He never asked to come out.

Charles Rogers would see it through to the bitter, cold, humiliating end. He would endure 60 minutes of his Michigan State team being embarrassed one last time. He would keep running his routes, a hopeless sequence of fruitless patterns where he ended up a decoy and his quarterback ended up under a pile of Penn State linemen. The player NFL scouts call the next Randy Moss would watch stoically from the sideline as the Nittany Lions' Larry Johnson made a run at the Heisman, the little statue that just eight weeks earlier was Rogers' to steal with his 4.2 speed. He kept going out there, even with the score 34-0, 48-0, 55-7.

After all, how bad could one more loss be, even a 61-7 loss? Rogers' grandfather, the man who raised him, died earlier in the season. His friend Jeff Smoker, a gifted QB who loved to throw to him, left the team to enter rehab amid gossip that would make John Gotti blush. Another friend, co-captain Dawan Moss, was suspended for an altercation with a cop during a drunken-driving arrest. And his coach, Bobby Williams, who brought him to East Lansing, was fired in midseason in a move that touched racial nerves. "You'd be in class and people were asking, 'What's going on?'" Rogers says. "I'd get calls about Smoke, about Dawan, about Coach. You couldn't hide. No matter what we did, we couldn't win."

	A funny thing happened on the way to the Heisman.

Yet here was Rogers, down 6 TDs in 16° windchill, nothing to gain if he caught a pass, millions to lose if he caught a knee. "That tells you a lot about Chuck," says Morris Watts, who coached the final three games of MSU's disastrous 4–8 season. "He'd have gone out for the last series if we hadn't caught him and said, 'It's okay, you can rest.'"

It wasn't supposed to end like this. With 16 starters returning from a 7–5 team, eight home games and the country's most exciting passing tandem in Rogers and Smoker, Michigan State thought it could be the team Ohio State turned out to be. The team was built by Williams, who emerged from the shadow of an autocratic predecessor, Nick Saban, as a player's coach. Now he had his own players, the jewel being Rogers, who would have gone to Michigan if Saban had still been coaching State. "In August, it was like, 'This is going to be a great season,'" Rogers says. "We had so much talent. We were thinking BCS, being 8–0 going into the Michigan game. We had the hype, the publicity, the big pictures."

Bigger than big. Rogers and Smoker had 40-foot murals of themselves hanging from the south side of Spartan Stadium, part of a promotional campaign, with the slogan, "Where there's Smoke, there's Fire." The talented juniors, both heavily recruited out of rugged industrial towns -- Rogers from Saginaw, Mich., Smoker from Manheim, Pa. -- had grown to be friends as well as potent passing partners. As a sophomore, Rogers caught 67 passes for 1,470 yards and 14 TDs, capping the year with a breathtaking 270-yard, 2-TD performance in the Silicon Valley Bowl against Fresno State.

Scouts gushed over the sprinter's speed, which propelled him to a near-world-class 20.6-second 200 meters in high school ... the slender 6'4" frame that helped him dominate shorter DBs ... the basketball player's hands and agility that served him in acrobatic, highlight-film catches. Here was the latest in the line of NFL-ready Spartan receivers -- from Gene Washington to Kirk Gibson to Andre Rison to Muhsin Muhammad to Plaxico Burress. Here was Randy Moss without the baggage. And with Smoker, a deft scrambler with a knack for making big plays, Rogers seemed set for a Heisman run and a top-five NFL draft slot as soon as he came out.

The first two games, Rogers put up 3 TDs and nearly 300 yards in receptions as State sprinted to a 2–0 record. Then in Game 3, against California, came the first sign of trouble. Rogers ripped off 166 more yards and kept alive what would become an NCAA record; 13-straight regular-season games with a TD catch. (The old mark was held by Moss, Desmond Howard and Pacific's Aaron Turner.) But Smoker threw two picks, MSU turned it over five times -- and the Spartans were upset at home.

