BeamVibe

CHICAGO — You hear the one about the kid who had never played football making it to college football’s grandest stage in a year’s time?

How about we spice the joke up a little, and say that the teen is a Yankee who has found a home on a Georgia football team that stands one win away from its first national title in 41 years?

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“Disbelief and gratitude,” says Luke Collins, the punchline of this bit, which is decidedly not a bit — something that his parents have finally come to terms with now that their oldest of four kids is a first-year walk-on linebacker with the Bulldogs.

Collins will travel with his Georgia teammates to Indianapolis, just three hours from home, for Monday night’s College Football Playoff national championship game. He dressed for two regular-season games and was on the sideline in his white No. 57 jersey behind Kirby Smart for the Orange Bowl semifinal win over Michigan.

Turns out that quarterback Stetson Bennett isn’t the only incredible walk-on story these Dawgs boast.

Collins’ set of challenges was particularly unique. For one, he was a basketball player, having spent three years on the varsity team at St. Ignatius on Chicago’s Near West Side. He never bothered to play on the flag football team at Hardey Prep when he was younger, but he begged his parents while in high school for permission to play tackle, to no avail.

His love for the sport had taken hold the last time Georgia made it this far, as Collins fell for the 2017 Bulldogs team that ended up losing to Alabama in overtime of the national title game.

“Just hearing about this physical brand of football that Coach Smart was selling everyone on was really cool to me because at the time, that was how I played the game of basketball,” Collins says. “And here was this really good team with a really good coach who was all about toughness and physicality that drew me in.

“So I would get up every Saturday the last three years of high school, watch ‘College GameDay’ and every Saturday would be about watching Georgia play football.”

He went to “Play It Again Sports,” a used sporting goods store in his Lakeview neighborhood, and bought shoulder pads and a helmet to wear while watching Georgia games. He bought a Jake Fromm jersey that he wore while he took his ACT.

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He scored a 35 on the exam, good enough to get accepted into Notre Dame and Northwestern.

“I was this avid fan, and that was the start of it,” he says of Georgia. “At that time, that’s all I thought I would ever be.”

He took that fandom seriously, though, embracing all things South despite not having a Southern bone in his body. He immersed himself in the country music scene, he loved to fish and, years later, he would become obsessed with hunting.

This was a city kid by geographic means only, and his Dixie mindset began to truly take hold during his senior year at St. Ignatius, as he was able to talk to a few small-college basketball coaches who had visited the school in pursuit of his teammate and best friend, Daniel Florey. One recruiter had made passing mention of Collins playing football in the fall, assuming that the then-6-foot-1, 180-pound bruiser starred on the gridiron based on the way he had always taken on bigger foes on the hardwood.

That conversation planted the idea of playing football in Collins’ mind. Not just college football — college football at Georgia.

His father Patrick, set on talking Luke out of the idea, went in with his son on a 2012 Ford F-150 as a means of putting the issue to bed. That the purchase came right after an upset win over DePaul College Prep — in what turned out to be the last basketball game of his career, because of the March 2020 shutdown — was not a coincidence.

Still, Collins could not kick the football bug. So he went to work, holding basketball clinics in his family’s backyard and becoming a delivery driver for Pizza Hut, set on earning enough money to, if nothing else, send himself to prep school and learn a sport he had never played before.

Every morning before class in the spring of his senior year, he would blast out emails to upward of 15 different prep schools, simply introducing himself along with his height, weight, bench-press numbers, squat numbers and an explanation of how badly he wanted a helmet, some pads and a foot in the door, promising to pay his own way.

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Only one school replied offering an opportunity: Birmingham Prep, a small Christian ministry in Alabama run by coach Tim Sanders that helps post-graduate students pursue college sports opportunities. Still, Sanders was up front about the school’s limited reach, with most of its players going on to smaller colleges, not to 13-time SEC champions like Georgia.

So Collins and his father set out in that pickup truck for a nearly 700-mile drive to Birmingham. Internally, Patrick Collins hoped against hope that his son might simply use that prep year to scratch an itch and get it out of his system.

