Hershel Dennis
player of American football
Hershel Henry Dennis IV (born July 12, 1984) is an American former football running back. He played college football as a student athlete at the University of Southern California. During his six-year career, the Trojans went 70–8 making Dennis the first player to play on six Pacific-10 Championship squads and the player with the most wins in college football history. His nickname since childhood is "Patch."
Early life
Dennis prepped at Long Beach Polytechnic High School and was a part of the "Long Beach Poly Five", five highly recruited players including Manuel Wright, Marcedes Lewis, Darnell Bing, and Winston Justice. As of May 2007, Dennis still held the career rushing and touchdown marks at Long Beach Poly, as well as the single season rushing record. Dennis made his final decision between USC and the University of Oregon; his father wanted him to go to Oregon, but he chose USC out of respect for his mother, Rose Teofilo, who wanted him closer to home.
He was also on Poly's track team, with bests of 10.7 seconds in the 100 meters, 22.3 seconds in the 200 meters, 6.75 meters (22.1 feet) in the long jump and 1.98 meters in the high jump, and basketball team. Current Trojans Vincent Joseph, Travon Patterson and Alfred Rowe also prepped at Poly.
College career
As a freshman in the 2002 season, Dennis was a reserve behind a stable of experienced seniors including running backs Justin Fargas and Sultan McCullough as well as fullback/tailbacks Malaefou MacKenzie and Sunny Byrd; however, he did see play time in all 13 games, highlighted by a 38-yard touchdown run against rival UCLA. In 2003, he was the starting tailback in all 13 games over Reggie Bush and LenDale White.
However, Dennis lost the starting spot for the 2004 season, having been suspended from the first two games due to a resulting criminal investigation (that later cleared him of any wrongdoing) and violating team rules.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5744434. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1984, 2007, 2002 and 2003.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hershel Dennis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.