I hear players say that their school did so much for them. I’m sure they feel that way, but I suspect there is a strong element of brainwashing as well, because in reality, they did so much more for the school. The players kept the damn lights on. But brainwashing athletes to play in the NCAA is an essential part of the NFL pipeline. We train to be professionals—on the field at least—and become recognizable brands before we even get to the league. That work is done without the NFL having to pay a dime. To make us into brands, they have to try to break us from being individuals or rebels. It’s a sensory deprivation project. They move us, mostly, to small country towns or isolated campuses. They treat us like it’s their job to “civilize” us, to change who we are. They want these schools to be like Get Out, if it were a sports movie, and we’re handed a football before we enter the Sunken Place.
It gives the whole game away that college football is so popular in the SEC, where the legacy of Jim Crow and segregation is so powerful, and now they worship Black football players who make no money and are out there providing entertainment. The university people and the networks intentionally create this fake feel—they use the football field to miseducate people with a fictional portrayal of life off the field. The fiction is that because all these white student fans are cheering majority-Black teams, the dynamic is somehow postracial. It creates an illusion for both the fan and the player—the student and the student-athlete—so they don’t have to face how messed-up this country is. You’re not Black on the field. You’re a representative of your school. There’s no New Jim Crow when you’re on the field. There’s no Donald Trump. There’s no Trayvon Martin.
Ignored is how powerless we are when the pads come off, or that we are risking brain injury at an educational institution to entertain. I think people need to start realizing that the real world doesn’t just reflect the field. It is the field. You watch Remember the Titans and it’s this heartwarming Disney movie with Denzel Washington; I’m thinking, “Yeah, this is cool. They all got together.” But at the end of the day, half the team had to eat outside. Everybody came to the game, the players bonded in the locker room, but it was still divided. Part of the mythology of sports is that people think it breaks down barriers and makes us more equal. That’s miseducation. The only thing that’s going to make us equal isn’t sports. It’s going to be people realizing that we’re all human: everybody takes a shit and everybody pisses. Some of us sit, some of us stand up, some of us have colostomy bags, but other than that, we do it exactly the same way.
My last year at Texas A&M, Martellus had already left for the pros, a year early, as one of the top tight ends in the country. My little bro Tellus was now a step ahead of me out there in the NFL. I was proud of him, but that sucked for me. It was not easy without his big behind in my face. I had spent so much time with this one person my whole life—it was scary to now be alone, with Pele and Peyton a good distance away. I felt a little exposed; nobody to depend on, nobody I could talk to on a daily basis. Nobody I could share stories with.
The one positive was that having Martellus in the NFL meant I could get some intel about what it was like in the Big Show. Martellus had a rough rookie year. He was on the Dallas Cowboys, which sounds like a dream, but he was playing behind an all-pro tight end and future Hall of Famer, Jason Witten, and getting no love and no help from either their head coach, Jason Garrett, or Witten. As Martellus said, “I hated Jason Witten. I appreciated his game, but I always hated him.”
It helped me realize that nobody is ever really ready for the NFL, no matter how physically gifted. As a kid, you see the glitz and the glamour, but you don’t see the pressure to fulfill a job. You don’t see all the stuff between game days, the grind. Martellus told me the straight truth. He said, “Man, this is a lot harder than anybody thinks. It’s not just the money. You think you got the money and now you can lay with it, put in on your bed and roll around. It’s more like, now you got the money, but now you gotta work twice as hard.” I will always believe that Tellus’s preview gave me an advantage over other NFL rookies, even if they were picked way ahead of me.
Without Martellus in College Station, I started reading more, thinking more, and speaking out more. My coaches looked at me like I was the devil, a serpent in their Garden of Eden. They didn’t understand why I was walking around with a kufi on my head or why I was reading the Quran. They didn’t understand why my locker was filled with books that had nothing to do with farming or the other easy classes on my schedule, why it was filled with The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Letter from Birmingham Jail by Dr. King. It scared them.
After my last year came the NFL draft. There I was, a future Pro Bowler, someone who in 2017 would be ranked as the seventeenth best player in the league by Sports Illustrated, sitting with my family, watching the draft live on ESPN, a spread of food and drinks laid out. As the rounds went by and my name wasn’t called, panic spread through me. I was getting calls all day from teams, saying, “We have our eyes on you.
