The email was sent on Dec. 17, 2021. For three weeks, Johnny Hodges had been in the transfer portal. He was beginning to fear that nobody wanted him.
Good morning,
Wanted to let you know that I’ll be visiting schools over winter break with the intention of enrolling in spring semester. I think I would be an excellent option for TCU at linebacker if you have a spot open. Be sure to check out my film at the Naval Academy from the transfer portal. Enclosed you will find my Hudl from high school.
Sincerely,
Johnny Hodges
He had initially sent emails to Boston College, Duke, Northwestern, Vanderbilt and several schools he preferred. No replies. So he sent out more emails and direct messages to as many FBS coaching staffs as possible. Nothing. He contacted William & Mary, Villanova, Richmond and other nearby FCS programs. Towson was the only one to respond with an offer.
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Now Hodges was almost ready to give up. It sure seemed like the universe was telling him that his college football career was over.
“At the end of the day, I’m a realist,” he said. “When I wasn’t hearing anything back, I was just like, you know what? Maybe that’s just how it was supposed to be.”
Hodges tries to not get emotional as he retells the story, but it’s not easy. He was not in a good place at this time last year. And now? Now he’s a starter and leader for a TCU team that’s about to play Georgia for a national championship. He’s the Horned Frogs’ top tackler and was the Big 12’s Defensive Newcomer of the Year.
The transfer linebacker will tell you that what he has achieved since arriving in Fort Worth is a testament to working hard and believing in yourself. But Hodges actually receiving this opportunity in the first place seems more like luck or perhaps fate. His father would argue it’s the power of persistence.
Hodges was so fed up with feeling ignored and rejected last December that he was already preparing to quit football and rejoin Navy’s lacrosse program. That’s when Brian Hodges stepped in to help.
“He was like, ‘Here, let me log into your email and I’ll email every school for you and I’ll just keep hitting them up,’” Johnny Hodges said.
He’d had to put up a similar fight just to get onto Navy’s football team. Hodges was an All-Met linebacker at Quince Orchard High School in Gaithersburg, Md., but he’d made an early commitment to play lacrosse at the Naval Academy during his junior year. Right as he was enrolling in 2019 for Plebe Summer, coach Rick Sowell was fired. The Midshipmen played five games in 2020 before the pandemic canceled their season.
Hodges went home to Darnestown, Md., and started wondering during quarantine whether he should give football another shot. His dad, an account manager for a construction supply company, encouraged him to reach out to Navy’s coaching staff.
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“The coach replied back like, ‘Thank you for your interest, we’ll be in touch,’” Brian recalled. “I said, ‘Well, Johnny, just email him every week.’ I’m in sales so, you know, I figure you’ve got to keep asking.”
Hodges kept pestering the football coaches until they said yes. He joined the program in the summer of 2020, earned snaps as a freshman and started in his first Army-Navy game. He built on that by bulking up 18 pounds to 228 and earning a starting role in 2021.
By the end of his sophomore season, he needed to leave. Hodges is not ready to delve into the details, but issues with a coach had deteriorated to the point that he abruptly left the program with two games left in the season.
“It was just a bad, bad situation,” Brian Hodges said. “He wasn’t in a good mental situation. It was definitely time for a change.”
Hodges entered his name in the transfer portal on Nov. 29, 2021. He and his father didn’t anticipate how challenging it might be to find his next school.
“You hear about the transfer portal, and you think you’re gonna go skipping down the highway on your merry way,” Brian Hodges said. “But it just doesn’t happen that way.”
Nothing was working. Quince Orchard coach John Kelley made calls on his behalf and advised him to stay patient through the early signing period. Hodges wondered if his stats — 50 tackles over nine games — weren’t good enough to get noticed. The men’s lacrosse team was willing to welcome him back, so he started training to get back in playing shape. He trusted his dad to keep trying, but he didn’t trust it would actually pay off.
When Brian found out Sonny Dykes had left SMU for TCU, he figured he should try them again. Johnny had enjoyed the best game of his career against SMU, recording 14 tackles and an interception. There was just one problem: He couldn’t find Dykes’ email address. He tried [email protected] and sonny.dykes and every other combination, but they just kept bouncing back. He finally tried emailing Andrea Roberts, TCU’s coordinator of office services, and asked her to forward his message to the coaching staff. Fortunately, she was kind enough to do so.
