The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Lloyd graduates 10 years after leaving school
Greg Lloyd Jr., who once sent a Notre Dame helmet flying into the air while making one of the most famous tackles in UConn history, was a good college student when he wanted to be.
He did not always want to be. “I can’t remember the exact day but I remember the moment when I woke up and was like, ‘I think I’m just going to be a football player,’ ” Lloyd said. “I was over school.”
That, Lloyd thinks, was during his junior year and early in the 2009 season.
That, he knows for sure, did not go over well at the Burton Family Football
Complex.
Lloyd, a linebacker, remembers being in the front row for a team meeting when Randy Edsall addressed the group with words still seared into his memory.
“Coach Edsall starts,” Lloyd said, “and he says, ‘I’ve been getting a lot of emails from teachers — guys showing up late to class, guys leaving in the middle of class and there’s even some students who haven’t gone to class all semester. Isn’t that right, Mr. Lloyd?’ I was like, ‘Yup, there are going to be consequences that I didn’t see coming.’ ”
Lloyd, 32, can laugh at this learning moment now, particularly as a recent UConn graduate. He finished his coursework to earn a bachelor’s degree in general studies over the summer, crossing the academic finish line 11 years after departing Storrs to pursue an NFL career with about a semester’s worth of work remaining.
What got him to this point? For starters, weeks of extra time in study hall in 2009 — punishment for his done-with-this approach and a way to make up for lost academic ground — and being motivated just enough over the years by the consistent friendship and pressure of Kelli Kozaryn, UConn’s football academic coordinator.
“I nag them when I know they only have a few classes yet,” said Kozaryn,
who was hired at UConn in 2008, worked closely with Lloyd for two years and has kept in close contact since. “He took a class here and there and it had been a few years. He had one class left and kept putting it off. Then he reached out and was like, ‘I’m ready now.’ I was like, ‘Finally!’ ”
The final course: Spanish II. Lloyd, who lives in Tennessee and works at a marketing company, completed the class online.
“I think for anybody, getting out of school is just refreshing,” said Lloyd, who was a seventh-round selection of the Eagles in the 2011 NFL draft and spent time with Bills and Colts in 2012. “No more homework. No more class checks. No more assignments. Then I realized I wanted to finish and I needed to finish. Kelli would hit me up, ‘Soooo … plan on graduating?’ I’d say, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, at some point. It’s on my to-do list.’ I’ve always had a good rapport with her. It always feels good to finish something you started, regardless of the fact that it took forever to get there.”
Lloyd’s UConn arrival in 2007 was intriguing due to name recognition. His father, Greg Lloyd Sr., was a five-time Pro Bowler and a three-time first-team AllPro linebacker with the Steelers in the 1990s. He was one of the most dominant defensive players of the era, with a body of work that cast a shadow impossible for his son to escape.
Lloyd Jr. did become a wonderful player in his own right at UConn, peaking in 2009, that year of academic struggles. And on Nov. 21, 2009, just five weeks after the on-campus murder of teammate Jasper Howard, Lloyd gave UConn fans a moment forever worth reliving on YouTube.
On the first play of the second quarter at Notre Dame, with UConn trailing 7-0 and Notre Dame setting up second-and-goal from the 1, Lloyd timed a handoff to the Irish’s Armando Allen, jumped, met him in the air, knocked off his gold helmet and sent the sounds of impact ringing through the stadium.
“Too funny,” Lloyd said. “Crushed him. It was fun. My mom said it seemed liked I jumped before he jumped, and I totally did. We had film-studied them. When they get down on the goal line, the way they set up and the way they run, it was hand the ball to him and he jumps over the line.
“So once we got down there, and I looked at the line and saw that setup, I was like, ‘Oh, this is that play’. So I had already predetermined, I am running and jumping over. If he didn’t jump, I would have looked extremely foolish. But film study said that was going to happen and I believed the setup was right for it. I was just ready.”
Notre Dame scored a touchdown on the next play for a 14-0 lead but UConn went on to win 33-30 in double-overtime, among the most significant moments in UConn history.
“The game, overall, was extremely tiring,” Lloyd said. “By the end, I had to have Scott Lutrus and Lawrence Wilson basically pick me up after every play. I was that exhausted. I had enough energy conservation to hold it in for a play, give a full burst, and once it hit the ground it was like, ‘That’s a wrap.’ ”
Lloyd has spent most of his life answering questions about his father and he gladly did so again in a recent interview. The relationship was not always healthy.
Today?
