Reggie Bush Already Deserves to be Rookie of Year

The risk in making such a proclamation this early, before the actual games even have started, is of sounding like a shameless homer, so provincial that it borders on embarrassing.

But, frankly, this is a book we can put down.

No need flipping to the last page to see what the end will be when it's already clear what the conclusion should be.

Without having played a down in an NFL regular-season game, Reggie Bush is its 2006 Rookie of the Year. Not yet having scored a touchdown, caught a pass, made a defender look helpless while executing a move you couldn't make up on an Etch-a-Sketch, Reggie Bush is the valedictorian of his class, maybe the best in the past 15 classes.

True, the honor officially won't be awarded until after 16 regular-season games have been played, during the course of which Reggie Bush (hopefully) will have scored a few touchdowns, caught a few passes, made a few defenders look helpless and done a few other description-defying things.

And, of course, there's the possibility that someone else in his rookie class will accumulate more yards and scores and lead a team to the playoffs.

But not one of them -- and not many veterans, either -- will have matched his accomplishments. None will have given so much, will have made a lasting impression and profound impact regardless of whether he plays or sits out the season.

Remember your mom telling you money doesn't grow on trees? It seems like it does in Reggie Bush's yard.

Since being drafted in April, the No. 2 overall pick has teamed with his sponsors to give $50,000 to Holy Rosary Academy and High School and $86,000 to help seed the field at Tad Gormley Stadium, and to lend 12 Hummers to the Slidell Police Department for another year. And he's planning to make more donations under a 10-point plan that, if he didn't add another point, already has scored big in our rebuilding community.

"It is abnormal," said Mike Ornstein, Reggie Bush's marketing agent. "There is not another player who has done as much for the community he was moving into before he got signed."

And as easy as it often is to dismiss the words of a player's representative as backslapping bluster, try challenging Ornstein, and testing your memory.

Think of any player who has done more BEFORE he got paid?
 
Now, there's a benefit to this for Reggie Bush, and that's the windfall of positive publicity he receives for his benevolence. And, obviously, that's not such a bad thing to have, particularly after the cloud under which he exited USC, his family -- and he, directly or indirectly -- being accused of cashing in on illegal inducements from a man who wanted to be his agent.

Reggie Bush's image took a bigger hit than anything he'd absorbed on the field at the outset of the scandal, which has yet to reach a conclusion.

But the truth is this: If he and his family manage to keep their names out of the news until the matter has been resolved, the reparation of his image would be complete, or pretty close to it, by the time it is determined that he did or didn't violate an NCAA rule. So he didn't need to give away money and Hummers to make people like him.

The cynic in you says he can give away that amount, times 20, because the money doesn't belong to him. Well, that probably isn't as true as you'd like to believe.

See, as easily as he makes sure the community receives, Reggie Bush simply could have included that money in his sponsorship deal. Instead of urging his sponsors (adidas and Hummer, so far) to make donations he could have fattened his own wallet, and no one would have been the wiser.

That's not to say the kid isn't going to make mistakes, on and off the field, this year or somewhere down the line. Or that he won't, at times, appear selfish -- he hasn't signed a contract and at some point in negotiations, the Saints likely will portray Reggie Bush as greedy while he works overtime to make them sound cheap.

In the future he might even give us reason to question why he was drafted where he was and regarded as highly as he was, and why the Saints handed over millions of dollars without knowing for sure he'd be the next Gale Sayers or Barry Sanders.

But not this year.

This year, Saint Reggie's first in New Orleans, already is an award-winning one. We don't have to skip to the last chapter to learn that.

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