When Jason Wright came to Northwestern two years ago, there was no question in his mind what his role would be on the football team.

“I’m a back,” he told himself, after carrying the ball 519 times for 4,268 yards at Diamond Bar High School in California.

But he remained a tailback for all of two weeks at NU before the Wildcats coaching staff suggested he start working on his pass-catching technique. He has since spent the last two seasons molding himself into a wide receiver — and, more importantly, adjusting his mentality.

“Oh, I’m a receiver,” Wright says now, grinning. “I’ve been working at it so hard with coach (Howard) Feggins and I’ve really developed into a receiver.”

Only problem is, the reborn receiver finds himself preparing to carry the ball in the backfield as his identity crisis continues.

With the Cats’ top three backs — Damien Anderson, Kevin Lawrence and Noah Herron — all sidelined in the span of a single week with season-ending injuries, Wright has had to make the second transition of his brief NU career.

Just a few days after Anderson went down Nov. 3, Herron made an awkward landing on his foot during a no-contact drill. The coaching staff, not wanting to take away freshman Jeff Backes’ redshirt, immediately thought of Wright.

A few hours after Herron was carted off the field, Wright got a phone call from Feggins: He was asked to start peeling off the rust at his old position for practice the next day.

“Honestly, him going back is real easy,” NU offensive coordinator Kevin Wilson said. “He’s an extremely intelligent guy. On the first day, he was like, ‘I can’t believe I remember this much.'”

Wright didn’t have to make the transition immediately during a game. Lawrence — Anderson’s most likely successor — took the bulk of the carries against Iowa as quarterback Zak Kustok devoted most of his attention to the passing game. When Lawrence injured his knee in the third quarter, sophomore Torri Stuckey took the field for the rest of the game.

But with the Monday discovery that Lawrence’s injury will keep him out of uniform for the rest of the season, the pressure on Wright has increased heading into Saturday’s game against Bowling Green.

He has spent the last week both reacquainting himself with the running backs’ playbook and rediscovering an identity that was suppressed for two years.

“You have to be much more physical at running back, and that’s something I have to get back in my mentality again,” Wright said. “It’s going down and cut-blocking people. You’ve got to stand up and hit them in the mouth.”

Wright doesn’t have a single carry all season, and after grabbing most of his minutes on special teams, he has caught the ball only five times for nine yards. With the new opportunity, his stats should mushroom after the Bowling Green game.

But he plans to spend the last two games of the regular season deferring to Stuckey in the depth chart. In his mind, he says there is no head-to-head competition with the team’s other sophomore tailback.

And Stuckey sees Wright mostly as an ally anyway.

“With only two running backs available to practice and play, it’s more like, instead of a competition, we’re trying to help each other out,” Stuckey said.

Wright, however, doesn’t plan on a lengthy stay in the offensive backfield after all of his teammates heal.

He’ll gladly make a third transition once the 2001 season mercifully ends because he knows he put plenty of effort into becoming a wide receiver in the first place.

“It was very difficult because I couldn’t catch,” he said, bluntly pointing out how far he has come. “It was a serious problem.”

And when Herron and Lawrence recover, and Backes is no longer a redshirt, the program will again have the depth at tailback that originally forced Wright to find a new home on the field.

“We just thought Stuckey and Noah offered a little bit more than him, and we could get him on the field as a receiver,” Wilson said. “Those other guys couldn’t play receiver — he could. So we moved him to try to get them all on the field.”

For the next five days, head coach Randy Walker is just hoping nothing happens to either of his two remaining tailbacks, the fourth-stringer and the desperation convert from another position.

No offense to Wright, but he’s at the end of the line.

“I’m next,” said Walker, a former tailback himself.