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Joe Gillespie had only been on the job as TCU’s defensive coordinator for 10 days when he got the email. If Dykes had hired anyone else to run the defense, there’s a good chance TCU wouldn’t have taken a look at Hodges. But Gillespie actually remembered him. During his three seasons as Tulsa’s DC, he liked studying Navy’s multiple defense and how it played against his next opponent because he saw similarities to his own schemes. Their veteran linebacker Diego Fagot always stood out to him on tape, but he started noticing No. 57 as well.
“He just kinda popped up out of nowhere,” Gillespie said. “I’m like, ‘Who the heck is this dude?’ So when I found out he hit the portal, I knew who it was. I had to go back and make sure and watched and I was like, ‘That’s frickin’ him!’”
After Gillespie and Dykes called around and did their homework on Hodges, Gillespie called the linebacker back on Dec. 22 to extend an offer. Hodges was stunned enough that he had to ask: Was this a full-ride scholarship or a walk-on offer? He tried to play it cool and hide his excitement when Gillespie said he had a scholarship to TCU.
“He was like, ‘I know you probably have a lot of decisions to make with other schools reaching out and all that. I can tell you’re not a guy that posts your offers on social media,’” Hodges recalled. “I was like, ‘Uh … yes sir, yes sir.’ I basically was like, yeah, let me talk it over with my family. I hung up the phone, literally went and partied with my friends and committed the next day.
“He was like, ‘Do you want to come down on an official visit or anything?’ I’m like, ‘No, I’ll just show up.’”
Before all the partying ensued, Hodges broke the news to his dad.
“I called him crying my eyes out. ‘You’re not going to believe it. We’re going to TCU,’” Hodges said. “He was crying his eyes out too. It was awesome.”
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The process of getting out of the Naval Academy included a lot of paperwork and gathering signatures from a variety of administrators. The scramble to collect all of them took three days and got stressful, but he got it done. Then the Hodges family packed and made the 20-hour drive to his new home.
“I just felt it in my gut, I felt great about it,” his dad said. “I told him, ‘This is gonna be one hell of a journey, Johnny.’”
Was he good enough to play at this level? That’s what Hodges wondered, and it made him anxious in the days leading up to the move. He had to defeat that doubt. He won sprints in winter conditioning workouts. He earned reps with the No. 1 defense right away in the spring. The nerves kicked in when he took the field for TCU’s season opener, a Friday night road game at Colorado in front of more than 47,000. He didn’t see crowds like that in the American Athletic Conference. But by the time the Horned Frogs entered Big 12 play, he knew he belonged.
“I didn’t believe in myself,” he said. “In life, you just have to believe in yourself more than anyone else does. Now that I’m confident and more mature, I won’t let that happen again. But no, coming out of high school, I didn’t think I was good enough to play college football so I did lacrosse. At Navy, I didn’t think I was good enough to go Power 5 when I entered the portal and my dad did and he got me here. All of these things that happened, I never thought I was playing football again. Now I’m here. You’ve just got to be confident. You’ve earned this. Tell yourself that.”
Johnny and Brian Hodges met on the field after TCU knocked off Michigan. (Courtesy of Brian Hodges)Hodges ended up being just what this TCU team needed as it embraced a new culture under Dykes and a 3-3-5 system under Gillespie. The second-team All-Big 12 selection has produced 81 tackles, 8 1/2 tackles for loss and two sacks, but what his defensive coordinator values most is the example he sets for their unit: disciplined, prepared, never loafing, always trying to prove himself. When you have enough guys like that, you can win a lot of games.
“He’s just one of those tough kids who is going to fight through it all,” Gillespie said.
And there he was on Saturday afternoon, one year removed from having nowhere to go, fighting back from a hamstring injury and getting stops against Michigan — one of the countless programs he tried to contact — to help the Horned Frogs pull off a Fiesta Bowl stunner. After the game, father and son hugged on the confetti-covered field and marveled at how just how far a few emails got them.
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“Oh my gosh, it’s just amazing,” Brian Hodges said. “We all knew he could do it, that’s the thing. And we knew they were gonna bring it. It was just … I’m speechless just thinking about it. Every time I see Coach Gillespie, I tell him: Thank you for giving my son an opportunity.”
(Top photo: Chris Coduto / Getty Images)
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