In his hand now was the daily dose of sugar: fourteen sweet-talking letters in all, eleven from Texas A&M alone, and from the look of things the comely coeds up in College Station had cornered the market on lipstick-colored love letters. The other three letters were postmarked Baton Rouge, home of LSU. The mailings were but the latest entries in the Ricky Seals-Jones sweepstakes, the all-out battle to sign arguably the most talented high school athlete in the country.
By any measure, Seals-Jones would be some kind of catch. At seventeen he stood six feet five, weighed 225 pounds and carried the lean, strong look of a budding all-pro. His hands were huge, the size of a catcher’s mitt. And he ran with a long, gifted grace. He played all over the field—quarterback, wide receiver, safety. He led the state in scoring in basketball as a junior, averaging thirty-two points per game. For added measure he had a nice little nasty streak.
Every major recruiting site in the nation was salivating over his size, speed and pure athleticism. ESPN.com had him ranked as the No. 1 wide receiver and “athlete” in the country; Rivals.com listed him as the No. 2 athlete in talent-rich Texas. He was the personification of student-athlete: an honor roll student blessed with the kind of humble “yes, sir, no, sir” attitude and game-breaking talent that can cause coaches in the winning business—and with access to discretionary funds—to do whatever it takes to sign him.
The Joneses’ rambling redbrick home is set on four family acres about a mile down an aging asphalt road. Chester liked conducting tours of the living room and of the Life of Little Ricky, pointing with pride at pictures of his son in oversized peewee football gear looking like a “peanut head” and in Little League taking a major-league-worthy home-run trot (“See, no smile on his face”).
Chester said he noticed that seriousness and promise early and nurtured it. His older sons were good athletes: one, Chester junior, from a first marriage, played quarterback at nearby Blinn College, while the other, Jamal, was a walk-on wide receiver at the University of Houston. But Ricky was different. Chester could see it in the look on his boy’s face before summer baseball games and in the way he quarterbacked his undefeated Pop Warner team to a championship down the road in Katy, where some serious ball was played. Father and son worked out as one, Ricky tagging along as his dad ran that old asphalt road and that hill out back. And when age took its toll and Dad slowed down, Ricky kept going. Kept working. By the time Ricky arrived at Sealy High, Coach Jimmie Mitchell knew he would never see a second on the freshmen or JV team. He started him at safety in ninth grade.
“I pushed him. I pushed him to the limit,” Chester said. “I told him you’ve got to grind, you can’t quit. I want Ricky to make it. I want to see him play on Sunday. I want to live to see that day.”
His wife, Buffy, on the other hand, had different priorities. And who could argue with her, given what happened to her brother—Ricky’s namesake—after he won the hundred-meter dash at a regional track meet at nearby Blinn. A day so full of joy and promise ended in a late-night car accident on Highway 36, just ten miles from home. Ricky Seals had fallen asleep at the wheel coming home from his girlfriend’s house. He was dead at seventeen.
That was what Chester was remembering as he stood silently at the mantel, pointing to a fresh-faced teenager wearing uniform No. 9, with RICKY SEALS 1973–1990 inscribed underneath.
He pointed to another photograph: a Christmas card in a place of honor.
“That’s Eric right there,” he said.
Eric, as in Hall of Fame running back Eric Dickerson, the pride of Sealy, Texas. Owner of the NFL’s single-season rushing record, Dickerson was one-half of SMU’s prolific Pony Express backfield from 1979 to 1983 at the center of a $60,000 cars/cash/boosters-run-wild recruiting scandal that resulted in the school’s football program being shut down by the NCAA’s first and only use of the death penalty. Dickerson was now acting as an unofficial recruiting adviser to his first cousin. When those sweet talkers came calling, ED was there to translate.
And if the dining room table—the one covered in an avalanche of mail—offered any indication, Seals-Jones was in need of some sage advice. Stacks and stacks of letters sat neatly organized by school, more than fifty colleges in all. Nebraska, UCLA, Miami, Iowa, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas Tech, Missouri, Michigan, Notre Dame, Arizona, Houston, Baylor, Oklahoma State.
