The brash unbridled tongue, the lawless folly of fools, will end in pain.
--
Euripides, The Bacchae
Preamble
That quarterback turned tailback turned fullback turned linebacker Jimmy Johns was arrested earlier this week for selling cocaine comes as a bit of a surprise. Everyone knows that the preferred intoxicant among the Alabama faithful is getting high off the fumes of their own bullshit. And nothing proves that more than the relationship between the fans and Jimmy Johns.
During one of the Great Leader’s state radio broadcasts, Nick Saban fielded questions about why Johns did not see the playing field more, since he was one of the team’s “best players.” What followed, perhaps after a couple of self-censor disabling beverages, was a brief inquisition of the fan, asking who told him Johns was one of the team’s “best players.” Certainly not, as Saban described himself, “the man wearing a National Championship ring.”
To pull rank, National Championship rank, on an Alabama fan in public is akin to telling the French that not only is their bread stale but that they could use a little more self-confidence.
How Jimmy Johns became the infatuation, and ultimately the embarrassment, of the collective Alabama fan consciousness is an object lesson for the future.
Act I: Straight Outta Brookhaven
For better or worse, Jimmy Johns was the best thing to come out of Brookhaven, Mississippi, other than State Route 550. A town of just under ten thousand people distributed over just seven square miles, Brookhaven bills itself as a “Homeseeker’s Paradise” and a town that “has the best of all worlds.” Why limit (or name, for that matter) to just two, one supposes.
As quarterback for his high school team, John only lost one game and took his team to the state Class 4A championship his senior season. The team won the title and Johns won the title of “Mr. Football” for the state. Online recruiting sites ranked him as a top ten “dual threat” prospect as he had nearly the same number of touchdowns throwing the ball as running it. A college future was assured, but where?
The suitors for Johns’s signature were two SEC schools: local favorite Mississippi State, who had recently made headlines by hiring Sylvester Croom, the conference’s first African American head coach; and neighboring Alabama, who at that time was coached by Mike Shula, the man who beat out Croom for the Crimson Tide job the previous year.
Any time a local hero considers a rival school, the recruiting heat can tick up a notch. However, the personal animus between the coaching staffs at Alabama and State (which had hired many former Bama men, like Croom himself) was considerable. Ultimately, Johns would make his decision based on who promised him a chance to play quarterback.
At the time, both schools were building a pro-style passing game requiring quick and accurate reads of the defense with an ability to stretch the secondary on occasional deep routes and keep linebackers back with hot reads. Croom, who had spent much of his coaching career in the NFL around West Coast offenses, knew Johns had no chance of doing what the offense required. Many argue that Shula knew that too, but told him otherwise.
If there is a bellwether moment of Johns’s poor decisions—well, friends, as Maine goes, so goes the nation.
Act II: A Special (Teams) Player
John was arguably the jewel of his signing class and certainly looked the part of a cut diamond. Much of the hype surrounding Johns’s career at Alabama may boil down to two factors over which he had no control: First would be the contentious recruiting chatter between Croom’s staff at MSU and Shula’s at Alabama. The second would be the physical comparison of Johns to the class’s other quarterback signee, Jimmy Barnes.
Jimmy Barnes was a California import with a big arm and a big everything else too. All freshmen report with a little pudginess to work off under the demands of the next level’s conditioning, but reports of Barnes’s massive size soon ballooned (pun intended?) to comic proportions. His early diagnosis of mono was even questioned in some quarters as a cover-up for inferior cardio stamina.
Johns, on the other hand, had a senior’s build beneath a freshman’s face. In his class’s group picture, he’s easy to point out as the player who already looks four years older than everyone else.
But Joe Montana never looked like Mr. Olympia, and Johns’s tryout at quarterback was predictably short. His already questionable arm was hindered by a tweaky shoulder and his ability to read progressions quickly never materialized. One option would be to redshirt his freshman year, giving Johns time to rehab his shoulder and study the playbook. Johns, however, continued to push for immediate playing time—another condition of his recruitment, supposedly—and was moved to running back.
In relief of Kenneth Darby, a squirty corkscrew of a scatback, Johns had moderate success as a change-of-pace runner. He had one speed and one direction, fast and straight ahead. He also had only one way of holding the football and no way to protect it.
Watching Jimmy Johns run the football was like watching a coat hanger being jiggled up and down in the slots of a locked car door, a stiff erratic motion that rarely yielded success and more often led to greater frustration.
Rumor had it that upon seeing Johns in high school, former Bama and current A&M DC Joe Kines said he planned on making Johns the best linebacker Alabama had fielded since Biscuit. Why he never got his chance is speculation. Some say Johns openly defied a move away from the offensive side of the ball, others say runningback coach Sparky Woods had more pull than Kines with Shula, still others say both, and a few say nothing because the truth may be worse than the rumors.
No surprise then that, after Shula’s dismissal, Saban wanted to make good on Joe Kines’s boast. However, in their first, and now only, year together, it took an entire season and a painful fumble for Johns to accept his role with the linebackers.
To be clear, it was not one moment that benched Jimmy Johns for good on offense. At one point in the season, he had cost the team more yards in personal foul penalties than he had gained in running yards. Also, he had been outspoken in how he couldn’t wait to show up his home state Bulldogs and their coach who’d suggested he was foolish for believing he could play quarterback, which only served to make Johns, now primarily a special teams player, a human target:
