A comprehensive memoir of my football journey. Chronicling my time playing college football at Iowa State.
To be honest, as much as I enjoyed growing up in Coppell, the truth of it is that ultimately it was a bubble that insulated me from the worst of things life had to offer. While I had certainly come a ways from what I had been before, I was still relatively a naïve spoiled brat. Going to Iowa State to this day remains one of the best decisions I've ever made, and not even just from a football perspective. The contrast of rural college town Iowa compared to richer upper middle-class suburban Dallas was jarring, but in the long run granted me a valuable perspective on just how big the spectrum of upbringings are in this country. Our football team itself was a melting pot as well, having plenty of homegrown Iowa kids and other Texas athletes like myself, but also from places like Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Ohio, California, South Dakota, Minnesota, and probably even a few others I forgot to mention. I don’t think I fully appreciated the camaraderie and experience of being able to bond with so many different guys from such different backgrounds until it was over, which is definitely one of my bigger regrets.
On the football side of things, there were certainly plenty of ups and down. My first training camp I had to play defensive line the first few days since we had a shortage due to injury and guys not able to report yet. This lasted about 4 days before I had a mental breakdown and practically had to beg coach Rhoads to move me back to offensive line. If you remember from my earlier posts this isn’t the first time this had happened before and looking back, I can see why they. One of my strengths was my athleticism for someone my size, and I’m sure they figured they could get more value out of me as a disruptive 3 tech, but in the end I just don’t think I had (or have really) the right mindset for it. Having played against many in my career, being a great defender in football requires great reactive ability and having a certain mental screw loose that I just don’t think I ever had. I like being calculated, having things planned out, and then adapting to the situation, which is why I prefer the more controlled, precision-based nature of offensive football.
Freshman year was rather uneventful on a personal level. I was redshirted, and the main goal was to build up my body to prepare for the future. This meant spending most of our time outside of practice with one of the most hard-assed, toughest motherf***ers I have ever met in our strength coach Yancey McKnight. I can say this with complete confidence, and anyone else that played football at Iowa State in the same time frame I did, there was not a single person respected more in the building than he was. He's also partly responsible for my occasionally out of control cursing habits, but as he'd say "People who curse a lot are the most honest motherf***ers around, because it's unfiltered thoughts!"
Some of you might be surprised by this and be thinking “Why not the head coach/your position coach?” and that’s a very fair question. It’s not that I didn’t have great respect and appreciation for our coaches. I am eternally grateful for Coach Rhoads for offering me a scholarship to play football at ISU and Coach Bleil the two years I was under him, but the reality of college football is coaches are not just solely there to coach you although that IS their main job. A lot of the time they’re also out wherever recruiting your potential replacements. College football is a dog eat dog, zero sum game. Where if you don’t produce you will be tossed to the wayside for someone who will. Some coaches aren’t entirely upfront about that and like to kiss up to potential recruits in order to lure them in unknowing of the figurative nail ridden baseball bat of reality primed to hit them in the teeth. Yancey laid it down to it us from day freaking one. We sure as hell didn’t like it at the time, but now in hindsight I certainly do appreciate it, as it rang even truer once I reached the professional level.
As I said before, aside from a certain upset that led to the eventual dissolution of the BCS (Bowl Championship Series for the college football ignorant plebes), freshman year was pretty uneventful on a personal level, and so was the following year as well actually. Then going into my redshirt sophomore year, coach Bleil left to coach in the northwest. His replacement would be a man named Chris Kleinakis, who will from this point be only referred to as Coach K. Now if you remember earlier in this series, I mentioned how I almost ended up quitting football altogether. While that was true, that was borne more of indifference and unhappiness with my current role on the team at the time. This was the ACTUAL closest I have ever come to hanging up my cleats altogether in terms of "F*** this is actually not worth what it's doing to me physically". The very first time our Offensive Line group interacted with him we ended up outside in a four-point stance in single digit temperature weather hitting a sled with this weird arm cocking technique that, in the absolute nicest way possible, could be described as sub-optimal. “How the f*** did I end up here” I’d frequently ask myself as the frostbite gradually settled into my fingertips. As nuts as it sounds from that statement, I probably handled it the best overall (or most likely bottled it in the best if anything, because who needs mental health anyway!) as everyone, myself included, struggled to contain their sheer contempt and frustration at his stubbornness. Ultimately, we were willing to put it temporarily aside for the sake of the team to win, except for the part where we would struggle to win, a lot. As most Iowa State football fans are well aware of these were not the most fun of times. In fact, it would only progressively get worse!