"You thought, 'Damn, is Cal that good?'" Rogers recalls. "'Or is it us?'" A speed bump, he finally concluded nothing a victory over Notre Dame couldn't cure. But the week of the Notre Dame game, Rogers faced a different kind of test. His grandfather died, and for the only time in his life, Rogers didn't feel like playing football.

"He was the only one who could reach me," Rogers says of Benjamin Rogers, the man who took Charles into his home in junior high, bringing security to what had been an unstable childhood spent shuttling back and forth between a mother in Saginaw and a father in Grand Rapids. Benjamin, who spent his life working factory jobs and making good on family responsibilities, drilled his grandson on taking responsibility for the two children -- Charnae (now 5) and Charvez (3) -- Charles had fathered out of wedlock in high school. He helped Charles resist the temptations of Saginaw's streets, where drug dealing and hustling were tempting alternatives for sons of a working class that could no longer find work.

The rock-solid, blue-collar community famous for being Stevie Wonder's birthplace is now a segregated smokestack town with the problems of the big inner cities, minus any big-city caché. A place Michiganders call Saginasty, its sole badge of civic pride is that it's better off than Flint, 35 miles to the south. "There are still some good factory jobs," Rogers says, "but if you don't know someone, you ain't getting one. Unless you're a top-10 student or an athlete, you're not getting out."

Benjamin Rogers saw to it that Charles would get out. The old man didn't even like sports, but he saw what everyone else saw, that the skinny kid had extraordinary gifts. "He told me to stay straight, that I was the last hope to bring good to the family name," Rogers says. "He told me to make the family proud." Now, with Charles on the verge of possibly putting that name on the Heisman, his grandfather wouldn't be there to see it. "I only played against Notre Dame because I knew he didn't want the train to stop," Rogers says. "I gave it my all, for him."

His all was spectacular: seven passes for 175 yards and 2 TDs, including what may be the catch of the year in the back of the Irish end zone, a Dwight Clark-style grab in which he defied gravity with his leap, then defied geometry by keeping his left foot in bounds. The Irish came back to beat MSU in the final minutes, 21-17, but Rogers and Heisman began keeping regular company in the media. It was a cruel joke, because the Heisman campaign and the season were about to go up in Smoke.

After a win over Northwestern, things fell apart at Iowa. Michigan State committed five turnovers, including 2 INTs by Smoker, in a 44-16 loss during which the quarterback was benched. The next week, he threw another pick in a 28-7 embarrassment against Minnesota. And suddenly Smoker was off the team, suspended indefinitely for undisclosed violations of team rules. "If there was something wrong with Smoke, nobody had any idea," says Rogers. "We're friends, but I had no clue."

Smoker has since announced that he went into rehab for an unspecified substance-abuse problem, but at the time no explanation was given, and Internet gossip piled upon radio rumors, a litany that grew more monstrous with each posting. It was a drug problem, went the talk. Weed and booze. Coke, too. And crack. Smoke got in deep with gamblers. So did teammates. And they threw games. And they were cutting deals with the feds. And ...

	You will definitely be seeing Rogers play on Sundays.

There was, of course, no evidence for any of it. But that didn't stop people from hitting the SEND button or talk radio hosts from musing about how deep the problems were at State. The hounding reached its zenith just before Halloween, when at least two Michigan media outlets rushed trucks to Grand Rapids to cover Smoker's supposed arraignment on federal drug and point-shaving charges.

Only there was no hearing. The FBI and every state law-enforcement agency denied Smoker was ever under investigation for anything. "We're inundated," one DA said. "We have serious cases I wish the media would spend time on, but they get absolutely no attention." That didn't stop campus comedians from playing on the school colors with the chant, "Smoke Green, Snort White," or students on Halloween from costuming themselves in Smoker's No. 9 jersey and powdery upper lips.

