

Crouch has won 35 games, another Nebraska record. None of those games, however, has brought a national championship. By that yardstick he falls short of the two quarterbacks who preceded him: Tommy Frazier, who helped the Cornhuskers win national crowns in 1994 and '95, and Scott Frost, whose '97 team shared the title with Michigan. One reason Crouch has amassed such gaudy numbers is that he's had to. Frazier and Frost were surrounded by far more talent. An astounding 13 players from Nebraska's '95 Blackshirt defense went on to play in the NFL. No disrespect to Dahrran Diedrick, who has quietly piled up 1.205 yards this season, but Crouch has nevered had an I-back anywhere near as talented as Ahman Green, whose final college season was 1997 and who's tearing up the NFL for the Green Bay Packers. Says Frost, a backup safety with the Cleveland Browns, "I had [current Arizona Cardinal fullback] Joel Makovicka and Ahman Green running behind a great offensive line. There's no question Eric's had to carry the team at times."

This season, though, Nebraska's defense has been solid, and its running game, behind Diedrick and Thunder Collins, potent. Moreover, for the first time since his freshman year at Millard North, Crouch is pain-free in mid-November. Last year he suffered from chronic back pain, inflamed bursas in both elbows and a torn labrum in his right shoulder that affected his passing and required surgery.

That operation was performed last January. While Crouch's rehab went smoothly, little else in his life did. Shortly after the surgery, he learned that James Brown, a radiologist and longtime family friend and mentor to Crouch, had suffered a stroke. Crouch spent hours at Brown's bedside in intensive care. "It meant a great deal to me," says Brown, who has recovered and is practicing again.

Sanchez, Eric and his younger brother, Kyle, would drive from one hospital in Omaha, at which Brown was convalescing, to another across town, in which Sanchez's mother, Madeline lay gravely ill. Having devorced Ron Crouch when Eric and Kyle were young, Susan raised the boys as a single mother. (She remarried, to Corey Sanchez, in August 2000.) Madeline babysat often, and the boys' bond with her was uncommonly strong. As her mother pulse faded last April, Susan told her sons to leave the room. She wanted to spare them the sight of their grandmother's passing, but they refused to go. "We're here for you, and we're here for her," said Eric.

Madeline died moments later, and her grave is marked not by a headstone but by a marble bench into which a football has been cut. Carved into the ball is NEBRASKA. "She loved visitors," says Susan, "and she loved Cornhusker football."

Madeline would have been thrilled by the events of Oct. 27, when Eric's 63-yard touchdown reception on a beautifully executed trick play sealed Nebraska's 20-10 victory over previously unbeaten and top-ranked Oklahoma. "What impressed me the most," says Gil Brandt, a renowned former scout for the Dallas Cowboys who scouts for the NFL, "was that he caught it clean, caught it in his hands." Brandt is a Crouch fan and believes there's a place for him in the NFL. It could be a receiver, could be at safety, could be at quarterback. "Every year, you're seeing offenses go a little bit furthur, become a little bit more creative." says Brandt. "Maybe you bring Crouch in as a third-and-one quarterback to run the option. Maybe you put him in the shotgun an the goal line. He'd scare the heck out of people."

Could Crouch be an every-down quarterback in the leagues? Maybe. While he has completed an impressive 57.1% of his passes this season, he's also thrown more interceptions (eight) than touchdowns passes (seven). That's attributable, in part, to the system he's in: On the relativly rare occasions they do pass, the Cornhuskers tend to go with play action. "A drop-back passer can check things out during his drop," says Nebraska tight end Tracey Wistrom, a frquent Crouch target. "When you're running play-action, you've got to find your receiver and get rid of it soon as you turn around. That's a disadvantage."

He's got a good strong arm," says Brandt. "He can definitely get the job done, especially once he is in NFL, where he'll concentrate more on passing."

As he made his way to class last Friday, Crouch seemed pleased Brandt thought so highly of him. "Right now," says Crouch, "with my schedule the way it is, to worry about only football and get paid for it-I can't even imagine how great that would be."

He offers a brief glimpse into his private life: "On Mondays, I get up at 6:30, get Lexi ready for day care, drop her off at 8:30." Lexi, he confirms, is out of diapers and into pull-ups. She looks like Boo in the Monters Inc. Bedtime goes much more smoothly if he's there to arrange her hair. "She lies down on a pillow," he explains, a tad sheepishly, "and I tuck it all back for her." On those nights when he gets home after Lexi is asleep, he goes into her room before he crashes. He just wants to look at her.

"These days," he says, "it seems like I wake up, catch my breath, and its time to go to bed again. Then, in the middle of the night, I get an elbow in the ribs"-Nichole's signal that it's his turn to minister to their crying child. Crouch goes without complaint. He knows his role and finds the joy in it.