JJamezz
04-26-2004, 12:12 PM
The real face of college football doesn't wear a burnt-orange uniform. He doesn't have a shiny gold helmet. He doesn't know any of the words to "The Victors." The real face of college football plays on a team with no chance for a BCS bid, and never got more pub than when his school threatened to drop football.
But J.P. Losman still starts every morning with film sessions, clanks barbells off his body each afternoon before winding down with wind sprints and 7-on-7 games. The real face of college football is on a mission: to prove there is more to his sport than what the BCS has to offer.
It's a Thursday afternoon in late June, and Losman is firing up his teammates as they pump out reps in Tulane's cramped weight room. If his boys back in Venice Beach could see him now & At 6'3", 225, he looks like an Aztec warrior, which is to say, nothing like the 175-pound bag of bones that left SoCal five years ago.
People are finally talking about J.P. Losman. Sure, some of them butcher his name. (It's not LOWS-man, as in the opposite of Heisman. It's LAHS-man.) But, no sweat, NFL scouts can pronounce it, and that's all that counts, right?
That's what Losman was thinking back in April, anyway, when he saw his name atop the list of quarterback prospects released by the NFL scouting service. His coach, Chris Scelfo, says Losman runs like Quincy Carter, guns like Patrick Ramsey and understands the game like Chad Pennington. (He should know, having mentored all three.) Still, Losman was pleasantly surprised at the recognition. "When the scouts came to work me out," he says. "I was like, will they really know how good I am? But they saw it. It was a big relief. Finally, a light at the end of the tunnel."
Then the tunnel took an unexpected turn. On April 21, word leaked that Tulane might pull the plug on Green Wave football. No matter that the 110-year-old program was fresh off a bowl win and an 8-5 season. The athletic department had lost $7 million during the past year, and there was growing concern at the school over whether the team could survive as a BCS outsider, that is, as a second-class citizen of college football.
Still, as Tulane's board of trustees got set to vote on the team's fate -- keep it D1-A, drop it to a lower division or kill it completely -- Scelfo told Losman not to worry. It's a stunt to raise money, he said. They do it every 10 years. "I was like, 'Okay, cool,'" Losman says. "Then a week goes by and they're still talking about it. It's in all the papers. I'm like, 'Coach, this ain't no little thing.'"
The athletic department revved into crisis mode, launching a "Think Green" campaign and phone-a-thon. Losman and others taped PSAs. The mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, offered to sell tickets and issued a release urging Tulane to keep big-time football because it was as much a thread in the city's tapestry as the Saints or Hornets.
Each day the players met for lunch, and each day the table talk started with "What if & ?" Losman, a senior whose entire O-line is made up of underclassmen, wondered, what if everyone abandoned him when Tulane football got nuked?
It's not like he didn't have options: his high school coach, Angelo Gasca, said his phone was ringing off the hook, with Pac-10 and Big 12 coaches rolling out just-in-case welcome mats for Losman, and with agents advising Losman to enter the NFL's supplemental draft. But Losman didn't want options. He wanted his football team.
When Losman asked his coaches how they'd advise the team if the vote went bad, Scelfo said he wouldn't -- couldn't -- pressure players to stay. Even though existing contracts had locked in the 2003 schedule, how could he force kids to play lame-duck football? Losman told the coach to reconsider. "I've been bleeding with these guys," he said, "crying with them, sweating with them for the past four years. I don't want to play for Miami or USC. I don't know those guys. These are my guys." Scelfo got it. He told his quarterback that if the call came, he'd make the announcement, then leave the locker room to Losman.
Losman planned a Gipper speech for the new millennium. He'd tell his team that they were the brothers he never had growing up as an only child. He'd tell them how a kid from a mixed marriage, who was too Mexican for the white kids and too white for the Mexicans, finally felt like he belonged. He'd tell them that now, when he threw a touchdown pass, he didn't get excited for himself but for Roydell Williams, or Nick Narcisse, or whoever caught the ball.
