All the late-night Bryce Love highlights the East Coast might’ve missed

Stanford running back Bryce Love has had one of the most dominant starts to a season in college football history. Despite a lacking end to the season, relative to his incredible numbers in the early going, he’s a Heisman finalist. During the season, he had 237 runs for 1,973 yards (an 8.3 per-carry average and a 164.4 per-game average) and 17 touchdowns.

The bad thing about Love’s season is that it occurred largely out of national view.

Stanford starts a lot of its games late at night on the East Coast. That’s great if you’re on the West Coast or an all-day college football watcher who lives for #Pac12AfterDark, but it’s rough if you need to sleep, like to go out at night, or have to do anything that drags you away while you’re eight beers deep early Sunday morning.

Everyone should have listened to Stanford grad Richard Sherman ...

... but it’s not too late to catch up on the Bryce Love experience.

To catch you up on the Love greatness you might’ve missed, I’ve put together a list. It includes all of his 20-plus-yard carries in games that started after 9 p.m. ET, with visuals for the best plays.

Week 0: a 10:05 p.m. ET kick vs. Rice (in Australia)

• A 62-yard Love run on Stanford’s first play of the season

• A 31-yarder in the second quarter
• A 25-yarder, also in the second

Week 3: a 10:39 p.m. ET kick at San Diego State

• A 51-yard TD in the second quarter:

On Stanford’s excellent blocking, Ian Boyd writes for SB Nation:

Love is regularly running behind great blocking, but he sure knows how to cut off his blocks and can do real damage after he does so. His balance, vision, and acceleration in this running game was the first thing Stanford put on film, and they’ve put a great deal more of it out there for everyone to see. You might want to tune in for one of these late-night games and see for yourself.

• A 47-yard run in the third

• A 53-yard TD in the fourth

Week 4: a 10:36 p.m. ET kick vs. UCLA

• A 27-yard run in the second
• A 30-yard run in the fourth
• A 69-yard TD in the fourth

Week 6: a 10:15 p.m. ET kick at Utah

• A 39-yard run in the second quarter
• A 68-yard TD in the fourth

Week 7: an 11:09 p.m. ET kick vs. Oregon

• A 34-yard run in the first quarter
• A 67-yard TD, also in the first

Week 9: a 10:30 p.m. ET kick vs. Washington

• A 21-yard run
• A 35-yard run

Pac-12 Championship Game vs. USC

While the game wasn’t in the wee hours of the morning, we’ll throw it on here because it was on a Friday night right before a bunch of games with Playoff stakes.

• A 52-yard run

At all hours this season Love had:

• 23 runs of 30-plus yards
• 14 runs of 40-plus
• 12 runs of 50-plus
• six runs of 60-plus
• and one rush of 70-plus

All of which met or exceeded almost every entire team in the country. Seriously, only Arizona had more 50-yard runs than Love did.

Just so you know, Love did a lot of this on one leg.

Love replaced Christian McCaffrey, one of the best running backs in recent college history. Love’s putting up numbers that even the great McCaffrey, now in the NFL as a first-round Carolina Panthers pick, never put up in college. He was a shoo-in for a 2,000-yard season if he’d stayed healthy, but he didn’t.

Love went out in the second half against Oregon (after already gaining 147 yards). He then missed the next week’s game against Oregon State game with an ankle injury and was hampered him for the rest of the season. In some games he would be spelled by a backup, and wasn’t at his most effective. Love averaged 5.7 per carry in the season’s final five games. It’s a far cry from his best, but when factoring in the injury, it’s understandable.

Through seven games, Love was on pace for 2,377 yards in a 12-game season, which would’ve been the fifth-most ever. If Love could have kept up that 198-yard average and stayed healthy through a 14-game season, he would have finished the year with 2,773 yards.

That would have broken Barry Sanders’ single-season record of 2,628, set at Oklahoma State in 1988, and we’ll always have to wonder what could have been. But not Love.

But it’s not just what Love does on the field.

His conduct off the field has more than impressed coach David Shaw.

It certainly qualifies him for the “with integrity” portion of the Heisman’s mission statement.

See, East Coast?

Don’t you wish you’d stayed up for more Pac-12 football now?