ATHENS, Ga. — Marcus Rosemy-Jacksaint stood up. He looked at his teammates, his fellow football players not used to bearing their souls, or hearing others do it. He was nervous, not feeling like he had status on the Georgia football team. Or that he had his voice.
Still, he reached down, found the courage and told his story: The father who didn’t return his calls. Rosemy-Jacksaint had to leave the paper with the signature lines — legal guardian or parent — blank. The coach who became a surrogate father.
He sat down. There was silence. The good kind of silence.
“You could feel the energy, like: ‘Wow, I didn’t know that,’” Rosemy-Jacksaint said.
Nearly two years later, Drew Brannon stood on the Georgia sideline at the Peach Bowl. It was early in the fourth quarter, and things were dire: Ohio State was leading by 13 points. And Brannon looked over to the bench and saw the whole offense huddled around somebody: Rosemy-Jacksaint, telling the group how it was going to pull out the win.
“Nobody had asked him or told him to do that,” Brannon said. “They’re saying all the right things, he’s leading, no one’s panicking.”
There are oft-told reasons for how Georgia, which three years ago was the program that couldn’t win the big one, has since gone 42-2 and won two national championships. The talent. The coaching. The resources.
But the most under-appreciated is what happened in January 2021. Kirby Smart was ready to do something different. And a man was there who had a plan for it.
Drew Brannon, left, and Ladd McConkey, who is headed to the NFL after winning two national titles at Georgia. (Courtesy of Drew Brannon)
Drew Brannon was born and raised in Knoxville, Tenn., and his family rarely missed a game at Neyland Stadium. He played basketball at Presbyterian, a Division II school in South Carolina where he studied psychology. Then, in 2004, he enrolled at Georgia for his master’s and was there for five years, working on the football staff as a sports psychologist, overlapping for one year with Smart.
But their connection didn’t happen for a while. Brannon moved back to South Carolina in 2010, eventually co-starting a consulting firm, AMPLOS, which works with sports and non-sports organizations. There was some off-and-on work with Georgia from 2018-20 but nothing firm.
Smart, meanwhile, was re-evaluating some things. His team had a disappointing 2020 season, failing to win its division for the first time in four years. The talent and coaching were there, but something was missing.
Rosemy-Jacksaint, a freshman in 2020, sensed it too.
“It felt like everybody was playing for themselves,” he said. “We’re all worrying about ourselves: ‘I don’t have this amount of stats yet, I don’t have this amount of catches yet.’”
Smart decided to scale back on football and conditioning talk during the offseason, taking about 20-30 percent of the usual time for that and instead focusing on relationship-building. And for that, Brannon had some ideas.
The week after a Peach Bowl win over Cincinnati, Brannon presented some ideas. The most time-consuming were so-called skull sessions, where players would share personal stories, their “why,” as it was called. This was taking a chance. Football players, who played a physical sport and weren’t always encouraged to be vulnerable, would have to bare their souls in front of teammates. There were so many phrases and buzzwords — connection, sharing — that could produce eye rolls in the wrong room.
But this was the right room.
“I do a lot of work outside of sports,” Brannon said. “I work in organizations, leadership training, culture work. It doesn’t really matter what the industry is, the success of what you’re trying to do always comes down to the buy-in and belief of the leaders. That stuff went really, really well from the beginning, but that’s because Kirby was so bought into what we were doing and set that standard for the staff.”
Then there were the players: Nakobe Dean, Travon Walker, Jordan Davis, Quay Walker, Lewis Cine … the best and oldest players on the team bought in too. Seeing these older players doing it, makes it easier for the freshmen and sophomores to buy in.
“As a man, society expects you keep everything bottled up, not open up,” said Javon Bullard, a freshman on the 2021 Georgia team. “It was more so with us we actually encourage you open up more and be vulnerable to your teammates, We actually wanted to do it. It wasn’t something Coach just forced upon us. We wanted to do it. We’d ask Coach: ‘When’s the next skull session?’ We actually wanted to do it.”
There were many more such stories told in the next three years. Zamir White talked about what he went through as a child, given only 10 days to live, surviving but with a cleft palate and needing several operations. Darnell Washington talked about his tough upbringing, having to serve as his siblings’ guardian. Stetson Bennett talked about his well-known rise from walk-on to starting quarterback. The idea was players were to tell each other their “why” — why they played football and what drove them.
Or just say … whatever.
“It was shocking because there were a lot of things I didn’t know about a lot of people,” Rosemy-Jacksaint said. “I thought I had a hard life. There were a lot of people on the team who had a way harder life than I did. I was like, ‘Wow.’”
The skull sessions were random, sometimes the whole team, sometimes just the offense or defense or position groups. Sometimes names were chosen at random, so those players may not have been necessarily close.
“Connect more on an emotional level,” Bullard said. “It’s overwhelming, man, you play the sport all the time and you get consumed by it. But you’re still a man, you’re still a person. It’s nice for us – it’s huge for us – to just get into the emotional connection with your teammates. I felt like it was a huge, huge boost for our team.”
It was nice. Players felt closer. Kumbaya and all that. But would it mean anything on the field?
Javon Bullard, left, had 114 tackles during his Georgia career. (Courtesy of Drew Brannon)
Georgia squeaked by Clemson in its 2021 season opener, then rolled over everyone until the SEC championship when old nemesis Alabama romped again. After dispensing Michigan in the Orange Bowl, the Bulldogs got a national championship rematch with Alabama, staring down all the program’s dreaded storylines: the inability to beat Alabama and a 41-year national championship drought.