For a month, Losman worked with his speech professor, whose advice was not to worry. But, says Losman, "All I could think was, this is my life, so, hell yeah, I'm worried." So even after Think Green raised $4.5 million to shrink the deficit, even after they sold 6,000 season tickets in a five-week sprint, even after June 10, when the school board voted 27-0 to keep D1-A football alive, Losman didn't stop worrying. He knows that if the Green Wave doesn't build on the momentum, Tulane football will be back on a death watch.
The real face of college football shrugs his shoulders at the responsibility. "Now the pressure's on us," Losman says. "Especially me."
Tulane president Scott Cowen is also on a mission. Cowen says the BCS must die. He concedes that Tulane's empty coffers can be blamed on apathetic Green Wave ticket buyers and boosters, but he thinks the real culprit is the caste system in college football. "It's created financial classes of haves and have-nots," he says.
In June, Cowen sent a letter to presidents of other Division I-A schools outside the BCS, asking them to join a conference call to discuss ways to fight back. The time is right, Cowen says, because the BCS contract expires after 2005.
Losman wouldn't mind being conferenced in on that call. He'd give the players' perspective and talk about what it feels like to have the rug yanked from under you. He'd remind the have-not presidents what they're fighting for. No one raised an eyebrow when Tulane ran the table in '98 and still got left in the bleachers. If his team goes undefeated this time, shouldn't it be invited to something bigger than the Liberty Bowl? C'mon -- that would mean beating Mississippi State, Texas and everyone in Conference USA. It's all football, right?
Losman also has some things to say about college football that the conference callers wouldn't want to hear. He'd say the term "student-athlete" is a crock. Ask him his major and he'll tell you straight-out: the NFL. What's a major, anyway? He's not going to wear a business suit. If he gets hurt or doesn't make it, he'll be a surfer.
If you really want to play pro football, he preaches, dedicate your life to football. "I don't wanna hear, 'Oh, I gotta study,'" he says. "Did you come here for school or did you come here for real? I don't care what any coach will tell you. School is not why I'm here."
The suits may not want to hear it, but they'd be wise to listen. Despite his singlemindedness, Losman, a classical studies major with a 3.3 average, isn't one to walk out on a midterm. Like 82% of Tulane football players, he should graduate on time -- even if he can't necessarily spell Tranghese or analyze the computer formulas that decide who will get to play in the Sugar Bowl.
Yes, more is being learned here than how to check-down, beat cover-2 or build big pecs. There always is when you ask 18- and 19-year-olds to make huge commitments -- even though they often come from places where commitment isn't a given. And Losman knows that better than anybody. Ask him about trust and why he is so devoted to his teammates and he'll talk about when he was a tyke and his parents broke up. And about tearfully watching his mom sob through the divorce: "People make mistakes, but if you make a commitment, you'd better know what's up. My moms taught me that."
Losman was raised by his mom, Tricia, in a two-bedroom apartment, sharing space with a rotating cast of cousins. Growing up five minutes from UCLA's campus, he was a lifelong Bruins fan. He graduated from Venice High a semester early, joining a five-man QB derby to replace All-America Cade McNown. Losman was hailed as the Bruins' best QB prospect since Troy Aikman. But after just 15 practices he realized he'd made a bad mistake. UCLA was like 13th grade, with buddies hanging out and 10 family members on the sidelines at practice. Rumors floated that Losman couldn't hack the competition. His take: "I love my family to death, but I needed to get away. I wasn't growing up."
It was no easier when Losman arrived in New Orleans. His new teammates thought that he was brash, that he didn't know his place, that he was a jerk. Wideout Nick Narcisse thinks the guys just misread the new QB. "Everyone has his own style," he says. "A lot of us weren't used to his."
For most of the 2000 season, Scelfo had Patrick Ramsey and Losman rotate quarter by quarter, sometimes series by series. Tulane stumbled to a 3-5 start as tension rose between the dueling QBs. "It's not where we're the best of friends," Ramsey said at the time. "But it's not where we can't speak to one another." Then, with three games left, Scelfo gave Ramsey the team. The Green Wave won them all. It began a humbling year and a half as understudy for Losman, who by his own admission is cocky.
