Jefferson chasing a new dream
OXNARD, Calif. — Malik Jefferson had the whole world in front of him, and he wanted it all. When he turned 18, his legion of admirers hailed him as the savior of Texas football. To him, somehow, performing that miracle didn’t seem ambitious enough.
At UT, there’s a class called “Game Plan for Winning at Life” that every scholarship athlete is required to take as a freshman. The professor, a former NFL assistant and Harvard Law School graduate named Daron Roberts, has lectured 2,800 students about, among other topics, vulnerability and anger management and dealing with failure.
“Malik always stood out,” Roberts said Friday.
The linebacker with the long dreadlocks and impossibly wide smile stood out, in part, because he always stayed late. Every time his classmates bolted for the door that semester in 2015, Jefferson would stick around asking “how and why” questions, because, as he explained to Roberts, football superstardom wasn’t his ceiling. He wanted to leverage that into something greater.
But to the 25-year-old man who stood on the Dallas Cowboys’ practice field Friday afternoon, vulnerability and failure were no longer fuzzy academic concepts. He knew them all too intimately, and instead of leveraging his fame into changing the world, he found himself just trying to leverage a training-camp invitation into a roster spot on his fifth NFL team in five years.
“This whole experience,” Jefferson said, “has been humbling.”
As you might have heard, he did not save Texas football. His college career ended with him doubting himself, and it didn’t help when the Bengals released him a year after selecting him in the third round of the 2018 NFL draft. By the time the Browns picked him up in 2019, he was, he admitted Friday, “a dead horse.”
“I never thought I’d be out of the league that fast, or cut from a team that fast,” Jefferson said. “It blindsided me.”
At UT, when the pressure of insane expectations started to get to him during his sophomore season, he had solutions. He started attending counseling, and he invited his mother to come from Mesquite and stay with him.
It was tougher in Cleveland, and in Cincinnati, and then in Los Angeles, where he spent his third disappointing NFL season with the Chargers. He was lonely. He didn’t have his family around. And though counseling helped, he wasn’t sure if he’d ever regain his old confidence on the football field, where his elite combination of speed and power once made him a five-star recruit and a freshman All-American.
Strangely enough, he explained, some of that returned last year while he was just trying to stay in the league in Indianapolis. He found teammates who challenged him, and who were enthusiastic about the game.
“I was just the practice squad guy,” Jefferson said. “And guys were like, ‘Man, I’ve got a lot of respect for you,’ because of how hard I worked. And I was like, ‘I just want that opportunity again.
“I’ve got a good one here.” By “here,” Jefferson means with his hometown Cowboys, who have guaranteed him nothing in terms of a roster spot but are at least giving him a chance to rediscover the form that once made him such a prized prospect. Defensive coordinator Dan Quinn’s marching orders to Jefferson were simple.
“Show me how well you cover,” Quinn told him. “Show me how well you hit. Go play football.”
“For the first time in a long time, that’s the kind of opportunity and the kind of thing I wanted to hear from somebody,” Jefferson said.
His goal, he said, isn’t just to make the practice squad. He wants to make the roster, and to contribute, and the odds might not be in his favor.
But the impossibly wide smile is back, and Jefferson said he’s in a better mental space than he was in Cleveland or in Cincinnati. Part of that comes from counseling, and knowing that, as he put it, “a lot of people get lost in not having a guiding system of what to do after something traumatic happens.” And some of it might come from what Roberts noticed in one of his favorite students seven years ago.
“A lot of us feel the need to put on a mask, to make people think we’ve got everything taken care of,” Roberts said. “Malik is not afraid to publicly acknowledge vulnerability. He is who he appears to be.
“The depth of his questions (in 2015) went so far beneath the surface. When a person asks questions like that, you know he is going to be a lifetime learner. He’s going to have a chance.”
And Friday afternoon, 1,400 miles from the classroom where he used to stay late, Jefferson was doing it again. With most of his teammates in the locker room, and only a few autograph-seekers still hanging around, Jefferson lingered near midfield, working with his position coach.
He didn’t become a savior, and he’s no superstar.
But who knows?
The whole world is still in front of him.