It took Jaylon King a few moments to find the right words. But when he did, similar to how his playing career has panned out to this point, waiting a bit longer proved to be the best strategy in the end.
“I hope they say I was a great player, they say I was a great teammate and reliable,” King said on how he wants to be remembered after he plays his final game for Georgia Tech this season. “That’s one of the main things that I think my teammates remember me for. Those are the ones I work with all day, sweat with all day. If they can remember me that way, I hope the fans will as well.”
King and the Yellow Jackets (2-2) host Bowling Green at 3:30 p.m. Saturday at Bobby Dodd Stadium. When kickoff arrives, it will be almost five years ago to the day since King made his first career tackles in a game for the Jackets.
The opponent in that game? Bowling Green.
“The first (tackle) was on a hitch. I remember (Tech defensive back) A.J. Gray told me I was playing a little too soft,” King smiles. “Being here this long, being able to play that many games, five years later it’s crazy to think about that I’ve been here for six (seasons).”
King has five home games left in his Tech career, a career that has had him play for three coaches, recover from one gruesome injury and complete an undergraduate degree. He’s been in the spotlight throughout this week (thanks, in part, to a pair of interceptions Saturday at Wake Forest) as he closes out his last September with his teammates.
The reigning ACC co-defensive back of the week has come a long way since breaking the tibia bone in his right leg Oct. 1 at Pittsburgh. He has come even further since he left La Vergne, Tennessee, in the summer of 2018 and moved to Atlanta.
“I love my degree, made great friends throughout football, made great connections through the staff – even professors, professors that still email me after a good game or good performance,” King said. “So feel like I made good connections from that aspect. And from the business world, I have professors that have pretty much put my name out there when they know someone that’s looking for or have a job that’s opening.”
King was one of the top college football recruits in Tennessee in 2017. He played for the prestigious Ensworth School in Nashville and was named one of the Tennessean’s Dandy Dozen (the state’s top 12 players) going into his senior season.
King played running back, quarterback, wide receiver, safety and cornerback during his prep career. As a senior, he threw for 116 yards and a touchdown, ran for 350 yards and another score and caught 20 passes for 333 yards on offense. On defense, he recorded 22 tackles and three interceptions.
Scholarship offers from Tech, Cincinnati, Indiana, Louisville, Memphis, Ole Miss, Purdue, Tennessee and Vanderbilt arrived in the mail. Most of those programs wanted him strictly as a defensive back, others saw King potentially playing on the offense. King said Duke recruited him as a quarterback.
Ultimately King chose Tech over Vanderbilt. As much as he loves his mom and dad, he said, he knew a school a little bit farther from home would be good for his growth off the field.
King made those two tackles in 2018 and then didn’t play again to preserve his redshirt season. Over the next three-plus seasons, for former Tech coach Geoff Collins, King totaled 89 stops and finally made his first career interception in a 42-0 loss to Ole Miss in 2022.
A little more than a week later, Tech fired Collins. A week after that, King broke his right leg in the Jackets’ win at Pitt.
“Going through a coaching change, that was a struggle in itself,” King said before broaching the subject of his broken leg.
With Tech now meandering its way through the remainder of the ‘22 season with an interim coach, King began the road to recovery, a road he acknowledges was as difficult mentally as it was physically. He felt as if he was letting the team down and felt helpless as he watched the Jackets miss plays he knew he would have been able to make had he been on the field.
While he was, “learning to walk again,” as he put it, King started to consider his football career might be over. He was on track to graduate with a civil engineering degree in December and there was no guarantee he would ever play at the level he once had.
“My main thing was, I didn’t want to go out that way. I wanted to go out on my own terms. If I wanted to hang up football it would be on my own terms, not just off an injury,” King said. “My mom, she’s always reminding me of my dream to play at the next level, and that’s how I kind of got to the point of I don’t want to go out like that.
“If I have a chance to make it at the next level, I want to give it another shot.”
King reenrolled at Tech this semester and is taking 12 credit hours, three of which involve a cooperative with the Manhattan Construction Group. King is a project-management intern where he works on projects, visits construction sites and watches proposals being implemented in real time.
After morning practices, King clocks in most every afternoon during the week. He was a bit of a celebrity this past week, especially with coworkers who are Tech alums.
“Went in Tuesday, had a lot of conversation, less work,” King laughed.
Lisa Rosenstein, a principal academic professional in Tech’s school of civil and environmental engineering, taught King in three classes during King’s undergraduate tenure at the school. In one of those courses, global engineering leadership, Rosenstein remembered King really standing out.
In a class of about 20 students, each student is asked at the semester’s outset to articulate their individual leadership goals in the course. King wrote, said Rosenstein, that his goal was to, “step up and fulfill team needs.”
“The peer evaluations he received from his teammates (at the end of the semester) matched absolutely perfectly to his goals. Each one of his teammates remarked on what a valuable and reliable team member he was despite his very demanding athletic schedule. That always stuck with me,” Rosenstein said. “It’s one thing to promise to step up into a position of trust. It’s another thing entirely to do it. And he did.”
Tech coach Brent Key has seen King’s every game since arriving in Atlanta as an offensive line coach for the Jackets in 2019. On his weekly radio show Thursday, Key recalled how King sat in Key’s office during the 2022 Duke game at Bobby Dodd Stadium and watched the matchup on television. King watched the game intently and took notes on his replacement Clayton Powell-Lee.
At halftime King went to the locker room to coach up Powell-Lee, who finished with eight tackles that day.
King said his close relationship with Key is another reason he decided to lace up the cleats one last fall. Key and the Jackets certainly are thankful King made that decision.
“Gosh, I could on forever about Jay King. He’s the shining example of what a Georgia Tech football player is,” Key said. “To do what he does academically in school, to take pride in that as much as he does in the game of football. To be the player that he is, the person that he is, the young man that he is. The overcoming of adversity that he has shown. To be down and out and back and banged-up again.
“He was limited in the first game of the year. He pulled something three days before the first game (against Louisville). You think he’s gonna go out and play 10-12 plays, and he doesn’t come off the field. Just a testament to the true grit and toughness that I want this program to be. He stands for all of it.”
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