Losman says he likes Ramsey, but the two never clicked. "I knew hunting and fishing were his areas," he says, "so I was like, 'I've never been fishing. Take me fishing. Take me hunting. Show me around.' I asked him a million times, but I guess we were just different. I respected him though, because I knew how good he was."
Ramsey left Tulane after the 2001 season to become the Redskins' first-round pick. Scelfo's older brother Frank, Tulane's QB coach, says Ramsey getting picked so high helped Losman overcome the sting of riding the pines. "I told him, 'I'm not saying he's better than you, but didn't I tell you he was gonna go first round?'"
On the field, Losman has continued to mature, cutting back on his mad scrambles and rarely forcing throws. He threw 19 TDs and ran for six more last season. Six of his 10 interceptions came after receivers couldn't hold on. His teammates didn't grasp his attempts at leadership, either. Vowing to take the young guys under his wing, he became a control freak. "I finally got some power," Losman says, "and people listened to me. But I could tell they didn't like to be talked to like that."
This summer, Losman is taking a laid-back approach to being a leader. Mostly that means checking up on the guys, making sure everyone's happy. For some it means he chauffeurs them to practice. For others, like wideout , it means he offers a place to crash.
Losman's still tight with his family in LA -- his mom still calls him every day -- but he has clearly created another one at Tulane. Instead of going home for a week this summer, he and his receivers drove 13 hours to Miami. Now the guys feel comfortable enough to dog the quarterback with the year-round tan. They call him Julio Iglesias. And Paco. And the Pope. To really get under his do-rag, though, they call him Jonathan. Only his mom gets to call him that. But, hey, it's cool, because he knows it's out of love. Mom would understand.
Back home in Venice, Losman's cousin Gerald Rodriquez has moved into J.P.'s old room. Gerald has grown into a promising receiver. Half the Pac-10 is interested in him. Two months ago, Losman would've thought twice about advising Gerald to come to New Orleans. Not now. "It's a great place for a kid from California," he says, "because you open yourself up to a whole new culture."
The real face of college football breaks into a grin. "Plus, now I know he'll have some real good guys on his team."
But J.P. Losman still starts every morning with film sessions, clanks barbells off his body each afternoon before winding down with wind sprints and 7-on-7 games. The real face of college football is on a mission: to prove there is more to his sport than what the BCS has to offer.
It's a Thursday afternoon in late June, and Losman is firing up his teammates as they pump out reps in Tulane's cramped weight room. If his boys back in Venice Beach could see him now & At 6'3", 225, he looks like an Aztec warrior, which is to say, nothing like the 175-pound bag of bones that left SoCal five years ago.
People are finally talking about J.P. Losman. Sure, some of them butcher his name. (It's not LOWS-man, as in the opposite of Heisman. It's LAHS-man.) But, no sweat, NFL scouts can pronounce it, and that's all that counts, right?
That's what Losman was thinking back in April, anyway, when he saw his name atop the list of quarterback prospects released by the NFL scouting service. His coach, Chris Scelfo, says Losman runs like Quincy Carter, guns like Patrick Ramsey and understands the game like Chad Pennington. (He should know, having mentored all three.) Still, Losman was pleasantly surprised at the recognition. "When the scouts came to work me out," he says. "I was like, will they really know how good I am? But they saw it. It was a big relief. Finally, a light at the end of the tunnel."
Then the tunnel took an unexpected turn. On April 21, word leaked that Tulane might pull the plug on Green Wave football. No matter that the 110-year-old program was fresh off a bowl win and an 8-5 season. The athletic department had lost $7 million during the past year, and there was growing concern at the school over whether the team could survive as a BCS outsider, that is, as a second-class citizen of college football.
Still, as Tulane's board of trustees got set to vote on the team's fate -- keep it D1-A, drop it to a lower division or kill it completely -- Scelfo told Losman not to worry. It's a stunt to raise money, he said. They do it every 10 years. "I was like, 'Okay, cool,'" Losman says. "Then a week goes by and they're still talking about it. It's in all the papers. I'm like, 'Coach, this ain't no little thing.'"
