BLACKSBURG - Chris Cyrus has been called the "12th starter" on Virginia Tech's nationally ranked defense.
He's been referred to as football's equivalent to a sixth man in basketball.

He usually doesn't start, but Cyrus' teammates still find it difficult to look at him as just another player off the bench.

"You can't put Cyrus in a category like that," said Tech starting defensive tackle Carl Bradley. "Cyrus is one of us."

Members of Tech's defensive line are fond of saying that there's no difference between the starting front four and the four who play behind them. With Cyrus, they can say that and mean it.

A 1995 Brookville graduate, Cyrus is the only senior on the second unit and has overcome an injury-plagued first two seasons at Tech to become not only a productive reserve, but a reliable part-time starter at end.
He plays his final home game Friday against Boston College, along with the members of the starting defensive line: tackles Bradley and Nathaniel Williams, and ends Corey Moore and John Engelberger.

"Us five guys have been here forever, we've been through it all together," Cyrus said. "It makes me feel proud to be part of such a great group. Because, I'm going to tell you, those guys are excel-lent. They're all going to be stars one day."

As for the present, Cyrus isn't far behind. He's started four games this season and was Tech's leading tackler after three games. He enters Friday ranked seventh on the team with 52 tackles, including three sacks and a forced fumble that resulted in a safety in Tech's two-point win over West Virginia.

Included in Cyrus' bio in the Tech media guide is the line "could start for a lot of Division I teams." But the 6-foot-2, 240-pounder has said he would rather be a reserve on a top-ranked team like Tech than a starter on a mediocre squad elsewhere.

Besides, there aren't many who will play in front of Moore and Engelberger, two of the top ends in the nation.
"He knows how good Corey and John are," said Tech senior Shane Beamer, Cyrus' roommate for the past four years. "I think he does feel blessed to have this opportunity to play. If it's just the two of us sitting around and talking, he'll say the same thing to me in private."

Beamer's father, Tech coach Frank Beamer, knows what Cyrus has meant to the Hokies' de-fense.
"He's been as consistent a player as we've had this year," Beamer said. "We've had some guys in and out of the lineup a little bit, but he's just been a solid, consistent guy every week.

"When ESPN GameDay had a little segment here, where Corey Moore was going to introduce all the other starters, we actually introduced 12 people. And Chris Cyrus was that other guy, be-cause we consider him a starting guy for us."

As a kid, Cyrus spent more time at the pool than on the football field. A competitive swimmer for the Hill City Dolphins, he could be found at the pool most summer days from 8 a.m. to late afternoon.
That changed when Cyrus was 12 and started playing football for the Timberlake Lions. The team's primary rival were the Brookville Comets, a squad featuring Anthony Poindexter, the for-mer All-American at Virginia and current member of the Baltimore Ravens.

"I was actually a pretty good swimmer," Cyrus said. "I kind of miss it now, but I didn't then be-cause football was a lot more exciting."

Cyrus' parents, Wayne Cyrus and Karen Ward, divorced when he was still an infant, but he's remained close to both. Cyrus grew up with his mother, who knew early on her son would be lineman-size.

"When he was born, the doctor told me he was going to be 6-3 or 6-4," Ward said. "We were in Hill's one time and we had him in a little cart, and a lady said, `Why aren't you in school?' And he had two more years."
Cyrus' parents both were Brookville graduates, too, and he visited his father regularly on the weekends. Wayne, now a Lynchburg policeman, had played football for the Bees in the early 1970s before joining the Marines.
If Wayne wasn't immediately around, he was close enough to keep Cyrus in line.

"It was kind of one of those scare tactics," Cyrus said. "My dad's a pretty big guy, especially when you're a kid. And my mom would always threaten me, like, `I'm going to call your dad and let him take care of it.' But in all honesty, I'd rather take a whipping from my dad than my mom, be-cause he would take it easy and she wouldn't."

Cyrus' grandparents, Monty and Bettie Maddox, also helped raise him, watching him after school. They now are two of Cyrus' biggest supporters and attend most of the Tech games, home and away.

Cyrus' step father, David Ward, played football for Baldwin-Wallace (Ohio) College when it won the 1978 Division III national championship.

He tries to downplay it, but Cyrus has an artistic bent. His major course of study at Tech is so-ciology, but Cyrus already has earned enough credit hours for a minor in studio art.

"It was something I always thought I was pretty good at," he said. "It's just a stress-relieving type thing. It's something that I'm definitely interested in using in the future. I just don't know exactly how."

Cyrus said he always was clever at drawing, but never had tried painting. His opportunity came this summer, when he needed a senior-level class and the only one available was, uh, painting.

"And I go in there and there's all these people who've been painting since they were kids," Cy-rus said. "They've got these oil paintings and all this stuff. And I walk in there with satin house paint with basic colors and like these sponge brushes.

"And the teacher kind of acted funny toward me because he didn't feel like I deserved to be in the class. I ended up catching his eye on a lot of things and he ended up giving me an `A' in his class."

Cyrus' artistic touch was nurtured early by his mother, who enrolled him in the Lynchburg Fine Arts Center. "I didn't want him to be a loose cannon out there," she said.

Cyrus, when he was 11, even had a role in a production of the musical "Oliver."

"We went to Red Lobster for lunch," his mother said, "and the waiter says, `I know you. You were in Oliver.'"
 
 

Cyrus, as a football player, was not heavily recruited out of high school, but he fit well into Tech's defensive scheme that places a premium on speed, not size.

After being redshirted his first season, Cyrus was battling Danny Wheel for a starting spot at end when his two-year battle with knee injuries started. He took a wrong step in a preseason drill and tore cartilage in his right knee. He underwent arthroscopic surgery, then tried to return four weeks later.

"When you're young, you're like, `I'm not going to let this get me down,'" Cyrus said. "And I came back faster than I should have."

Later that season, Cyrus reinjured the same knee in a Tech junior varsity game. He played one game that year for the varsity, which lost to Nebraska in the Orange Bowl. "I'm sitting there going, `What am I doing wrong?'" Cyrus said.

In 1997, Cyrus and Wheel again were battling for a starting spot. Cyrus started three of the first five games before tearing cartilage in his left knee against Boston College. He continued to play but was not 100 percent, registering 28 tackles in 10 games.

At the end of the season he again underwent arthroscopic surgery.

"That kind of screwed up that season, too," Cyrus said. "I honestly questioned whether or not I was going to keep playing, because there was a lot of stress. It's like you want to do something so bad, and you know you can, but you can't because of this injury. And it really works on you men-tally."

Cyrus stuck with it after undergoing a 180-degree turn in his approach.

"I took the attitude where I wasn't going to worry about it anymore," he said. I was just going to go out there and have fun. I just went out and played and I didn't get all serious before the games, when you get sick to your stomach. And that season went great."

As backup at defensive end, Cyrus last season stayed healthy and took part in 54 tackles, in-cluding four for losses. He recovered a fumble in Tech's overtime win against Miami, the type of big play Cyrus' teammates knew he was capable of producing.

Bradley, an E.C. Glass graduate who also plays his final home game Friday, said Cyrus is re-spected on the team - whether he starts or not.

"I hold my head up high to Cyrus," Bradley said. "The way he approached it, he handled it in a real humble way. Some players could have come through here and been backing up somebody else and had a bad attitude about it.

"But I haven't seen anything negative about Cyrus."