MORGANTOWN — For Jarrett Brown it has come down to one game.
They say it’s him against Florida State in the Gator Bowl, but he knows different.
It’s him against the world. Always has been.
“I feel like I’ve been underrated my whole life,” he said the other day after finishing off a two-hour practice and about a half an hour round of interviews with seemingly anyone with access to a tape recorder or pen and notebook.
It wasn’t just that he came to West Virginia and redshirted or that then he had to sit around for three more years while Patrick White changed the way people thought about the way quarterback is supposed to be played.
It goes back further, and in a way that’s what makes it so fitting that Brown’s final collegiate game will be against Florida State, the team he loved as a child and that snubbed him when it came time to head off to college.
Brown was raised outside Palm Beach in Florida. As such, you develop a loyalty to either Miami, Florida or Florida State.
You don’t have a choice. That’s just the way it is.
Brown’s father liked Miami.
He fell for Florida State.
“Charlie Ward, Adrian McPherson, all those guys. I loved them,” Brown said, referring to former Florida State quarterbacks from his youth. “Chris Rix, Warrick Dunn; I’m a fan of that school.”
It was Ward, however, who hooked him. Brown was 5 years old when Ward was doing his thing in Tallahassee, winning the Heisman Trophy as a quarterback, running the basketball team as the point guard.
He was everything Brown wanted to be, everything Brown became, really, except that he played basketball only part time and as the Heisman, well, White didn’t win that, either.
Come college time, Jarrett Brown was big and strong, a hot high school quarterback good enough to be recruited by a lot of people not named Miami, Florida or Florida State.
They avoided him like he was California orange.
“Miami recruited me for about a split second,” he said. “They came and watched me play, but never offered me a scholarship.”
That was the extent to which Brown heard from the top Florida schools. Nothing from either Florida or Florida State.
That burned like walking on the hot sand in bare feet in the August heat.
West Virginia wanted him, though, and he had a connection with former WVU quarterback JaJuan Seider, who went on to be Little All-American at Florida A&M; and got himself drafted in the pros. Seider steered him toward WVU after working with him at West Palm Beach, then came up here as a graduate assistant and has helped keep him here.
See, there’s that underrated thing and he was always White’s backup, not a starter when he really believed he could start at a major college. There were days when he thought about leaving, but he was truer to West Virginia than his home state universities were to him.
And it paid off.
Florida State got as old as its coach while WVU became a national power. Even this year, as they meet in the Gator Bowl, they do so with the Seminoles possessing a 6-6 record while the Mountaineers under Brown went 9-3.
Things were so good here that he didn’t think much about Florida State.
“We’ve always done so good that it’s hard to root for them or look up to them,” Brown said. “We’ve always done better than them. It’s hard to like them when we’re winning all these games.”
He was always driven by that feeling that people were underrating him.
“It makes you a better player, makes you play with a chip on your shoulder,” Brown explained. “When I was redshirted it was like I wasn’t good enough to play then and it made me work harder and win every sprint.”
He now has one sprint left, one that he’ll run with that chip on his shoulder, a sprint toward finally convincing the world that he’s as good enough to quarterback anywhere.
“I’ve got something to prove to the nation, too,” he said.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
Bob Herzel
HERTZEL COLUMN: Jarrett Brown vs. the world
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