College football is hands-down my favorite sport. It’s not even close. Sometimes when you say that people immediately jump to “What about the NFL?” And I always respond, “What about it?”
They’re different sports.
Yes, the best players in the world do play in the NFL. They’re professionals. But the sport of college football is, in my opinion, a far more exciting one.
Some of my friends hear that and lose their minds. They are mostly from the northeastern United States. I point this out for a reason. The majority of their college teams are dog shit. Philly? New York? Boston area? Yeah, I understand why you’re not into and don’t “get” the appeal of college ball. You have Rutgers, Army (geographically close), and some Ivy League teams. And yes, once every few decades they’ll have a decent team. That’s nice. Once every few years I take a solid shit, so we can both be proud.
The Midwest, West Coast, and especially the South have another thing happening. It’s a culture, an obsessive one. Nothing, in my opinion, compares to college football in the southern United States. It’s not only a religion, it’s the most important religion. More important than Christianity? Jesus fuckin’ Christ, yes! Of course, it’s easy to make the observation that many of these places do not have an NFL team, so college football is all they’ve got, but honestly, I don’t think they even want one.
College games are electrifying, and let’s be real, the players are all trying to make it to the NFL. They all want to be twenty-two-year-old millionaires. They play the game lights out every week in the hope of getting noticed by the pro scouts. These are the best players in the country, and they seem to be cut from a different cloth than most men. From the time they were in high school, their bigger frames and notable athletic ability set them apart from us mere mortals. Once they get to college, you’re seeing the future stars of the NFL.
It’s like seeing a porn star when she’s still only a stripper. You were there watching her give lap dances for twenty-five dollars in person and now she’s doing triple anal and winning awards.
The truth is, although there are 130 D1 teams, there are really only twenty-five that matter. The top twenty-five are where you want to be as a team, and they’re what most college football fans pay attention to. If you want to get really granular, you can say that what really matters is the top ten, because those are the teams competing for the national championship. Those are the best of the best. Everyone who coaches, plays, and watches knows that there is a difference watching those teams play. Mall security guards and Secret Service agents both carry badges, but we know who the real deal is. The badasses are the teams you see on Saturday broadcasts in the fall, and those are the schools where I dreamed of playing when I was a kid. I fantasized about playing on prime time at a big-time school: LSU, Clemson, Auburn, Michigan, or my dream team, FSU.
I started playing football in the fourth grade when I was nine years old. My dad loved football, and as far back as I can remember he would watch and talk about football almost without pause during the season. Sometimes it was the only thing we’d talk about.
He’d lead with “You see the game last night?”
“Yeah. Jerry Rice is unreal!”
“Yeah.”
That would sometimes be the entire conversation. My dad, like other dads, had his “go-tos” of complaints when watching games. I can shut my eyes and still hear all of his.
“What a stupid penalty. That guy’s just stupid.”
“This team is totally undisciplined.”
“Do these guys even practice? They are terrible.”
Dads love complaining.
I played all through elementary school and middle school, and when I got to be a freshman in high school I thought my dream of playing at the next level was not only reasonable, but probable. After all, I was one of the best players on the freshman team at my big public school in the suburbs of Milwaukee. I had decent size and speed, but more important, I was making plays. I loved playing defense and was regularly in on a bunch of tackles. Now, I should make it clear that my team was bad. Beyond bad—like, really terrible—but I was a good player on this really shitty team. If I remember correctly, we went 1–9. My dad was so invested in my playing on this epically dreadful team that he delayed our family’s move to Florida until late November of my freshman year because he didn’t want to disrupt my football season. Seriously. The whole family was ready to move and begin a new chapter of our lives, but my dad told me I couldn’t abandon my “platoon,” as if we were at war.
When we arrived in Florida, my parents opted to send me and my older sister to a small, private school because they’d heard the large public school was violent.
I don’t know how violent that public school was, but the new private school certainly wasn’t. It was full of very entitled, wealthy kids who lived in an absurd, protected bubble. All kinds of things I’d never seen before. Kids whose parents were CEOs of major corporations. Kids whose parents would leave them behind while they toured around Europe. I always wondered how those kids managed alone, but when I’d ask them about it, they looked at me like I was barking at them.
“They left money.”
“Oh. So you just live alone?”
I could feel their contempt. How could I ask such a silly question?
I started to pay attention to high school football, and it was obvious that they were playing the sport at a different level than my school in Wisconsin. Football in the state of Florida is no joke.
You know how crazy Florida is, right? Insane shit basically is the norm in Florida. Every other news story with an out-of-this-world headline has a good shot of coming out of Florida.
“Man Chews Off Other Man’s Face.”
“Woman Gets 7th DUI While Shaving Her Pubic Area.”
“Magician Zip-tied to Lamppost during Drug Deal Gone Awry.”
These are all from Florida, and they are all real. I didn’t make them up. Do you get it? They’re out of their fucking minds down there.
Like the rule that you can shoot someone if you sense they might hurt you later; they’re that crazy about football too. There are four states that have elite level high school football: Ohio, California, Texas, and Florida. Many other states love their football too, but those four produce the most top-tier players and often compete to be the best team in the country.
Freshman year in Florida would be my first experience with spring football. Every spring the football team practices for roughly three weeks, culminating in a spring game, like an exhibition match. The spring season allows the coaches to see which current freshmen, sophomores, and juniors will be on their team come fall. It’s basically a sneak peek. As a freshman I tried out for the football team during the spring, and I was surprised to be named a starter at linebacker for the varsity team. It was wild. I had just turned fifteen, and I was lining up against juniors in high school, two and three years older. And not juniors on a crappy Wisconsin team—these were Florida football players. I started thinking that my childhood dreams of playing college ball might become a reality. Those college studs I looked up to must have been named starters on their freshman spring teams too. Also, I knew I was good. I weighed maybe 180 pounds and I could fly around the field. I was aggressive and loved hitting. My coaches were thrilled. They knew they had a player who was hungry, and best of all, I had three full seasons ahead of me. They could mold me into the player I needed to be. And in my eyes, my next-level dream was starting to come together.
That summer my coach approached me about the summer workout schedule. He wanted me there lifting and training, five days a week. It sounded reasonable, but I already had plans.
I think this is the part where someone who really has a dream does the work they’re supposed to do. Rocky ran those steps, and Michael Jordan got cut from his JV team and pushed himself, and Buffalo Bill had to follow all those big-boned women home to hone his craft. I should have committed myself to training if college football was really my dream, but my plans, as you now know, involved me spending the majority of my summer in Peru with family. It was something my family did with my mother’s siblings and cousins every summer. We’d go down there during our summers, they’d come up here during theirs. When I told my coach, he reacted as you might expect.
“The fuck is in Peru?!”
“My mom’s from Peru.”
“Oh. She lives down there?”
“No. Coach, I’m going to spend it with my family. I have to.”
I mean I guess I didn’t have to. I could have pleaded with my parents that I preferred to pursue my dream, and that dream required me to stay and train. You might wonder how my Marine Corps father didn’t push me to stay and work out. There’s only one thing he had no power against in this world, and that was my mother. She said I was going down there, and that was that. Part of me wishes that my coach would’ve forced me to stay, to be the best I could be. But I know deep down I was never going to not go to Peru. I loved spending time with my primos and living that Latin life, even as a young teen. Down there you could experience a life that was inconceivable to me here. Late nights, almost every night. Food, dancing, drinking, parties until six in the morning, routinely bribing police officers. I wasn’t even sixteen yet! South America and specifically Peruvian culture is one of my favorites in the world. I am the person I am today because of my time there, and I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. I told my coach that my parents wouldn’t let me stay, and he asked me to do one thing while I was gone: gain weight.
“Coach, I got you.”
Boy, did I.
Before I left, he handed me a large plastic tub of powder. On it, in marker, was written, “Protein & Carbs.” It looked like he’d made it at home, all of it. The powder, the jar, the writing.
I left for Lima around 180 pounds. When I returned in August: 210. Yup. A sophomore in high school who looked thirty-five. Yes, he asked me to gain weight. For a two-and-a-half-month stretch he was probably thinking ten or fifteen pounds, not thirty. You could see it in my shoulders and chest, but you could definitely see some of that new weight in my belly too. You know how people in their thirties and forties sometimes say, “My metabolism just changed. I can’t eat how I used to.” That happened to me at fifteen. My first day at school I saw some jaws drop. That summer I was drinking two of his “homemade” shakes a day and not working out nearly as hard as I should have. I didn’t even realize I had gained too much weight until I saw the coach who had given me the powder.
“Damn, son. How much did they feed you down there?”
“Not much, Coach. Your shakes did the trick.”
“You know you have to move and not just drink shakes, right?”
Yeah.
I was still fairly strong, but it was clear that I’d lost a step, so I was moved to play on the line with other fatties.