The three tallest stacks belonged to Texas, Texas A&M and LSU. Seals-Jones had verbally committed to the Longhorns in February 2012, only to rock the recruiting world four months later by de-committing. Now, in November, the field had been narrowed to two favorites—A&M and LSU—with Oregon and Baylor looming on the outside. The college football world was left waiting to find out which school would win the sweepstakes and, it turned out, the price some were willing to pay to come out on top.
On the first Sunday in September 2012, Ricky, Buffy and Chester sat down for lunch at Tony’s, a busy down-home diner not far from their house, to talk about the foreign army of recruiters who had invaded their life.
“Been a lot of stuff happening around here lately, a lot of stuff,” said Chester at one point, shaking his head.
“It’s been hectic,” added Ricky. “The rankings come out and you’re No. 1 and everyone is congratulating you. Even my [football] friends, they say, ‘We know you’re No. 1, but we’re going to try and beat you out and get it.’ You got to keep that in the back of your mind, but you still got to enjoy it. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. You just got to go with it.”
One seat over, his mother simply nodded. A pretty, petite woman, she worked for the school district as a part-time bus driver and administrator, up every weekday by 5:00 a.m. She was deeply invested in not just her son’s life but also those of many others his age. Her concern was clear: Ricky was not just her youngest child, the last to leave, but also a visual, daily reminder of what happened to her brother. She called Ricky several times a day. She wanted to know where he had been, the people he was hanging with and where he was going.
He might be out of sight, but he was never out of Buffy’s mind.
She had pulled Jamal out of Houston when his grades fell below her expectations. Ricky would be an honor student—that’s all there was to it. In a bedroom filled with trophies and awards, with size 15 Jordans and school caps lined up like cadets, perfect attendance certificates and a kindergarten diploma were among the awards most prominently displayed.
By Ricky’s sophomore year everyone from local fans to Division I recruiters knew he was going to be special. He broke out nationally his junior year, when he was district MVP and college football coaches started showing up at his basketball games. One afternoon he got called out of class and down to the office. The principal and a counselor were waiting when he arrived.
“Now I’m thinking I left trash on the floor or something,” Ricky said.
Not quite. It was LSU’s head coach, Les Miles, who had guided the Tigers to the 2007 national title, stopping by to say hi, all smiles and charm as he and Ricky walked the halls together. One girl was so awed by the sight that, as Ricky put it, “she about passed out.” Coach Miles casually offered that he’d love to have Ricky come down and see how he liked the campus. Seals-Jones giggled remembering the moment. “He’s a smooth talker,” he said of Miles. “He’s just so smooth when he talks.”
The same week a Baylor assistant coach dropped by. Then TCU’s head coach, Gary Patterson, arrived carrying a box. A sudden crack of sunlight shone down like magic as Patterson opened it up to reveal a set of diamond-encrusted rings, including one from his team’s undefeated Rose Bowl season in 2010–11.
“This is what happens when you come to TCU,” he told Ricky. “We win championships.”
By now Ricky couldn’t go anywhere without hearing what he called the million-dollar question: Have you decided where you want to go? “I could go into Walmart and somebody comes up who I don’t know: ‘Have you decided where you want to go? I think you should go here.’ ”
He got
to making a joke of it, playing a game with a bunch of his hotshot buddies from the national 7-on-7 circuit. They would tell reporters they were going to shock the world and commit to Bethune, as in Bethune-Cookman, the historically all-black school that plays in the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference. “And they were writing it down!” Ricky said. “We were laughing. One of us would make a big play, we were like, ‘Beth-THUNE …,’ reporters just writing it down. We were just messin’ with them.”
As the winter of 2012 wore on, fans and coaches searched for any sign of where Seals-Jones might be headed. One day Buffy wore a Texas shirt, and in no time the recruiting message boards were buzzing: Seals-Jones leaning to Texas! His parents learned the hard way what they said, what they wore, was news. Then, in February, after a Junior Day visit to Texas, where coaches implied they were handing out only a few select scholarships, Ricky made some news of his own. He verbally committed to Coach Mack Brown and his Longhorns.
