Oshea Trujillo has a big personality.

“He has an all-american mouth, too,” Trujillo’s position coach Roger Cooper said after extolling his star outside linebacker’s athleticism before the season.

That’s been proven true in interviews with Trujillo over the year. The linebacker is as quick in press conferences as he is on the field — and considering Cooper also said his star was running close to 4.5-second 40s, that’s pretty quick — always smiling, always joking, always quipping.

So it wasn’t a surprise to hear that Trujillo had been talking his coaches’ ears off this fall about trying him out at running back.

“It’s something that Oshea’s been bugging the heck out of us about for a long time,” ISU head coach Rob Phenicie said. “We messed around with it in the fall, just, ha-ha, joking, joking.”

Despite that, it was certainly a surprise to see Trujillo in the offensive backfield on Idaho State’s opening drive against Southern Utah on Saturday — so much so that the Pluto TV broadcast and the official stats confused Trujillo with Hunter Hays, a walk-on backup quarterback who shares Trujillo’s No. 11 jersey.

“That’s OK, that’s my guy,” Trujillo said laughingly after the game. “That was Hunter Hays out there.”

In ISU’s 26-24 win over the Thunderbirds, the Bengals’ first win since October 2019, Trujillo led the team with 66 yards on 10 carries, ripping off two 15-yarders.

He had three of the four carries by running backs on ISU’s final drive, which ended in a game-winning field goal, picking up 11 yards on those totes.

“When I found out they were going to put Oshea at running back, I was scratching my head, I was like, what the hell are we doing?” ISU quarterback Tyler Vander Waal said. “But it worked out. He’s just a ballplayer, hell of an athlete, heck of a player. Before that fourth-quarter, last drive started, I went up to him, I said, it’s you and me right now.

“We were kind of the guys that we wanted the ball in our hands, we were champing at the bit to go out there.”

ISU’s coaches started scheming up up a package for Trujillo, expanding on their fall experiments, after last week’s game against Weber, when Malakai Rango and Raiden Hunter, ISU’s top two backs, both left the Bengals’ season-opening loss with undisclosed injuries.

It wasn’t until Friday, though, that Trujillo and the rest of the team knew that, with Rango and Hunter still out, the linebacker would actually be taking snaps in the backfield. A former quarterback and running back who came out Seattle’s Bishop Blanchet High School listed as an “athlete,” Trujillo had no problem with the assignment.

“If you ever need him, especially with this whole thing going around and people getting quarantined — and that’s not what happened to (Rango and Hunter) — we had it in our back pocket,” Phenicie said.

“Really, Oshea willed his team to a win Saturday. There’s a lot of people that contributed to a victory, there were a lot of people that had a hand in that victory, but Oshea Trujillo, there was a spirit there that he had going and he willed this team to victory.”

With Rango and Hunter still uncertain for Saturday’s game against Eastern Washington — Phenicie, as always, refused to confirm injuries at a weekly press conference — Trujillo may be reprising his dual roles against the Eagles this week.

Who knows, maybe he’ll try his hand at punting too.

“My nickname for him is Oshea Both Ways now that he’s playing offense and defense,” cornerback Jayden Dawson said. “Seeing him run the ball, I’m just like, OK, I didn’t see you do that in practice, now you’re acting a little different today. But he did a tremendous job running the ball, he gave our offense a lot of support.”

SCOUTING EASTERN WASHINGTON

As always in recent years against Eastern Washington, stopping the Eagles starts with stopping quarterback Eric Barriere.

Now a redshirt senior, Barriere led the Eagles to the national title game in 2018, finished fifth in the Walter Payton Award voting in 2019 and was named a preseason All-American by multiple publications heading into this season.

From La Habra HS in Inglewood, California, he’s thrown for 752 yards in the Eagles’ first two games of the FCS spring season. He’s run for a total of minus-7 yards, but make no mistake — Barriere is a true dual-threat quarterback.

“He’s where everything starts and stops with that offense,” Phenicie said. “Exceptionally fast, good player. He’s been in the system four years and we definitely have our hands full with him. ... You gotta contain him. You can’t let him loose. You have to keep your edge pressure, you have to maintain an edge so that he can’t escape outside, but you have to have him covered up the middle if he escapes out the front door.”

Idaho State hasn’t beaten the Eagles since 2005, a stretch of 11 games. EWU hasn’t scored under 34 points in any of those games, and handily won 2019’s meeting, 48-5, in Holt Arena.

“It left a bad taste in our mouth for sure, and I think we’re more excited to come out and do better this year against them,” wide receiver Tanner Conner said. “I think we have a better game plan going in. I was watching the game film from last year the other day and I think we have a better read on them this year. We’ve got new guys, a new system, really, and I think we’re going to do a lot better this year against Eastern.”

Tamarick Pierce, like Barriere, is a redshirt senior for the Eagles. He’s rushed for an average of 84 yards in two games this year. Receiver Talolo Limu-Jones is the third member of that redshirt senior trio, and he has 15 catches for 180 yards in the two games. Andrew Boston has only played in one game, but went off for eight catches and 120 yards against Northern Arizona last week.

“What makes it harder is they have a good running game and a whole group of skill players,” Phenicie said. “Sometimes you have to rob Peter to play Paul. Do you go heavy in the box or do you go light in the box and cover down? That’s the game you’re playing.”

Redshirt junior linebacker Chris Ojoh has 18 tackles and two TFLs in two games, and with Ty Graham (16 tackles) gives EWU two very good linebackers.

Anthany Smith and Calin Criner, who’s from Rocky Mountain High School in Boise, are the downhill run-fitting safeties in Eastern’s scheme.

“Their defense is talented and they’re tricky to figure out a little bit,” Vander Waal said. “Just watching both games from this year, I think they’ve shown two different things in two games this year, so we’re just trying to figure out what they do against our 11 personnel, our 12 personnel. It’s just getting a bead early, not relying on what you see on film, going out there on Saturday and seeing, are they in a two-high shell, are they in a one-high shell, stuff like that.”