On a personal level, this was the first year I ended up seeing real action. I was thrust into the lineup due to injury against Iowa and ended up playing in 11 out of 12 games that year, starting in 9 of them. There were some nerves and physically at times I found myself outmatched, but ultimately, I was happy with finally being able to seriously contribute at this level. Again, keep in mind that only a few years ago I was rotting away on a JV team on the verge of quitting the game altogether, and now I was playing for a Division 1, Power 5 conference college team on a full ride scholarship. It’s important sometimes to just take a step back and put things in perspective.
After the season ended and a very upfront and tense meeting with Coach Rhoads about the year, Coach K ended up not being retained. Instead coming in to replace him would be Brandon Blaney, who is probably the singular person most directly responsible for me even making it to the pros in the first place. Which is especially weird in hindsight considering he ended up (rightfully, by the way) benching me going into junior year coming out of training camp. Doing some self-reflecting, I think the combination of being in a poor mental state after the previous year and a sense of entitlement just because I had started a few games the previous year lead to a drop in my performance that put me on the losing side of a camp battle. I would still end up playing due to injuries, at least until I suffered injuries of my own. I ended up suffering a pretty severe concussion and ended up sidelined for a couple weeks. A week after I came back, I ended up breaking my hand against West Virginia. Then to cap it all off, I had to play the season ending game with aforementioned broken hand casted up against TCU, then ranked #3 in the country. To say I had a bad time was to put it very mildly. Then again, so did everyone else that year. Going 2-10 on the season will do that to you!
And so, fast-forward to redshirt senior year. Yancey ended up leaving to end up being the strength coach at Houston with Tom Herman, whom together eventually ended up at Texas a couple years later due to their great success there. Through all the ups and downs of my time here, I wanted to end things on a good positive note and regardless of my status on the team give it my all so I could have no regrets. Obviously, the end of college was creeping up and I had to start seriously considering what I was going to be doing the rest of my life. Certainly after what a disastrous year junior year was, I had no professional prospects right? Until Coach Blaney had a suggestion. He had a solid prospective eye for talent gleaned from plenty of experience in the NFL and thought with my body type and skillset I’d project well to be a center at the professional level. Of course, with my horrible pessimistic tendencies I was skeptical of this at first, but thought back to what I’d promised myself I'd do this year and decided to give it a genuine shot, training how to snap after practice on a daily basis on the side.
On a personal level, senior year was easily my best year yet, which you’d hope for seeing as you’re the most experienced and physically mature you’re going to be relative to your competition.. I ended up being honorable mention All-Big 12 for the year. Unfortunately this was not quite enough to stop us from sucking, and after what was the single most disastrous blown lead I have ever had the displeasure of being a part of late in the year against Kansas State, Coach Rhoads ended up getting fired, although he was allowed to at least finish out the year. As irrational as it seems, it’s one of the things I feel the guiltiest about my career to this day. I was partly responsible for the man who granted me this wonderful opportunity to play here and completely relieve both me and my family of the financial burdens of getting a collegiate degree for losing his own job, it eats away at you. In the long run though, it certainly was the best move for Iowa State. Soon afterwards the university would sign Coach Matt Campbell, whom I've only had the pleasure of meeting 3 times before my time at ISU came to an end, but he’s managed to take the program to new heights, giving such a diehard loyal fanbase all the success they deserved and more. Even through the objective misery that were the three years I had played, our stands would still be packed game after game after game. Of course I'm biased, but I firmly believe there is not a single more dedicated fanbase in the country, and you can tell that by how we swarm unsuspecting cities during bowl season and drink them dry like beer locusts!
(Part 2 of 3)