The next few seasons I played well. I still dreamed of big-time college football, and I especially wanted to be a part of the recruiting process. If you like the NFL, then you are familiar with the draft, where each of the thirty-two teams picks which college player will join its team. It’s exciting and, of course, it’s a gamble. You don’t know how your pick will turn out. It’s like Tinder. You can swipe right as much as you like, but until you see her in person you won’t know whether she really looks like that or is a black belt in Photoshop. She can say she wants a family, but is she down for anal on the first date? You get the idea. You don’t really know what you’ve got until you try it out.
The college game has something similar to the draft called National Signing Day. This is when the nation’s high school players sign letters of intent to play at colleges across the country. Leading up to that day is the recruiting process, where all the college football programs in the country compete for all the talent that’s out there. The detail that goes into scouting high school players now is beyond what you can imagine. Players are scouted beginning in middle school if they’re good, and college coaches begin sending letters, making phone calls, and even visiting kids in their homes. I wanted to be a part of this, to be courted, wanted. I wanted to be told that my services were deeply desired by all the big schools. This sounded like the closest a young man could get to experiencing what his female counterparts felt all the time: Everybody wants me. Yeah, I wanted my Cinderella moment, is that so crazy? Boys have feelings too.
There’s a rating system that is used to rank players coming out of high school. Rivals, one of the country’s biggest scouting networks, breaks down the star ranking system like this: “A five-star prospect is considered to be one of the nation’s top 25–30 players, four-star is a top 250–300 or so player, three stars is a top 750-level player, two stars means the player is a mid-major prospect, and one star means the player is not ranked.” Just so you know, yours truly was a four-star player. Pretty cool, huh?
Just kidding. I just felt like writing that because I know some people thought, “Wow, good for him,” and those who know definitely shouted, “Bull fuckin’ shit!” Those ratings didn’t even exist when I was in school.
Rivals.com began in 1998, the year after I graduated. Thankfully, I can’t confirm that I would for sure have been a one-star player. At the time, I probably thought I was a three-star because that gave me hope. Looking back, I saw what top-tier looked like, and it wasn’t me. They were bigger, faster, stronger. I was above average at best, and that gave me hope. Hope that I’d get the letters, the phone calls, the house calls, and best of all, the recruiting trips. Football prospects are allowed five official visits to major schools when being recruited. These trips are paid for by the schools, and the higher ranked the prospect is, the more bells and whistles come out.
They fly you out, put you up, and then the show begins. Prospects are given a tour of the facilities and often walk out onto the field where they would play with their name on the jumbotron. The game day announcer might even introduce him, so the prospect hears what it would sound like. The recruit is then paired up with a current player, who walks him around campus, showing him the ins and outs and answering any questions the prospect might have. Then, the player is wined and dined and sometimes there are blow jobs. I’m not saying that any official member of the program is blowing prospective student athletes. I’m saying that a lot of these campuses are filled with young, hot girls who like football players. And hey, they want their school to win too. I know a guy who had a threesome on a recruiting trip. Imagine that. You’re in high school and colleges want you to attend their school so badly to play a game that two college chicks bang you at the same time.
Add to that the numerous, and I mean countless verified reports of players being bribed, and you’ve got yourself a one-two combo of undeniable fun that I really wanted to be a part of. Play football, get blown, get paid, play more football. Honestly, it sounds like a dream. And it was. A pipe dream.
I got my first recruiting letter late in my junior year. One of the coaches handed me a letter, and in the corner I saw that it was from Holy Cross College, what is known as a Division I-AA school, the second highest tier for athletics. I didn’t know what it was at first. When I opened it I realized I was reading my first recruiting letter. It has begun, I thought. It was the standard form letter they probably send to hundreds of kids a year: “We’ve noticed you are performing well in the classroom and on the gridiron.” Well, I can tell you right now, they didn’t know who they were writing to. I was probably an above-average football player at best, but I was an absolutely terrible student. I mean, truly awful.
I had the second-lowest GPA in my class. Borderline special-needs level. But even as I read that letter, I thought, This is cool, but I can’t wait for the major schools to start sending me stuff. I knew I wasn’t top, top tier, but I thought for sure Indiana, Mississippi State, and Texas Tech would be seeking me out. I mean I didn’t want to go to those schools, but I would entertain their interest. I’d let them fly me out, take me to dinner, put some mid-major mouths on my penis, and at some point I’d have to let them know, “Sorry, but I’m going to be a Seminole/Tiger/Buckeye.”
