Toby Gerhart is as human as the next guy.

There are times, he says, when he just wants to sit around on the couch and watch TV, or break his normal routine and sleep in until mid-morning.

"But I can only handle so much of that," he says. "Then I get bored and want to go outside and do something."

Fortunately for Gerhart, his schedule at Stanford keeps him busy.

Gerhart is one of the latest in a long line of two-sport Cardinal athletes. During the spring, he patrols the outfield grass of Sunken Diamond for the Stanford baseball team, where he has never made an error in 105 total chances. And on Saturdays this fall, he has anchored the Cardinal football team's backfield, shouldering the offensive load for a program that is fighting its way back into national relevance.

In two days, Gerhart will take the field at Memorial Stadium as potentially the biggest influence over the outcome of the 111th Big Game, and with it Stanford's opportunity for its first bowl appearance in seven seasons.

"This is the season for us," he says during the Big Game luncheon on Monday. "It's just huge for our program. It's huge for the seniors. They want to leave with a legacy that they've been to a bowl game."

Two of those seniors are at the luncheon as well, but most of the media is crowding around the junior tailback. He handles the attention with a humility bordering on shyness that in no way reflects his bruising, downhill running style.

But it's hardly a coincidence that the Cardinal is on the brink of bowl eligibility in the same year that Gerhart has emerged as a legitimate full-time runner. In fact, he enters Saturday just 51 yards shy of tying Stanford's school record for most rushing yards in single season.

And after finishing no higher than ninth in the Pac-10 in rushing for the last five seasons, the Cardinal features a potent ground game as part of its resurgence in 2008, currently ranking third in the conference in that category.

"Stanford football's on its way back up," he says. "Maybe in years past, people have taken us more lightly than they are now. Even the culture at school of people following football, people paying attention to it, the culture's changing."

It probably helps that Gerhart is the kind of player that a school can rally around-a two-sport kid who speaks softly and plays smashmouth football, and one who passed up interest from schools like USC for the institution that he now represents with obvious pride.

Gerhart graduated from Norco High in Norco, Calif., in 2006 as one of the most prolific runners in California prep history, having finished his high school career with 9,622 rushing yards-the state's highest all-time total.

Collegiate offers were rolling in. Most of the schools in the Pac-10 wanted him, but not everybody was offering what he wanted to hear.

At the time, USC had just fallen to Texas in the Rose Bowl as part of its bid for three straight national championships. Stanford, meanwhile, was coming off of its fourth straight losing season.

But the Trojans wanted him to block for ball carriers instead of be one of them. And they didn't want him playing two sports.

"My decision was based on playing baseball," Gerhart says. "In the end, it came down to Stanford and UCLA ... Those were my final two as I started narrowing things down, and eventually decided on Stanford."

Although he says that he doesn't remember which coach was happier to have him-football's Walt Harris or long-time baseball skipper Mark Marquess-Gerhart made an immediate impact for both. He finished the 2006 football season as the Cardinal's second-leading rusher, and then started 23 games on the diamond despite missing over seven weeks with a fractured right forearm.

Since then, Gerhart has hardly had a break. Football blends into baseball and back again, and the junior rarely gets more than two weeks in between seasons to recuperate and shift his mindset between approaches to the different games.

"Football is a lot more physically demanding on the body, so you've got to have a tougher mindset," he says. "In terms of baseball, you fail a lot more than you succeed, so you have to adjust to that."

Still, Gerhart doesn't seem to mind. He moves between sports like a kid switching little leagues. When the season changes, so does his uniform.

And even with a leap to the professional rankings very much a possibility in the future-he has one year of college eligibility left in baseball and two in football-Gerhart doesn't want to choose between the two.

"In my perfect world, I'd play both," he says with a smile. "I mean, at this point, I like whatever one's in season."

Tags: BIG GAME, TOBY GERHART, CAL FOOTBALL