The athletic department revved into crisis mode, launching a "Think Green" campaign and phone-a-thon. Losman and others taped PSAs. The mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, offered to sell tickets and issued a release urging Tulane to keep big-time football because it was as much a thread in the city's tapestry as the Saints or Hornets.
Each day the players met for lunch, and each day the table talk started with "What if & ?" Losman, a senior whose entire O-line is made up of underclassmen, wondered, what if everyone abandoned him when Tulane football got nuked?
It's not like he didn't have options: his high school coach, Angelo Gasca, said his phone was ringing off the hook, with Pac-10 and Big 12 coaches rolling out just-in-case welcome mats for Losman, and with agents advising Losman to enter the NFL's supplemental draft. But Losman didn't want options. He wanted his football team.
When Losman asked his coaches how they'd advise the team if the vote went bad, Scelfo said he wouldn't -- couldn't -- pressure players to stay. Even though existing contracts had locked in the 2003 schedule, how could he force kids to play lame-duck football? Losman told the coach to reconsider. "I've been bleeding with these guys," he said, "crying with them, sweating with them for the past four years. I don't want to play for Miami or USC. I don't know those guys. These are my guys." Scelfo got it. He told his quarterback that if the call came, he'd make the announcement, then leave the locker room to Losman.
Losman planned a Gipper speech for the new millennium. He'd tell his team that they were the brothers he never had growing up as an only child. He'd tell them how a kid from a mixed marriage, who was too Mexican for the white kids and too white for the Mexicans, finally felt like he belonged. He'd tell them that now, when he threw a touchdown pass, he didn't get excited for himself but for Roydell Williams, or Nick Narcisse, or whoever caught the ball.
For a month, Losman worked with his speech professor, whose advice was not to worry. But, says Losman, "All I could think was, this is my life, so, hell yeah, I'm worried." So even after Think Green raised $4.5 million to shrink the deficit, even after they sold 6,000 season tickets in a five-week sprint, even after June 10, when the school board voted 27-0 to keep D1-A football alive, Losman didn't stop worrying. He knows that if the Green Wave doesn't build on the momentum, Tulane football will be back on a death watch.
The real face of college football shrugs his shoulders at the responsibility. "Now the pressure's on us," Losman says. "Especially me."
Tulane president Scott Cowen is also on a mission. Cowen says the BCS must die. He concedes that Tulane's empty coffers can be blamed on apathetic Green Wave ticket buyers and boosters, but he thinks the real culprit is the caste system in college football. "It's created financial classes of haves and have-nots," he says.
In June, Cowen sent a letter to presidents of other Division I-A schools outside the BCS, asking them to join a conference call to discuss ways to fight back. The time is right, Cowen says, because the BCS contract expires after 2005.
Losman wouldn't mind being conferenced in on that call. He'd give the players' perspective and talk about what it feels like to have the rug yanked from under you. He'd remind the have-not presidents what they're fighting for. No one raised an eyebrow when Tulane ran the table in '98 and still got left in the bleachers. If his team goes undefeated this time, shouldn't it be invited to something bigger than the Liberty Bowl? C'mon -- that would mean beating Mississippi State, Texas and everyone in Conference USA. It's all football, right?
Losman also has some things to say about college football that the conference callers wouldn't want to hear. He'd say the term "student-athlete" is a crock. Ask him his major and he'll tell you straight-out: the NFL. What's a major, anyway? He's not going to wear a business suit. If he gets hurt or doesn't make it, he'll be a surfer.
If you really want to play pro football, he preaches, dedicate your life to football. "I don't wanna hear, 'Oh, I gotta study,'" he says. "Did you come here for school or did you come here for real? I don't care what any coach will tell you. School is not why I'm here."
The suits may not want to hear it, but they'd be wise to listen. Despite his singlemindedness, Losman, a classical studies major with a 3.3 average, isn't one to walk out on a midterm. Like 82% of Tulane football players, he should graduate on time -- even if he can't necessarily spell Tranghese or analyze the computer formulas that decide who will get to play in the Sugar Bowl.