“I felt like that was it, but I felt like I rushed it,” Ricky said.
“I felt like he was being rushed, too,” said Buffy.
The smart coaches—meaning just about everyone in the Seals-Jones sweepstakes—barely blinked; yeah, it was Texas and all, but “verbals,” they knew, were little more than foreplay to National Signing Day in February. The letters, e-mails and texts—especially the texts—continued to pour in: USC, Clemson, Illinois, Oregon, Michigan, Mississippi State, Florida State, Oklahoma State, Alabama, Auburn … all talking about playing him at wide receiver, but mostly just talking and talking. And talking …
“The recruiters, they didn’t care what time it was,” said Ricky. “They just kept calling. I would wake up, and I’d have ten missed calls. It was, like, two in the morning, and I’m like, ‘Dude, don’t y’all sleep?’ ”
Meanwhile, his cousin Eric, the Hall of Fame running back, weighed in, cautioning his cousin to be patient. They want you. Take your time. Make sure where you want to go. Advice that hit Ricky like a linebacker when in early June 2012 he attended the UT football camp in Austin and took stock of some of the Longhorn recruits, worried they weren’t up to their four- and five-star billing. Within two days he called Texas and told them he was de-committing.
“They didn’t want to let me off the phone,” said Ricky. “The whole coaching staff got on the phone. They said there was no place like Texas. I just told them I just wanted to open up my options and look around.”
The news spread like a Texas wildfire across recruiting sites and Twitter. Longhorn fans did not take kindly to the fact that Seals-Jones was suddenly playing the field. Soon Ricky noticed strange cars driving slowly past the house.
“You live in the country; you kinda know the cars,” said Ricky.
The cars were one thing, the death threats something else. Four or five showed up on his Twitter feed, one warning him if he didn’t come to his senses, his family was going to miss him.
“I just shook it off,” Ricky said.
His parents certainly didn’t after he finally confessed to the threats a month later at a Nike event in Oregon.
“I said, ‘What?’ ” recalled Chester.
“That just shook me up,” said Buffy.
By the summer of 2012, Seals-Jones was blowing up on the invite-only showcase circuit. He was selected as the top wide receiver at the Rivals100 Five-Star Challenge 7-on-7 in Atlanta and named the MVP at a Next Level camp in Houston. He was abusing some of the top-rated cornerbacks in the country with highlight-reel plays that were exploding on the Internet.
In mid-June the entire family took a trip to College Station for an unofficial visit to A&M. The arrival of pass-happy coach Kevin Sumlin in December 2011, the school’s impressive facilities and the Aggies’ move to the SEC had electrified an already formidable fan base. In addition, Sumlin was proving he could recruit with the big boys. At A&M the Jones family was escorted to a room where a pristine Aggies jersey bearing Ricky’s high school number, 4, was laid out on a table, along with a helmet, socks and gloves. The unmistakable message: It’s all yours. Then an assistant coach showed a video of an A&M wide receiver running with the ball and getting caught from behind that—magically—morphed into shots of Seals-Jones running downfield untouched for a touchdown.
“Man, they were selling that stuff,” recalled Chester.
Coincidently, two days later the family had a meeting set in Austin with Texas basketball coach Rick Barnes. The Longhorns had been floating the notion of allowing Seals-Jones to play two sports, something he talked openly of wanting to try. When Mack Brown found out that Seals-Jones was on campus, he flew into action, canceling a trip to a coaching clinic in San Angelo, and set up a meeting in a Texas-sized conference room in the football offices. There, around a big burnt-orange table, Brown, Barnes and several assistant football coaches and school officials made their pitch.
Said Chester, “They wanted him to commit again.”
“I’m talking about the whole coaching staff in there,” said Ricky.
“Man, they went from pleading the third to the fifth,” Chester recalled. “Mack. Everybody. They said, ‘Whatever you decide to do, Texas is going to beat this, beat that, everybody is going to take care of you.’ They’re going to do this here, this there. A job when you graduate. [They’ll take care of] people in your life.”
