Will McKnight ever take game by storm?

If I were Joe McKnight, I wouldn't be here.

With his football chops, I'd be down south. Maybe at Miami or Louisiana State -- possibly starting, probably a star.

But Joe McKnight, arguably the most heralded high school football player in the country, came here to be among us -- at USC, a freshman tailback swaddled in heavy expectations.

Some said he'd be the next Reggie Bush.

Now he's almost an afterthought.

Three games in and he has touched the ball only 17 times, almost all of them in mop-up duty. He has shown flashes of brilliance, moments when he has cut across the field like a blade through butter. But he also has fumbled, crumbled and looked confused.

"Joe," I told him, after practice this week, "maybe you shouldn't have come to Southern Cal. Convince me I'm wrong."

Most big-time schools have a running back, maybe two, with propulsive speed and serious hopes for the NFL. This year, USC has at least six, counting McKnight. Next year? Six again, maybe more. He might never break out of this traffic jam and become what he could be at many other major universities right now: The Man.

Two beats of silence. Then: "This was the right decision."

McKnight doesn't stop there: "I didn't want to go to a place where it was just given to me. I would rather come here than to a place where you just get the top spot without even doing that much. I've always had that kind of mentality."

He is 19. He stands about 6 feet tall, weighs roughly 190 pounds, has slim hips, thin legs, dark eyes and an earnest expression.

He grew up in a soggy, tough neighborhood just outside New Orleans. His father wasn't around. His mother struggled. By his teens, he was a transient, bouncing around from his mother's place to his cousin's house to the homes of friends.

"He learned to be self-reliant and to believe in himself," says Neal Thompson, who spent a year with him and his team at John Curtis Christian School for a book, "Hurricane Season."

McKnight developed self-discipline and a stern maturity, Thompson says, realizing he had a gift and was honing it. Without being told, he threw on a weighted vest, went alone to a nearby track in the hot southern sun and ran sprints. When that was over, he lifted weights.

By his junior year, his flashy runs had become famous among college football scouts.

Then Katrina hit.