Yes, more is being learned here than how to check-down, beat cover-2 or build big pecs. There always is when you ask 18- and 19-year-olds to make huge commitments -- even though they often come from places where commitment isn't a given. And Losman knows that better than anybody. Ask him about trust and why he is so devoted to his teammates and he'll talk about when he was a tyke and his parents broke up. And about tearfully watching his mom sob through the divorce: "People make mistakes, but if you make a commitment, you'd better know what's up. My moms taught me that."
Losman was raised by his mom, Tricia, in a two-bedroom apartment, sharing space with a rotating cast of cousins. Growing up five minutes from UCLA's campus, he was a lifelong Bruins fan. He graduated from Venice High a semester early, joining a five-man QB derby to replace All-America Cade McNown. Losman was hailed as the Bruins' best QB prospect since Troy Aikman. But after just 15 practices he realized he'd made a bad mistake. UCLA was like 13th grade, with buddies hanging out and 10 family members on the sidelines at practice. Rumors floated that Losman couldn't hack the competition. His take: "I love my family to death, but I needed to get away. I wasn't growing up."
It was no easier when Losman arrived in New Orleans. His new teammates thought that he was brash, that he didn't know his place, that he was a jerk. Wideout Nick Narcisse thinks the guys just misread the new QB. "Everyone has his own style," he says. "A lot of us weren't used to his."
For most of the 2000 season, Scelfo had Patrick Ramsey and Losman rotate quarter by quarter, sometimes series by series. Tulane stumbled to a 3-5 start as tension rose between the dueling QBs. "It's not where we're the best of friends," Ramsey said at the time. "But it's not where we can't speak to one another." Then, with three games left, Scelfo gave Ramsey the team. The Green Wave won them all. It began a humbling year and a half as understudy for Losman, who by his own admission is cocky.
Losman says he likes Ramsey, but the two never clicked. "I knew hunting and fishing were his areas," he says, "so I was like, 'I've never been fishing. Take me fishing. Take me hunting. Show me around.' I asked him a million times, but I guess we were just different. I respected him though, because I knew how good he was."
Ramsey left Tulane after the 2001 season to become the Redskins' first-round pick. Scelfo's older brother Frank, Tulane's QB coach, says Ramsey getting picked so high helped Losman overcome the sting of riding the pines. "I told him, 'I'm not saying he's better than you, but didn't I tell you he was gonna go first round?'"
On the field, Losman has continued to mature, cutting back on his mad scrambles and rarely forcing throws. He threw 19 TDs and ran for six more last season. Six of his 10 interceptions came after receivers couldn't hold on. His teammates didn't grasp his attempts at leadership, either. Vowing to take the young guys under his wing, he became a control freak. "I finally got some power," Losman says, "and people listened to me. But I could tell they didn't like to be talked to like that."
This summer, Losman is taking a laid-back approach to being a leader. Mostly that means checking up on the guys, making sure everyone's happy. For some it means he chauffeurs them to practice. For others, like wideout , it means he offers a place to crash.
Losman's still tight with his family in LA -- his mom still calls him every day -- but he has clearly created another one at Tulane. Instead of going home for a week this summer, he and his receivers drove 13 hours to Miami. Now the guys feel comfortable enough to dog the quarterback with the year-round tan. They call him Julio Iglesias. And Paco. And the Pope. To really get under his do-rag, though, they call him Jonathan. Only his mom gets to call him that. But, hey, it's cool, because he knows it's out of love. Mom would understand.
Back home in Venice, Losman's cousin Gerald Rodriquez has moved into J.P.'s old room. Gerald has grown into a promising receiver. Half the Pac-10 is interested in him. Two months ago, Losman would've thought twice about advising Gerald to come to New Orleans. Not now. "It's a great place for a kid from California," he says, "because you open yourself up to a whole new culture."
The real face of college football breaks into a grin. "Plus, now I know he'll have some real good guys on his team."