A&M great turned QBs into sack lunches
Green, who set school record with 20 in 1979, inducted into College Football Hall of Fame
COLLEGE STATION — An occasional visitor to Jimbo Fisher’s practices, Jacob Green said he appreciates the Texas A&M football coach’s approach to instruction.
“He coaches every play and teaches the players to do it until you can only do it one way — the right way,” Green said.
When Fisher was still in junior high school back home in West Virginia, Green was doing it the right way for the Aggies in record numbers. The swift defensive end’s 20 sacks in 1979, when the pass wasn’t as prominent in the college game, are a school record.
“Jacob came from a really good family, and he had a lot values and character, just all of the intangibles you look for in a young man,” said R.C. Slocum, a former A&M head coach who was an Aggies defensive assistant when Green starred at Kyle Field from 1977-79. “He had all of that going for him, along with great athletic ability. He could get off the ball and track down quarterbacks, and he did that at the college level and then on to a Pro Bowl career in the NFL.
“His quickness was his No. 1 asset. He was just so quick off the ball.”
It all added up to the induction of Green, a 1975 Kashmere High graduate, into the College Football Hall of Fame on Tuesday night in a ceremony in New York.
“That’s about as good as it gets for a college player,” Green said of becoming the 11th A&M player to earn the honor and the first since linebacker Dat Nguyen two years ago.
Green played defensive end at 6-3 and 230 pounds in college and then at about 250 pounds over a 13-year career spent mostly with the Seahawks after he was Seattle’s first-round selection (10th overall) of the 1980 NFL draft.
“Most people would have characterized him as being a little undersized,” said Slocum, who was Green’s defensive coordinator in 1979, when Green set the school’s sack record. “He overcame that by having great awareness and great acceleration.”
What Green has done since is nearly as remarkable as his A&M and Seattle tenures — and part of that meant a happy return to his youth. When he was growing up on the north side of Houston, Green drove dump trucks and tractors for his father’s landscaping company, Green Brothers Dirt Yard, starting at the ripe age of 13.
“You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” Green once recalled with a chuckle. “I loved that kind of work anyway.”
He loved it so much he got back into the landscaping business for a time upon his retirement from the NFL in 1992. Green and his wife, Janet, also opened Jaycee’s Children’s Center in Houston, a home for teen girls that provides a place to sleep, bathe and eat for youths who might otherwise be on the streets.
Green, 62, works in College Station for A&M’s 12th Man Foundation,
the athletic department’s fundraising arm, as a vice president for major gifts and endowments.
“Working at the 12th Man has certainly been something I never dreamed of,” Green said. “It was such an honor to be able to come back and see how it all works — how our student-athletes earn their scholarships — and get to know our donors who support our student-athletes.
“It’s just great. I’m like a kid in a candy store. Texas A&M is a special place, and our former students know how much the university helped make them a success in their businesses. It’s amazing to see how people give back to help others. That’s what it’s all about.”
Green’s shining moment at A&M came 40 years ago this month, when 5-5 A&M toppled No. 6 Texas 13-7 before a then-Kyle Field record 69,017 fans on Dec. 1, 1979. Standing before a massive crowd at the annual Aggie Bonfire in late November of that year, Green blurted of the rival Longhorns, “We’re gonna kick their ass!”
“The crowd went wild,” Green remembered. “I didn’t intend to say that. It was a spontaneous reaction to an emotional moment.”
Green, under pressure to back up his boast, did more than his share to ensure an Aggies victory, accounting for the final two of his 20 sacks that season while consistently harassing UT quarterback Rick McIvor.
“Jacob Green is a heck of a football player,” McIvor said afterward. “He put a lot of pressure on me throughout.”
McIvor then uttered what’s been said about Green by admirers across multiple walks of his extraordinary life: “You don’t find many like him.”