The letters kept coming, but some were from schools I’d never heard of. I got one from Randolph-Macon College. That sounds like some online-only bullshit. I came to find out that this was actually a Division III program, the lowest level of competition. DIII schools do not even offer scholarships. So this letter of recruitment was more of a suggestion. “Hey, do you like football? Well, we’ll let you pay to play and go to school here.”
I was offended.
My best friend and teammate, Steve, got the same letter from Randolph-Macon. Eventually, we decided it’d be fun to go to school and play football together, so we visited the school and met with the coaches. They were thrilled that a couple of big boys like us (each over 240 pounds at the time) would be willing to come to their school and play together. They were not, however, thrilled enough to pay for our trip. There was no free flight, no name on a jumbotron. There was no jumbotron. The “stadium” seated 5,000 people. The big schools have 100,000 seats. They didn’t take us to dinner, and there certainly was no blow job offered.
Steve and I actually ended up hiring a stripper from the phone book to come to our hotel room. We paid for it, of course, and it was terrible. She was sad, tired. She ended up drinking with us. Told us she’d never heard of the college we’d be attending in the fall. It was one mile from the hotel.
When I got back to Florida I let my high school know I’d be attending Randolph-Macon in the fall to play football with my bestie. That summer, almost as soon as high school had ended, I received a phone call from the Randolph-Macon admissions office. There was a problem. My SATs, while not stellar, were acceptable. And my GPA, while deplorable, was also passable, save for one issue. Math. God, I hate math. I didn’t always. I was given the “math award” (whatever that is) in the fourth grade, and that led me to believe I had some innate math skills in my brain. But as math progressed I did not. I failed Algebra 1 with a capital F. FAILED.
They put me in Algebra 2 even though I clearly wasn’t cut out for its easier version. If you didn’t guess, I failed that too. Some teachers were perplexed. They looked at me like, “You don’t seem this stupid.” I’d try to make a case that I wasn’t, but then we’d talk about algebra and they’d go, “Wow, he is.” Like the opposite of when a child is capable of an adult-level skill.
The admissions office told me that I’d be welcome to go to the school and play football, but I’d have to take a math course over the summer.
“What?”
“Just take a summer school course at the local community college.”
“Oh, I don’t want to do that.”
“Then we can’t let you in.”
“Okay.”
And that was that. All I had to be told was that I needed to take another math class, and the course of my life changed. The problem in retrospect is that I imagined the admissions office would inform the football program that I needed to take a summer school class if I was going to play football there. They didn’t.
I told Steve that we wouldn’t be going to college together and then scrambled to find a school that would let my dumb ass attend without requiring a summer math class.
I found one. The equally unimpressive-sounding Lenoir-Rhyne College located in Hickory, North Carolina (it has since changed its name to Lenoir-Rhyne University). It was literally the only school that accepted me. Talk about low standards. How dumb are the people going there? Apparently about my level of dumb. LRC, as the school is known, has a Division II football program. They didn’t recruit me to play, but said I could “walk on,” which is another way of saying, “You can try to play here.” I was done trying. I was also very into smoking weed now, which at the time got a number of players kicked off the team.
August is when football players of all levels—from high school to the pros—report to camp. Players arrive and begin the arduous process of preparing for the season. This begins with what are called “two-a-days,” that is, two practices a day in the hottest month of the year. It’s brutal. You’re going hard, wearing helmets and pads, getting yelled at and running as fast as you can into other people who are running as fast as they can. Once in the morning and again in the afternoon. It’s the civilian athlete’s version of boot camp. I have to admit it was the only part of football I wasn’t going to miss.
I received a call on a Friday in early August. It was the offensive line coach at Randolph-Macon College.
“Segura! We’re excited to have you. You all set for Monday?”
“Coach? Monday?”
“Camp starts Monday.”
“Coach, I’m not coming to Randolph-Macon.”
“What are you talking about? You changed your mind?!”
“No, you guys required me to take a math class.”
“A math class?”
“Yeah, Coach. They told me to take a math class and I said no.”
“Well, no one told me! Fuck!”
“Sorry, Coach. I thought you would know.”
“Well, now I do, and I need a damn offensive lineman!”
Sometimes I can still get lost in the fantasy of “what if?” What if I had stayed and trained instead of gone to Peru? What if I were really committed to that dream? Could I have made it to big-time college ball? Then I think about what those guys really go through, and I remember how much I hate getting up for morning radio to promote stand-up shows. I resent having to wake up at 6:00 a.m. just to sit and talk to people so that I can sell more tickets at my own shows, where I get paid. I was never going to dedicate myself to the grind of playing major college sports. I don’t even like morning walks.