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An ex-Navy lacrosse player is living ‘a crazy story’ with TCU football
By Chuck Culpepper
January 8, 2023 at 5:30 a.m. EST

LOS ANGELES — The white 4Runner, packed to its last known crannies, revved before dawn on Jan. 8, 2022, then lurched steadily out of Montgomery County, then out of Maryland, then southwest out of the remnants of a snowstorm and on toward Tennessee. A road trip had begun. An inconceivable 365 days had just started.

Father and son rode for 16 hours that first day. They listened to podcasts. They rode just as they had for all those lacrosse tournaments during Johnny Hodges’s teen years, only this time they brought him toward a college football program they barely knew and had never seen. They reached Tennessee and pointed pretty much due west.

How many college football stories end in the national championship game but start with a guy recruited to Navy to play lacrosse? The correct answer might be one. But here was Hodges, who as a Quince Orchard High midfielder was “very tough, very physical, very strong, very smart,” his prep coach, David Heiney Gonzalez, said from Maryland. “He was able to see the field very differently than a lot of other players. He would see passes in small windows. He was always two or three steps ahead.”

He took that to Navy while still “too raw,” Hodges said. He appeared in one game in 2020, and he “100 percent” would have persisted as a lacrosse player had the pandemic not snuffed out that season in early March. That sent him home to Darnestown, and that got him thinking about training, and that got the 2018 first-team All-Met linebacker thinking about football, and that got him calling his father’s longtime friend Travis Keating, and that got Keating coming over every day at 7 a.m. to the Hodges’s basement — the walls still boasting the two sons’ tyke-years drawings their mother, Michele, had framed.

“What’s in that basement?” went a question to TCU linebacker Johnny Hodges here Saturday at College Football Playoff media day.

“Iron,” Hodges said with a laugh.

TCU, the unlikely national championship finalist, is done being belittled

On through Tennessee drove Brian Hodges and the second of his two sons. Neither had ventured west much. They kept noticing sights they would like to visit while saying they lacked the time. They headed for frontier. “I didn’t really have a chance to read [about] TCU,” Johnny said. “I had no idea who Gary Patterson was. I just knew their coach had been fired. I knew they were good about five, 10 years ago when I was younger, and I liked their jerseys, but other than that ...”

They crossed through Memphis and into Arkansas, then carried on past Little Rock, switched from Interstate 40 to Interstate 30 and aimed southwest toward Texas. Sixteen hours down the road from home, they would eat and sleep in Arkadelphia, Ark. (pop. about 10,000) — one last night before the who-knows.

Back in that basement, Johnny Hodges had revisited his love for the grind of football training. He would walk on at Navy, play seven games in 2020, play nine in 2021, encounter a distressing situation he has not shared publicly, enter the transfer portal and haul along the impression he left from two games in particular: against SMU coached by Sonny Dykes, who nowadays coaches TCU (14 tackles, one for loss, one interception); and against Tulsa, then coordinated on defense by Joe Gillespie, who nowadays coordinates the defense for TCU (seven tackles, two for loss, one sack, one forced fumble).

“Those were hands down my two best games — turnovers, forced fumbles, tackles,” he said. “So it’s just kind of crazy how those puzzle pieces kind of fell in line.”

The transfer portal offered nothing in the first few weeks, and discouragement loomed. His father started shepherding the process so as to send more persistent emails, including to TCU with its new coaching staff. “I didn’t know him as Johnny Hodges,” Gillespie would say Saturday. “I knew him as 57.” Then TCU personnel man Jeff Jordan said to Gillespie: “ ‘Hey, Johnny Hodges — does that ring a bell? He just hit the portal,’ ” Gillespie recalled. “I said, ‘Yes, that’s the linebacker from Navy.’ He said, ‘What do you think about him?’ And I had already watched so much of this guy [while studying Navy’s defense] . . . that I was like, ‘This is a guy that we need for our program,’ ” noting he “has an old-school mentality to him.”

Father and son cried over TCU’s offer, then within weeks finished crossing Arkansas and reached Texas. They neared the end of their 21 hours, reached the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex for the first time, crossed through Dallas and reached Fort Worth.

Who knew Fort Worth had a zoo? “Now that you mention it,” Brian Hodges said, “when we first came down the street, there was [a moment] like, ‘Wow, there’s a zoo here.’ ” I’ll go to school down the street from a zoo, went one of those funny little thoughts people have, this one Johnny’s. They would reach the house he would share with kicker Griffin Kell and punter Jordy Sandy; they would assemble a bed that had come in a box; they would somehow refrain from fighting during that process, unlike most humans; Johnny Hodges would attend his first team meeting; and they would meet Gillespie and feel kindred with him for he, too, had just arrived.

By the night of Jan. 10, 2022, as Brian Hodges prepared to fly home the next day, Johnny Hodges would watch the national championship game between Georgia and Alabama, and he would think, “I’m like, ‘Wow, I’m playing Power Five — I could be playing these teams.’ ” And then he would switch it off at halftime and go to bed because a 6 a.m. workout beckoned.

Remembering TCU’s last national title, way back in 1939

The 12 months that followed would cement his path as among the all-time dreamiest. He would toil in the spring to enlarge himself from his “215 [pounds], 220, too small” size to a listed 240. TCU, 5-7 in 2021, would start driving toward 12-0 and later 13-1. Hodges would make 81 tackles, 8½ for a loss, and notch two sacks. He would become a lacrosse recruit playing in the College Football Playoff, and the Horned Frogs would upset Michigan, 51-45, to become the unlikeliest finalist in the playoff era. And here he would stand, ahead of the very next national championship game, at media day, saying: “Lo and behold, we’re playing Georgia. It’s a crazy story.”

“What have I learned about myself?” he would answer one question.

He would pause.

“Just — you have to have a strong belief in yourself.”

But first, before all of that wonder, Brian and Johnny Hodges would spend some of their first moments in Fort Worth driving to Amon Carter Stadium, that 46,000-seat nugget that drapes itself in purple. “This is a pretty nice parking lot,” Brian would recall saying. “This is a pretty nice stadium,” Brian would recall saying next. And Brian would say a year later, “We were blown away that you could just walk right up and be in the stadium.”

So they got out of the car after their 1,400 miles and walked up together to that overlook behind one end zone, the father and the second of his two sons. They strained to believe a reality about to grow far more unbelievable, and these two travelers into the unknown, bonded even more than most travelers, had themselves a moment.

They high-fived.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2023/01/08/johnny-hodges-tcu-football-navy-lacrosse/