Again, the young man from Ypsilanti, Mich., smiled.
"That's not for me to say," said Jenkins, who at 24 already has played three seasons for the Panthers. "My job is to play. If that's what's said, that's what's said, but for me, that's not my focus."
But it has been said, Jenkins was told. First, from a less than objective person -- teammate Brentson Buckner causing a minor firestorm before the season by saying Jenkins was better than Sapp; then, from an anonymous group of 10 NFL general managers polled several months ago by the Dallas Morning News.
"My focus," said Jenkins, again trying to deflect the question, "is to enjoy this, go out and try to get this win."
But as the questions continued, Jenkins finally conceded that "I'd like to be the best. I work to be the best, and when I retire, I might have a different view."
Jenkins's soaring popularity with NFL observers has come the hard way, he said, because it wasn't too long ago that the opinion was moving in the opposite direction. It was the spring of 2001 when Jenkins became stressed out in the days leading up to the NFL draft. "I took my cellphone and left it in the car," he said. "I went fishing. I was doing different things to get my mind off [the draft]."
He could only handle so much fishing, however, and later he watched television and kept seeing names flash across the bottom of the screen. Through the first round, he hadn't seen his own. Jenkins wondered why, his mood going from disappointment to anger to wonderment.
Then, with the 44th overall pick, the Panthers chose the mountain of a man from the University of Maryland.
Jenkins has squat-pressed 700 pounds, bench-pressed 450, and pressed cleanly 363, but he's never understood how he slipped that far in the draft.
Then again, he never has figured out why Michigan State dragged its feet on a scholarship offer -- especially after he said he wouldn't play for archrival Michigan -- a situation that led him to Maryland.