Then MSU lost to Michigan, 49-3. Within days, Dawan Moss was arrested and Williams fired. One of only four African-American football coaches in Division I-A, Williams was dismissed by athletic director Ron Mason for letting the program get out of control. Some in the state thought Williams wasn't cut the same slack a white coach would have gotten. In this environment, with his friends and his coach being publicly pilloried, Rogers and his teammates were supposed to shut out distractions, put their season back on track. "That's what I tried to do, because that's part of being an athlete," Rogers says. "But this hit so big, you couldn't close it out."

Rogers isn't a born leader. "Even when he was the best player in the state, he'd never step out front," says his high school coach, Don Durrett. "Charles just liked being part of the team." Yet he spoke out to the Spartans, urging them not to quit: "I figured I rarely talk, so they should listen. But I wasn't reaching everybody. You could see guys giving up."

As the situation grew worse, the rumor mill began grinding on Rogers. A dropped pass, a slow jog back to the huddle, even his friendships came into question. "It went from Jeff to Dawan to Coach," says Rogers, his eyes flashing anger. "And now here they come for me. Me and Jeff were cool, and me and Dawan were friends, so people just start to assume, you know, 'Rogers has something to do with it.'" Yet he expresses no anger at Smoker:

"It's like family. You stay with them. Jeff is still the quarterback, my teammate, and I'm gonna support him." Fire and Smoke still talk, but not about Smoker's problem: "We're trying to look forward."

Their coach's firing left the Spartans with little to look forward to. "Coach Williams was like a father to a lot of the guys," Rogers says. "He's the only reason I'd even thought of staying for my senior year." (On Nov. 28, Rogers surprised exactly nobody by declaring for the NFL draft.)

To get through the season, Rogers turned back home. In the past decade, Durrett has built a football power at Saginaw High, molding kids from the town's toughest neighborhoods into disciplined teams brimming with D1 prospects. No egos or shortcuts allowed. "Saginaw prepared me for the world," says Rogers, who -- with every college in the country after him -- chose to stay close to home to be near Charnae and Charvez. Each summer, he gives a clinic for area kids with Purdue safety Stuart Schweigert, who attended Saginaw High's crosstown rival and dueled with Rogers on the track and football field. "There haven't been a lot of superstars from Saginaw," Rogers says. "Me and Stu thought we could set an example."

In East Lansing, Rogers gathered his former Saginaw High teammates -- starting LBs Ron Stanley and Monquiz Wedlow and reserve CB Jeremiah McLaurin -- and made a pact. No matter what else happened, the guys with the Saginasty tattoos would play hard to the end. "Saginaw guys, we're close," says Rogers. "We can point the finger, we can challenge each other."

They dedicated the Indiana game to Williams, and to each other. "We played hard, and I think the team fed off us," says Rogers, who had another 100-yard game and 2 TDs in a 56-21 win. They nearly upset bowl-bound Purdue, with Rogers grabbing eight passes for 162 yards and another pair of scores. Even in the debacle at Penn State, Rogers kept at it all the way, because that's what you do when you're from Saginaw. Things won't be easy, ever, so you plug away, show up, try to turn a negative into a positive. "I feel like I've been through it all," Rogers says. "But I got no regrets. I think it will make everyone who went through it better people."

The worst-kept secret in Michigan all season was that Rogers would turn pro once it ended. Schweigert, his old rival, publicly said he'd be crazy to stay, with two kids to support, a new coach on the way and nothing left to prove. But Rogers remained mum about his intentions, attending study table the week of his final game. He kept up the student-athlete pose long after he needed to. And he handled it all with as much grace as he showed on that catch against Notre Dame.

In a frigid interview room at Penn State, five days before Rogers announced his pro plans, one of a group of beat writers asked him how a new coach could change his mind. "Those are your words," he said. "I haven't made my decision yet." Then Rogers paused and with perfect timing, patted the reporter on the forearm and said, "Nice try though, baby."

The group laughed in appreciation, more of the young man than the patter. In Charles Rogers' world, you still get points for trying.

This article appears in the December 23 issue of ESPN The Magazine.