Football foray leads to stardom for Evans
When Jerald Temple’s star basketball player at Galveston Ball approached him a little more than a decade ago about playing football his senior year for the Tornadoes, Temple offered Mike Evans a lifetime gift: his blessing.
“When I determined he was serious, I told him the only thing I ask of him is that you play out there on the football field as hard as you do for me on the basketball court,” Temple once recalled of his counsel to Evans. “I knew if he did that, everything would take care of itself.”
Has it ever. Evans, who once helped make Johnny Manziel Texas A&M’S most prolific quarterback, now is the top target of the NFL’S greatest all-time quarterback.
“It’s been amazing to play with him,” Tom Brady recently said of Evans, who is bound for his first Super Bowl as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ leading receiver.
The Buccaneers face the Kansas City Chiefs on Feb. 7 at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Fla., the first time a team has played in its home stadium in the 55 Super Bowls. Evans this year became the first receiver in NFL history to begin his career with seven consecutive 1,000-yard seasons, snapping the old record held by his childhood idol, Randy Moss.
More than 750 miles of the Gulf of Mexico separate Tampa from Galveston, and David Suggs found the gulf nearly as wide in trying to talk Evans into playing football beginning his junior year at Ball. Suggs, then the Tornadoes’ football coach, had seen Evans casually playing catch with friends on the Ball football practice field one day after school.
Suggs had no luck early in wooing Evans, who planned to play basketball at Texas, to catch a football for real.
“His junior year, Mike just continued focusing on basketball, so we kept working on him,” Suggs remembered. “Finally, at the end of his junior year, he said he’d come out for football. He walked out of the gym, across the street to the field house, and we gave him shorts and a T-shirt. It just so happened that day we were testing, and he ran two 4.5s (seconds) in the 40-yard dash.”
Temple’s gracious reaction to Evans’ opting to play football before a promising senior year of high school basketball should be etched in stone for all parents and coaches of youths in any sport.
“We don’t own these kids — and this is the time in their life when they get to participate in everything if they want to,” Temple said.
In his one season of varsity football for Ball, Evans collected
25 catches and was second-team all-district, hardly a harbinger of his football glory to come.
“I just wanted to have a good senior year and have fun, so I decided to play football,” Evans recalled with a chuckle of his fateful resolution. “It ended up being one of the best choices of my life.”
To their credit, then-a&m football coach Mike Sherman and his staff recognized a raw prospect when they saw one.
“He showed a lot of toughness and physicality and was just highly competitive,” Sherman said of his first impression of Evans at Ball.
It helped that Evans was 6-5 with exceptional jumping ability. He weighed 180 pounds in high school and put on about 40 pounds in his three years at A&M, including a redshirt season in 2011.
He also proved to be a remarkably
quick learner under coach Kevin Sumlin, who succeeded Sherman at A&M in 2012. Evans, quietly excelling in the massive shadow of the 2012 Heisman Trophy winner Manziel, set the school record for receiving yards in a season (1,394) in 2013.
His 287 and 279 receiving yards against Auburn and Alabama, respectively, in 2013 top A&M’S single-game receiving chart, and his four touchdown catches against Auburn that same season are tied for the school record for a game.
Along the way, Evans developed into a better NFL prospect than Manziel, and both entered the 2014 draft after their redshirt sophomore seasons. The Buccaneers picked Evans seventh overall, and the Cleveland Browns
selected Manziel at No. 22.
The perpetual reveler Manziel was out of the league within two years, while Evans continued making a handful of quarterbacks, primarily Jameis Winston, look decent over Evans’ first six seasons in the NFL.
Then Tampa Bay in March signed Brady, who led the New England Patriots to six Super Bowl victories, and a thrilled Evans on Instagram dubbed Brady “the greatest of all time — a franchise changer.”
Indeed. The Buccaneers are back in the Super Bowl for the first time since the 2002 season after making the playoffs for the first time since the 2007 season — when Evans was a freshman at Ball.
Meantime, Evans leads the
franchise in career catches, receiving yards, touchdown catches and 100-yard games — all in only seven seasons. His 15-yard touchdown catch from Brady on the Buccaneers’ first possession in Sunday’s NFC title game got Tampa Bay rolling in its 31-26 victory at Green Bay.
Brady compared Evans to a former Patriots teammate in Moss, who retired from the NFL following the 2012 season.
“Both have big bodies, big catch radiuses and great body control,” Brady said. “(Both) have great understandings of the game. Randy is a Hall of Famer, and I think Mike is going to be one, too.”