National Football League

Breece Hall on his number, Nebraska ties, impact at Iowa State

Published Apr. 25, 2022 12:07 p.m. ET

By RJ Young
FOX Sports College Football Writer

Former Iowa State tailback Breece Hall is one of the most accomplished football players in school history, and he has an argument as being the program’s best player ever, alongside Cyclones legend Troy Davis.

Davis occupies special standing at ISU. He is perhaps the program’s second-most important player ever, behind Iowa State great Jack Trice, for whom the stadium is named.

When Davis was at ISU in the mid 1990s, people showed up to watch him in Ames, Iowa. That's no small feat, but when you rush for 2,000 yards in back-to-back seasons, finish as a Heisman finalist in back-to-back seasons and are named a consensus All-America First-Team selection, people do more than just notice.

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A quarter-century later, Hall showed up, wearing Davis’ number at Davis’ old position in the place Davis made famous. But Hall didn’t show up at Iowa State looking to take on Davis' memory, and he didn’t show up even to wear his number.

Hall wore jersey No. 1 at Northwest High School in Wichita, Kansas, and he wanted to wear jersey No. 1 at ISU. But one of the upperclassmen on Matt Campbell’s team already had it.

"So I was kind of searching," Hall said.

He spoke to Campbell about wearing No. 28. He had no idea that was Davis' number, too.

"I didn’t know the stigma of what it was going to be because Troy Davis wore it," he said. "So once people found out, it was, like, a whole big deal of everything. I just had to stay away from that and just really focus on myself and just focus on football."

Besides, Hall was already chasing the player his stepfather, Jeff Smith, was at Nebraska and in the NFL as a running back for the Kansas City Chiefs and Cincinnati Bengals. No. 28 was Smith’s number.

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Smith was inducted into the Nebraska Husker Hall of Fame after playing on teams that featured Heisman winner Mike Rozier and Hall’s cousin, Roger Craig.

Given Hall's pedigree, I wondered out loud how he ended up at Iowa State instead of Nebraska.

"I asked myself that every day," he said. "Just being recruited to go to those schools — the Nebraskas, the Michigans, the Oklahomas — it was hard to say no. I went up to Nebraska, and they had my stepdad’s Orange Bowl team up there. All his old teammates were up there. Just seeing that, sitting down with Coach [Tom] Osborne and eating dinner with him and his family, that was really cool."

What made Iowa State stand out, though, is that the Cyclones were there early on, when Hall wasn’t as highly recruited as he was by the time his senior season ended.

"Iowa State was my first offer," he said. "They were the ones who took a chance on me. They stayed consistent. They stayed loyal. The icing on the cake was that Coach Campbell said if I came to Iowa State, he was gonna make me the best running back in the country. And he did that. So, I mean, everything worked out for the best."

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Hall finished his career as the first and only unanimous All-American selection in Iowa State football history and led the Cyclones to their first major bowl victory with a 34-17 win over Pac-12 champion Oregon in the 2021 Fiesta Bowl to cap the best season in school history.

He averaged 5.5 yards per carry in his career and rushed for 1,572 and 1,472 yards, respectively, in 2020 and 2021. He needed just three years to vault into the NFL Draft, and he might be the first running back selected Thursday.

What’s more? He has claimed his own legacy, and No. 28 might well stand for Hall 25 years from now, when another once-in-a-generation tailback shows up in Ames.

RJ Young is a national college football writer and analyst for FOX Sports and the host of the podcast "The No. 1 Ranked Show with RJ Young." Follow him on Twitter at @RJ_Young, and subscribe to "The RJ Young Show" on YouTube. He is not on a StepMill.