Barry James Sanders planted his feet and bounced right, leaving a defender grabbing at air. His broad shoulders withstood another arm-tackle as he hurried upfield, where he found himself surrounded. To even his mother’s surprise, Sanders then hurdled his own blocker, sprinted for a 64-yard touchdown, and escaped the shadow of his own name, if only for one play.


“That’s the run that made me think, this is his father’s son,” said Andy Bogert, who coached Sanders for four years at Heritage Hall High School in Oklahoma City.


The run, during the semifinals of the state playoffs in Sanders’s freshman season, was an introduction, a burst of bottled-up potential and athletically divine DNA. It was a step out of the shadow of his father, the Hall of Famer Barry Sanders. On Wednesday, Sanders took another step, signing a national letter of intent to play running back at Stanford.


Sanders is hardly the first son of a famous athlete to try his hand at sports. Trey Griffey, son of the second-generation baseball star Ken Griffey Jr., committed to play college football at Arizona on Wednesday, which was national signing day, and offensive tackle Kyle Long, son of the Hall of Famer Howie Long, signed with Oregon out of a junior college.


But few inspire comparisons like Sanders, who shares a name, a sport and a position with his father, who won a Heisman Trophy and shattered N.C.A.A. records at Oklahoma State.


“I try to emulate him,” Sanders said in a phone interview last week.


Sanders’s mother, Aletha House, gave him her father’s name as a middle name to deliberately separate her son from his father. But Sanders does not correct strangers when they incorrectly call him Barry Sanders Jr. His given name was a last-minute decision by Sanders’s paternal grandmother, Shirley.


After Sanders’s breakthrough run, as others saw similarities between father and son, House could still tell the differences between them. Sanders’s strides were too tall to be his father’s, and the son’s celebratory fist-pumps would have looked strange coming from the elder Sanders, who is quiet and hates attention.


But in many other ways, Sanders is so like his father: his smile; the way he walks with his tree-trunk legs; the nervous-sounding, awkward laughs he lets out in midconversation.


Barry James Sanders was destined to be a running back. A swimming instructor once told House her son’s legs would not float like the other children’s because his were too heavy.


At first, his size was a curse. Coaches relegated Sanders to linebacker and defensive end, positions he disliked. House said she thought Sanders would play baseball, his first love. (He still plays baseball and may play for Stanford, too.)


Growing up in Oklahoma City with his mother, who separated from his father when he was 2, Sanders watched replays of his father’s N.F.L. games with the Detroit Lions. Football claimed Sanders’s heart in seventh grade, once he got a chance to play running back and dominated at the position. The first time Bogert scouted Sanders in middle school, his first three runs went for 70-, 75- and 60-yard touchdowns.


“People always say the way my father played, it was more of a mind-set than a physical way,” Sanders said. “It’s just something that you think and you’re able to react to. I don’t think you can practice thinking like somebody.”


Before the snap, Sanders tries to visualize how the play will develop. “Improvise” was his motto, he said, but it was grounded in instinct.


Born with his father’s humbleness, Sanders shrugs off experts who say he is less shifty but possesses better top-end speed than his father.


“What he did, I think can’t be duplicated,” Sanders said.


Off the field, the comparisons never end. On the field, the elder Sanders leaves his son to figure out football on his own, unless the son asks his father for advice.


“I’ve always had my own aspirations, but I’ve used his name to my advantage,” Sanders said.


He has gained knowledge through his father’s resources, meeting Marshall Faulk last summer, for example, and has drawn attention from a young age. By now, it is more deserved, as Sanders rushed for a school-record 4,955 yards in his career at Heritage.


Not all sons of star athletes follow the pedigree. Trey Griffey tried football instead of baseball, developing into what his coach, Rodney Wells, called a big, rangy, physical receiver in his one and only season, as a senior at Dr. Phillips High School in Orlando, Fla.


Griffey said he skipped baseball when he was 12 because the game was too slow. He tasted early success in football, saying he lost just seven Pop Warner football games in seven seasons.


Rated a two-star or three-star recruit, Griffey will play in a spread offense at Arizona that is similar to what his high school used.


But Sanders’s talent dwarfs Griffey’s, said Scott Kennedy, Fox Sports’s director of scouting, who called Griffey a borderline Division I prospect. Kennedy’s Web site, Scout.com, did not rank Griffey among the top 316 wide receiver recruits in the country.


“Does his last name Griffey help him get some scholarship offers? Maybe,” Kennedy said.


Sanders said he chose Stanford over Oklahoma State, Florida State and Alabama, citing the Cardinal’s academic reputation, strong recruiting class of offensive linemen and commitment to the running game.


Consistently named among the top 150 recruits regardless of position, Sanders may have a better shot at outrunning his father’s fame.


“I think he will never totally escape the shadow of his father, because it is what it is,” House said of her son, pausing after her voice trailed off. “But I do think that he has put a mark out there for himself as Barry James Sanders.”