www.usatoday.com/sports/college/football/big12/story/2011-08-27/Oklahoma-quarterback-Landry-Jones-combines-football-faith/50156448/1Oklahoma quarterback Landry Jones combines football, faith
By Steve Wieberg, USA TODAY Updated 17h 10m ago
Landry Jones' two callings intersected last spring while he and eight Oklahoma football teammates were in Haiti, joined on a mission to the storm- and poverty-ravaged island.
From home came stunning news. Another teammate, linebacker Austin Box, had died at 22 of what was found to be a toxic mix of prescription painkillers and an anti-anxiety drug — an accident, authorities ruled.
Jones, the standout quarterback, felt the hurt as deeply as the other teary players gathered almost 2,000 miles away.
Jones, the quietly devout Christian and prospective minister, saw need to tend to the wounded flock.
"I gave my life to Christ two or three years ago, so I'm kind of matured in my faith. I'm not saying I'm mature in it, but I have matured," he says. "And so I felt like I was in a place to kind of walk these guys through it a little bit.
"It was a blessing that eight guys, nine guys were together and we got to talk about it and pray, really point people to Christ and say, 'Hey, I don't have the answer for this one.'"
He is good at both — throwing a football and practicing his faith — and Jones sees no reason why one must displace the other. He's planning a life of service, he says. He's sure he'll wind up in some kind of ministry. But he and college football's No. 1-ranked team open their season a week from Saturday, meeting Tulsa and launching an expected run at the Sooners' first national championship since 2000.
That is the obligation at hand. In another year or two, it's likely to be the NFL.
"Whether I'm a pastor or whether I'm a chaplain — whatever it's going to be, whatever ministry God calls me to — I'm going to do it," Jones says. "Right now, it's (being) the leader of the University of Oklahoma."
'Right in the mold'
Before him, that role was Sam Bradford's. A few years before that, it was Jason White's. Both quarterbacks won the Heisman Trophy and, with the right numbers and sequence of big-ticket wins, Jones will inject himself into this year's Heisman race.
In the two years since Jones trotted into his first college game to replace injured Bradford, the fourth-year junior has effectively stepped out of the considerable shadow of the school's all-time passing leader and NFL's reigning offensive rookie of the year. Jones has started 24 games and won 19, including two bowls, and set seven OU passing records.
He threw for 4,718 yards and 38 touchdowns a year ago, leading the Big 12 Conference in total offense and going out with a flourish. Against Oklahoma State in the regular-season finale, Nebraska in the Big 12 championship game and Connecticut in the Fiesta Bowl, Jones averaged 413 yards and accounted for nine TDs. The Sooners swept, finishing the season on a five-game winning streak.
"Look at Sam Bradford. Look at Jason White. There was consistent improvement," OU coach Bob Stoops says. "The other great quarterbacks we've had, (Jones is) right in the mold in how he's progressing and his personality and everything he does."
"We look up to him," wide receiver Ryan Broyles says, "and he knows we look up to him."
Broyles had similarly impressive numbers — a nation-high 131 catches for 1,622 yards and 14 TDs — and he and Jones are among 23 full- or part-time offensive and defensive starters back from last year's 12-2 team. That doesn't count the defensive centerpiece, linebacker Travis Lewis, who broke a bone in his left foot this month and will miss as many as four games.
Lewis seems unlikely to play in a Sept. 17 showdown at No. 5-ranked Florida State in Tallahassee, and also could miss OU's Big 12 opener a week later against Missouri. The Tigers, who start the season at No. 21 in the USA TODAY Coaches Poll, knocked then-undefeated Oklahoma from the top of the polls in October.
In 2009, untested, unfazed
The Sooners' breathless, no-huddle offense last year piled up better than 481 yards and 37 points a game. That wasn't quite to Bradford-era levels, but Jones had it humming again.
Stoops has been impressed, he says, from the time Bradford went down with a shoulder injury in the first half of the 2009 opener against Brigham Young and an untested Jones was thrown into the fire. He didn't light it up, mustering only enough offense for a field goal the rest of the way through a 14-13 loss. But he was unfazed.
Stoops recalls the then-20-year-old's cool in the halftime locker room.
"Players can't fool players and, as a coach, I can tell when a guy is real and when he isn't," he says. "And he was ready to go. He couldn't wait to get out there and 'let me go play.' He knew it wouldn't be easy. We didn't go in expecting this to happen. But he genuinely embraced it.
"Leaving the locker room, I said, 'Boy, that's encouraging.' I felt it right there … that this guy was going to be good."
Bradford came back for a couple of games but reinjured the shoulder and had season-ending surgery. Jones and the Sooners stumbled to an 8-5 record, but he returned bigger and stronger last fall — from 211 pounds when he arrived at OU to 229 on his 6-4 frame. And quarterbacks coach Josh Heupel gave his mechanics a polish.
Jones is not quite as accurate as his predecessor was (62.5% career completion compared with Bradford's 67.6%). And decent at 21/2-to-1 touchdowns-to-interceptions, Jones falls well behind Bradford's 51/2-to-1 ratio. But he's giving the Sooners 22 more passing yards a game (roughly 293 to Bradford's career 271).
And Jones isn't done.
"When you're comparing horses to Secretariat, no matter how good the horse is, he's always second-best," says former Dallas Cowboys personnel director Gil Brandt, an analyst for NFL.com. "But … this guy has good arm strength, good athletic ability. He's real smart. I think he's a very good quarterback in his own right."
Brandt says he'd prefer Jones stay for both years of college ball he has left — his common refrain on non-seniors — but projects him as a top-half-of-the-first-round pick in the April NFL draft if he chooses to jump after this season. ESPN's Mel Kiper Jr. rates Jones as the third-best quarterback in the potential draft pool behind Stanford's Andrew Luck and Southern California's Matt Barkley.
Brandt rates him behind only Luck. "This is a player who can take a team into the playoffs," Brandt says of Jones. "I think he has that kind of ability."
Wonder not about his commitment to God and full-time ministry vs. his commitment to football.
"God gave me this talent to use," Jones says, "and so I'm going to use it. If someone wants to draft me, I'm not going to turn that down. It's a blessing from the Lord. He's rewarding me with that.
"I'm definitely going to go, and that would be my ministry."