“It’s nonexistent,” Lloyd said. “I have an apathetic approach to him in general.”
Lloyd describes his father as someone whose aggression on the field carried over into areas of everyday life.
“Some people can turn it on and turn it off,” Lloyd Jr. said. “He wasn’t one of them.”
Lloyd Sr. in 2004 was accused of sticking a gun in Lloyd Jr.’s mouth. The case twice went to trial, resulting in a hung jury and a mistrial, according to Lloyd Jr. and numerous reports. Lloyd Sr. was not tried a third time.
“It’s true,” Lloyd Jr. said. “He was upset that I got a C in math and acted as if that was an end-all event.”
Lloyd and his father are at least cordial. They are on a text thread with two of Lloyd Jr.’s siblings.
“And to his benefit,” Lloyd Jr. said of his father. “I let him know and he informed me that I was the first male in the family to graduate.”
Lloyd tore an ACL and MCL against Syracuse the week after the Notre Dame game and was expected to sit out the 2010 season, redshirt to maintain his final season of eligibility and return in 2011.
Instead, he played in the 2010 opener against Michigan and made 11 tackles.
“Once I was able to firm up and my knee wasn’t killing me, I was like, ‘I can do this,’ ” Lloyd said. “I said, ‘It won’t be pretty but I can definitely move.’ I had expressed that I can play but not to the level I want to.”
Lloyd made just 14 more tackles the rest of the season, falling down the depth chart and appearing in just seven games. He did not play in the Fiesta Bowl loss to Oklahoma on New Year’s Day 2011, Edsall’s final game as coach before departing for Maryland.
“I played enough games to burn my medical redshirt, then they benched me for the rest of the season,” Lloyd said. “In my head I was like, ‘That felt like a setup and a half.’ I definitely felt some type of way about it. The rest of the season I was like, ‘Damn, my medical redshirt is burned and I won’t be eligible next year.’ It felt like the end of my football career.”
Lloyd was mostly a practice squad player during his two years in the NFL but he did appear in two games for the Bills in 2012. He started taking online UConn courses around this time, too. Sometimes he’d drop them before completing them due to the hectic nature of pursuing a football career.
“Life gets in the way sometimes,” Kozaryn said. “It happens. Dan Orlovsky took a few years to finish. You’re mostly plugging away only during spring semesters because that’s all [football players] have free.”
Edsall texted Lloyd after learning of his former player’s graduation, congratulating him and inviting him to return to campus this season. Lloyd has not been back since 2011. Edsall announced his retirement Sept. 5 and left the program Sept. 6.
Lou Spanos is the interim coach. There’s a connection there, even if Lloyd didn’t realize it. Spanos was a Steelers defensive assistant in 1995-2009, spending three years coaching Lloyd’s father.
“Then he probably knows me, because I feel like in my younger years, in my earliest years, I kind of grew up in the Steelers locker room,” Lloyd said.
Spanos said, “I remember Greg Jr. back in 1995. I’d say, ‘Hey, little guy.’ ”
Not only that …
“I coached him with the Titans when he had a tryout in 2014 or 2015,” said Spanos, who was linebackers coach with the Titans in 2014-17. “So I coached the dad and the son. I coached Greg Jr. for a weekend and I was like, my god, he’s like his father, demonstrative. We had a good team and he didn’t get a spot but you saw the athletic ability, the football instinct.”
That was the end of the football road for Floyd, who has been in the Nashville area, where most of his family is based, for years now. He’s passionate about a creative writing habit. He has a girlfriend. He has a stable job and likes to say he “crushes it” at work, like he crushed Armando Allen, like he eventually crushed schoolwork.
Lloyd stays in touch with Andy Baylock, UConn’s longtime baseball coach, who has been the football program’s director of alumni and community affairs for the past 17 years. He is close with several former teammates. He’s proud of the pictures that hang in Burton and the Shenkman Training Center — one of him knocking Allen’s helmet to the sky, one of him making a tackle while teammate Jesse Joseph assists.
He keeps in touch with Kozaryn, too, who is interested in having Lloyd return for a May commencement ceremony.
“We would touch base every couple months,” Kozaryn said. “I was like, ‘I know your capabilities — and you promised your mother.’ He was a smart and good student when he wanted to be, and that’s how we became connected, because he wasn’t doing what he was supposed to be doing.
“We spent a lot of time making sure he stayed on track and then he just got comfortable with that aspect of it, knowing I’d just call him out on everything. We joke about it now. There has been a lot of growth and he recognized that he needed to finish this because he was so close and it’s such a big accomplishment.”