Speaking to the team the day before the game, Brannon came up with a story to counter that: Burn the boats.
It harkened back to a Spanish conquistador, Hernan Cortes, who invaded the Aztec empire from the sea and according to legend, told his men he was burning their boats, so there was no turning back.
“When you go 40 years and don’t win a championship, it can lead to a sense of, ‘Here we are, we better not screw this up.’ And that’s not how people thrive,” Brannon said. “I just thought we needed a message that said we’ve got to be aggressive. There’s no going back.”
Corny or not, Georgia won the game, then the next morning talked about Brannon’s speech. Not just “burn the boats” but how Brannon harkened back to everyone’s personal stories.
“I thought it was very moving because he related it to you belong here. Lewis, you belong here. Where have you been? Look at what you’ve done. Look where you are, Stetson, and what you have done,” Smart said. “He went through a lot of players. Zamir White, a guy they gave zero chance to live past six months, and he’s playing in a national championship game. James Cook lost his father and didn’t get to play in a bowl game last year. Devonte Wyatt, the road he’s taken. He went through every guy.”
Because players shared their personal stories, they felt more connected to each other. And because they felt more connected, they acted less selfishly.
Rosemy-Jacksaint explained it this way: “OK, I’ve got to make sure I do my job right so this play can work, so he can get the ball. Because he’s been through a lot, just like I’ve been through a lot.”
Whereas players were more worried about stats pre-2021, now they belabored not making a run block or little stuff to help teammates.
“It turned. It just got a lot more selfless,” Rosemy-Jacksaint said. “That was the coaching that we needed because my freshman year everyone was worried about their stats and getting ready for the league.”
There are a couple of images from the two championship seasons that bring that home:
• Early in the 2021 season in a win over UAB, a receiver sprung open, and before Bennett threw the ball, you could see players and coaches on Georgia’s sideline — including injured quarterback JT Daniels — throw their arms up excitedly, anticipating the touchdown.
• Early in the 2022 season, Washington — a tight end who sacrificed catches for blocks — celebrated as Brock Bowers ran downfield for a long touchdown.
Players tie the wins directly to the offseason skull sessions.
“He does a great job talking to us, talking to us about real-life stuff, personal stuff or anything that is on our minds,” Washington said that season. “He just kind of helps us clear our minds.”
“It’s not an accident we won our first national championship in years after we started doing that,” Bullard said. “It was just a true group of guys that bought into it. You don’t have to do it. But it’s something that we focused on. And we bought into it, and we decided it’s going to be our thing as a group and we collectively did it, and it’s helped our team tremendously.”
Zamir White, left, rushed for 2,043 yards during his Georgia career. (Courtesy of Drew Brannon)
For the second championship run, Brannon reached into his work with corporations for the lesson on how Blockbuster got complacent and went out of business: Celebrate what you just did but study the examples of places that tanked.
And in an era when NIL deals were becoming a bigger deal, the connection between teammates was even more vital. Nolan Smith, a senior on that team, said the week of the national championship game: “We can’t have 11 guys worrying about if they’re making 15 bands ($15,000) a month.” The clear implication is that they did not: Yes, Georgia players were getting NIL deals. No, it was not tearing them apart.
Brannon introduced a few other catchphrases: “Sweep the shed,” which meant nobody was too good to pick up trash, literally and figuratively. Last season it was “eat off the floor,” which was about having the humility to do whatever it took regardless of circumstances.
The 2023 season didn’t end with a championship as Georgia fell short of the College Football Playoff after losing to Alabama in the SEC championship.
“It should’ve,” Rosemy-Jacksaint said, shaking his head. “(But) it wasn’t a failure of motivation. It was simply a football game that didn’t go our way. We made mistakes. We didn’t capitalize on the opportunities. And they did. And we let our future in the hands of the committee, and it didn’t work out.”
Still, a team that had lost so many players to the NFL, had a new quarterback and offensive coordinator, went 12-0, had comeback wins against South Carolina and Auburn and finished with a 63-3 win in the Orange Bowl. Yes, that came over a Florida State team decimated by opt-outs, but the fact Georgia didn’t have any non-injury opt-outs was another credit to the team culture, according to Brannon.
And evidence that this will keep going. Brannon cited some of the team leaders already emerging for this season: Malaki Starks, Tate Ratledge, Earnest Greene, Jared Wilson, Carson Beck, Smael Mondon, Raylen Wilson and CJ Allen.
Part of it is Smart. Brannon has been brought into non-sports organizations and seen leaders be lukewarm or only marginally supportive of what they were trying to do.
“Credit to him, I think one of the reasons he’s a fantastic leader is he was very, very open-minded and interested in doing some things that are different,” Brannon said. “And that’s when things really took off.”
Is it the secret sauce to the program?
“Hardly anyone is doing this, to my knowledge,” Brannon said. “We are doing some things that are pretty unique. I’m not ignorant or naive to the fact it helps when you have Brock Bowers on your team. I mean I’m no fool. But I also know that Georgia’s had great players for a long time. Matthew Stafford, Knowshon Moreno and A.J. Green were really great players.
“I think the bottom line is it all matters. And it’s never been more challenging to be at the top in college football.”
(Top photo of Drew Brannon, left, and Sedrick Van Pran: Courtesy of Drew Brannon)
2024-02-06 16:37:12
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