Chester remembered one assistant coach kept asking, What’s it going to take? What do we need to do?
It was an hour before the Sealy-Bellville brawl, and the stands were filling up fast. Sealy’s record stood at 6-3, and to make the Class 3A playoffs, the Tigers needed to win the game by at least nine points. It had been a roller-coaster season for Sealy and for Seals-Jones, who began the year scoring five touchdowns in a 62–6 win over Houston Milby before suffering a major setback one week later against Houston’s powerful St. Pius X, in a game nationally televised on ESPNU.
The special Thursday night telecast had opened with ESPN analyst Tom Luginbill singing the praises of Seals-Jones and with Sumlin making a dramatic entrance via helicopter onto St. Pius X’s Parsley Field. A graphic listed Seals-Jones’s top choices: Texas, A&M, LSU, Baylor, Oklahoma and TCU, with Oregon and USC in the mix. But Luginbill said he believed Seals-Jones was still “75 percent” committed to Texas. The truth was nobody knew. Not even the kid behind center, who on his very first carry glided for nine yards and moments later, on a QB draw, hit a crease and sped seventy-one yards for a 7–0 lead.
By late in the third quarter Seals-Jones had accounted for 213 yards rushing on just twelve carries. He had run for two more touchdowns (sixty-one and four yards). Still, the Tigers trailed the Panthers 31–21 when Seals-Jones, making a tackle from his safety position at the end of a St. Pius running back’s thirty-one-yard gain, fell awkwardly. “I knew he was hurt when he came down,” said Chester. The fall caused Ricky’s left kneecap to pop out of its socket.
Strapped into an air cast, Seals-Jones was carted off the field on a stretcher and taken to a local hospital, where a doctor reset the knee. The family didn’t get home until 5:00 a.m. Chester watched the replay over and over on local news and ESPN until he couldn’t stand it anymore. But a new day brought encouraging news: no structural damage to the knee and a recovery time of three to four weeks.
Ricky was “freaked out” by the injury, but fortunately for him his cousin Eric came to town the following week. Dickerson helped calm Ricky down. He told him the injury had come at the best possible time, early in the season. “Don’t go back until you’re well, all the way right,” he said. “If they want you, they know what you can do. High school doesn’t matter.”
Sure enough, the phone never stopped ringing, and texts kept flying in at all hours of the day and night. Ricky received so many scholarship offers that it was hard to keep track. Florida State one day, Baylor the next. Texas was still after Ricky, and according to Chester, Longhorns’ assistant coach Oscar Giles pushed too hard during a phone conversation.
GILES: Well, Ricky made any kind of deci
sion yet?
CHESTER: Decision on what?
GILES: He made any kind of decision on what he’s going to do?
CHESTER: Man, we’re just trying to get Ricky well.
At this point Chester said another assistant coach came on the line with an ultimatum: if Ricky doesn’t commit, Texas is going to stop recruiting him.
To which Chester said he replied: “Well, you gotta do what you gotta do. We gotta do what we gotta do.” Then he hung up the phone.
Two days later OrangeBloods.com, a UT fan Web site, reported the team was no longer recruiting Seals-Jones.
“Boy, that deal there, we don’t know what happened,” Chester said. He said Giles tried to contact him again through Ricky’s high school coach and also tried reaching out to Ricky directly. But Chester Jones is a proud man. He told his son not to return any calls from anyone at Texas. In Chester’s mind the Longhorns had gone all in at the wrong time with a bad hand. They were out of the game.
On Senior Night at Sealy High, the cheers rang out loudest when Seals-Jones walked onto the field arm in arm with his mom and dad.
A few minutes later, sitting with other family members and friends near the twenty-five-yard line behind the Sealy bench, Chester was asked if he was nervous.
“Little bit,” he said.
On paper Bellville was no pushover, although in the first drive the Brahmas offered little in the way of resistance. The Tigers took less than three minutes to open up a 7–0 lead with Ricky switching between wide receiver and quarterback, content, it seemed, to act as a decoy or to hand off to the hard-charging running back Kris Brown.
The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football Page 36