JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The expectations for Jacksonville Jaguars running back Leonard Fournette are sky high.

He’s the odds-on favorite to be the NFL Rookie of the Year.

The best running back in franchise history called him a “beast.”

Executive VP of football operations Tom Coughlin told Fournette they drafted him fourth overall “to put the ball in the end zone.”

Win awards. Surpass 1,200 yards. Score touchdowns. Elevate a franchise that hasn’t had a winning record since 2007 and has lost 11 or more games each of the past six seasons. All that is falling upon the broad shoulders of a 22-year-old who will be playing in his first NFL preseason game on Thursday night.

Yet to Fournette, that’s nothing new. He’s been dealing with immense expectations on the football field since he first put on pads. He’ll attack these the way he did when he was starring at LSU and St. Augustine High School in New Orleans: by shrugging them off.

“To me, it never was pressure,” Fournette said. “You expect that from yourself. All the work you put in, you expect to succeed.

“I’m a firm believer if you work hard, at the end of the day, you’ll get what you came for.”

That’s not arrogance. That’s acknowledging history, because Fournette has met — and exceeded — the enormous expectations at every level. The NFL is just the next logical step.

“This kid was a legend when he was 5-, 6-years-old when he started playing football,” said David Johnson, Fournette’s high school coach for three seasons and now the wide receivers coach at Memphis. “He always had those expectations.”

Fournette was a youth football star in New Orleans. He was bigger and faster and stronger than the other kids his age and was running around and over everyone so regularly that opposing coaches were demanding to see his birth certificate.

At 12 years old, opposing parents signed a petition to get him banned, so it’s easy to see why Fournette was already a football legend in New Orleans by the time he set foot at St. Augustine High School in 2008. It didn’t take long for the legend to grow, either.

Fournette rushed for more than 1,000 yards over his first three games as a ninth-grader, and that’s all Frank Wilson, the recruiting coordinator and running backs coach at LSU, needed to see. He offered the 14-year-old Fournette a scholarship.

“Everybody thought at the time that Frank Wilson was crazy,” Johnson said. “We are from New Orleans, and we coached at [Landry-Walker College and Career Prep] together and he asked me, ‘Dave, how good is he?’ I said, ‘He is the best running back I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s not even close.'”

By the time Fournette was a senior, he was a consensus top-five recruit in the nation, and Scout.com ranked him No. 1 overall, one spot ahead of now-Jaguars teammate Cam Robinson and four spots ahead of Myles Garrett, who was the No. 1 overall pick in the 2017 NFL draft.

“I knew about Leonard since he was in high school. He’s going to be very talented in this league,” second-year linebacker Myles Jack said. “He’s very sturdy, very strong, good pass protector. He can catch; he can do it all. I wouldn’t be surprised if he rushes for a good amount of yards. He’ll be a big part of our offense. I expect big things from him.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — The competition for the San Francisco 49ers’ starting center job ended after just 10 practices.

The Niners released veteran center Jeremy Zuttah — who was expected to compete with Daniel Kilgore — on Wednesday morning, after less than two weeks of training camp.

“That was a tough decision,” head coach Kyle Shanahan said. “That was something we were really looking at last night. I think it says a lot about how Kilgore has been playing. He’s done a really good job in practice with that center spot.”

The 49ers acquired Zuttah in a March trade with the Baltimore Ravens; the teams also swapped sixth-round picks (No. 186 to Baltimore and No. 198 to San Francisco). Zuttah was coming off a Pro Bowl appearance, and his previous experience playing in offenses similar to Shanahan’s made him an intriguing fit.

At a personnel meeting Tuesday night, Shanahan, general manager John Lynch and their respective staffs spent time examining the roster and whether there was a spot for Zuttah.

“It just looked to us like we weren’t going to get Zuttah a lot of playing time throughout the preseason,” Shanahan said. “He’s a guy I have a lot of respect for; he’s done a lot of good things in this league. I just told him this morning I had a hard time doing that to him, and [I] wanted to give him a chance to go somewhere else instead of keeping him here and making him go through that.”

“I’d love to keep everybody, especially a guy who can still play in this league,” Shanahan added, “but we thought it was better for him and better for us to move on.”

Zuttah, 31, spent his first six seasons with Tampa Bay, playing both guard and center, after the Bucs used a third-round pick (83rd overall) on him in the 2008 NFL draft. He was in Baltimore for three seasons before the Niners traded for him. He played exclusively at center with the Ravens. He has appeared in 131 games, making 117 starts.

With Zuttah gone, the Niners will lean on Kilgore as the starter in the middle with veteran Tim Barnes as the current backup. Barnes signed with the Niners after the Rams let him go late in the offseason.

Elsewhere on the interior of the offensive line, guard Joshua Garnett is set to have cleanup surgery on his left knee Thursday, according to Shanahan.

Make that four conquests of the UEFA Super Cup for Real Madrid.

On Tuesday night at Philip II Arena in Macedonia, Real Madrid held the throne in the UEFA Super Cup by defeating Manchester United 2-1. Los Blancos are the first club to win the game in successive years since AC Milan accomplished the feat in 1989 and 1990.

The result was deserved for Real Madrid, which played most of the match at a higher gear than United. Los Blancos were relentless in their pressure through the first half, and Casemiro scored the goal that had been a long time coming, calculating a run into the Red Devils’ penalty area before one-timing the ball past David De Gea. The Brazilian midfielder was borderline offside, but complaints fell upon deaf ears.

It was much of the same in the second half. Real Madrid was rewarded for its pressure once again when Karim Benzema played the ball to Isco, who played a give-and-go with Gareth Bale and proceeded to beat De Gea. United pulled a goal back minutes later courtesy of Romelu Lukaku’s first competitive goal for the Red Devils, but it was all in vain. Seven minutes of second-half stoppage time – the result of Marouane Fellaini being treated on the pitch – provided no equaliser.

At the end of the game, Jose Mourinho was seen congratulating Real Madrid’s players individually and giving Cristiano Ronaldo, who came on for Benzema in the 83rd minute, a friendly pat.