He knew better, though. This was a father who had given so many pep talks to his kids about chasing their dreams. About following their passions. About how happy people never truly work a day in their lives.

When Luke gently threw those credos back at him, it stopped Patrick in his tracks.

“He’s listened to my speeches and now he’s living them,” he told himself. “How dare you not get behind it?”

That resiliency paid off in his son’s lone year in Birmingham. Asked for the hardest part about playing football for the first time, Collins, who was assigned outside linebacker, was blunt.

“Everything,” he says. “I think football is just the best sport in the world. It’s the most humbling sport in the world. Just like trying anything new, I failed time and time again, and I still do. If I had a nickel for every time I got thrown around some field in Alabama last year, I’d be a rich man. But you just have to stick through it.”

He made himself a modest highlight tape that he sent around the country, while emailing Georgia’s staff every week or so. In December of 2020, amid silence from the Bulldogs, he figured he’d pull a “Rudy” of sorts and drive to Athens himself, wait outside the football complex until he bumped into a coach, and then go ahead and plead his case.

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A day before that trip, however, he received a text from Georgia running backs coach Del McGee asking about his interest.

Collins spent that offseason training with Brent Mason and Mike Settle of All In Athletics in Chicago, getting up to 245 pounds by the time he reported to Georgia’s campus in May of 2021. He called his dad on Nov. 4 to tell him he was on the dress list for the Missouri game that weekend, leading to a quick flight to Atlanta for father and an immediate haircut and new suit purchase for son ahead of the program’s pregame “Dawg Walk.”

“Everyone that knows Luke knew he had the heart, passion and drive,” Mason says. “The unknown was the learning curve of high-level football in the matter of a year.

“It looks like he figured it out.”

Collins is so committed to his current cause that his Georgia bio lists Birmingham as his hometown, which he says is a nod to Sanders for shaping him as a football player. His father jokes that his son almost has a Southern accent after two years away from home — though the Notre Dame graduate won’t go as far as comparing his fah-muh-lee member to Brian Kelly. The only evidence of Collins even being from the Windy City came from a Chicago Sun-Times story ahead of the Orange Bowl.

There is a lesson in all of this, of course, about grit and confidence and a willingness to risk failure. Patrick Collins is an attorney, and his wife is a radiologist. They are blue-collar people who worked their way into white-collar jobs and are now providing their kids plenty of professional opportunities. Yet it became clear to them through this journey to another sport, in another part of the country, that their oldest son wanted to find his own identity, mark his independence and not fall into the trap that seems to trip up so many kids who come from means.

Just this week, Collins asked his father what exactly he thought would happen when they drove to Birmingham together less than two years ago. His old man was blunt with him: One, you might not like football once you actually play it. Two, even if you do like it, you might not be athletic enough to get anywhere with it. Three, because you had never played the game before, you could be at greater risk of injury.

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Then father flipped the question on son: What did you think was going to happen?

“He said, ‘I thought I would learn the game and somehow talk my way into Georgia,’ ” Patrick says. “He didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about other results. And when you look at really successful people, that’s what they do.”

The Collins family will be at Lucas Oil Stadium on Monday to see their son’s team play for a ring. They ordered eight custom No. 57 jerseys for Christmas but ended up receiving just six, along with two No. 99 jerseys, a supply-chain miscue that will leave two family members wearing the uniform of Jordan Davis, Georgia’s 6-foot-6, 340-pound All-American defensive tackle.

Somewhere, presumably, those two missing Collins jerseys ended up in someone else’s hands.

“How horrible would that be if some poor 10-year-old kid on Christmas morning opened up a Collins No. 57 jersey when he asked for a No. 99 Davis jersey?” Luke Collins says, laughing. “How heartbreaking would that be?”

Every dream starts somewhere. Collins would know that better than anyone.

(Photo of Luke Collins (57) standing behind Georgia coach Kirby Smart: Courtesy of the Collins family)

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