When Georgia Tech has the ball and is about go into its clockwork option, there is one player who stands below the rest. He is the one who can be missed, the one who demands your full inattention.
As Paul Johnson employs him to shuttle in a play call, the coach must stoop a bit to speak the instructions into his helmet’s earhole.
And when he arrives at the huddle, this player is swallowed up in the company of giants, like a dandelion in high grass.
But once the play commences, Robert Godhigh, the Yellow Jackets’ 5-foot-7 A-back, will not be overlooked. The shortest player makes the biggest plays, and you will notice. He’ll see to it.
He is a senior now, having survived a couple of years in the purgatory of a walk-on toiling on the scout team. A practice-field extra no more, Godhigh is the most efficient player on the field. Entering Thursday night’s game at Clemson, he has averaged 11.3 yards per carry and 21.1 yards per reception this season.
Which begs the question: Instead of using him sporadically, why don’t the Jackets just get him the ball every time?
“Well, we do run the triple option, so we have to spread it around,” center Jay Finch said while smiling.
Godhigh, his very name practically an invocation, has turned himself into quite a lesson on belief.
Seems that every time he touches a football something beneficial happens. As in Tech’s last time out, against Pitt, when two of his six carries went for touchdowns. The first, a 35-yard run, demonstrated the varied ways Godhigh can make a difference.
In breaking free of a tackle as he swept around the left end, Godhigh showed the weight-room strength that has earned him the nickname “The Beast” (he benches 400 pounds, squats 535). At least that’s the nickname still available to Robert Godhigh III — RG III has been otherwise claimed.
Then, as he scampered past the Pitt secondary, he put on the kind of moves that has prompted his former coach at Harrison High, Bruce Cobleigh, to say, “He might have the best lateral movement of anyone I coached.” (Among the others he coached, when working in the northeast, were NFL backs Joe and Jamie Morris).
Mind you, just judging by the packaging, none of this could have been expected.
So small was he at 5 years old that his mother feared tackle football would break him in two. His father wrested a concession from her, enrolling Robert in flag football. The boy had speed. That one time he ran the wrong way and scored for the other team, no one could catch him.
Even as his sense of direction improved, Godhigh always needed to prove that he belonged on a football field because of his stature — to this day Johnson jokes that his back is “vertically challenged.” That has only lent his college career more impact.
“I take a lot of pride in him,” quarterback Vad Lee said. “He’s one of those success stories that all walk-ons can look at.”
“There have been people come up to me saying that they look up to me for being short and doing this,” Godhigh said. “I love talking to people like that because of all the things I went through. I just tell them it doesn’t really matter how tall you are if you have the desire to do it and you put in the hard work. Don’t let people tell you what you can’t do.”
At Harrison, Cobleigh noticed this little running back in a freshman game who seemed to spend all his time in the end zone. He was worried about exposing someone so small to varsity competition, but Cobleigh brought up Godhigh anyway. The concerns vanished when the kid ran for 170 yards his first game.
By the end of high school, no FBS schools were willing to invest a scholarship in an undersized back. As he and his family drove home from a visit to an FCS school, Wofford, they began to review options. When his mother told him to take the scholarship out of the equation, to look into his heart as to what he really wanted to do, he said he always pictured himself at Tech.
Well, she had asked for honestly. “Then,” Jeri Godhigh said, “my next thought was, ‘Oh, gosh, now we are going to have to foot that bill.’”
The Godhighs were on the hook for two years while their son worked the scout team without benefit of a scholarship. When Godhigh first showed up at Johnson’s office, far from filling the door frame, the coach’s initial thought was that he would never amount to a real contributor. There were times that Godhigh would slip into the same kind of thoughts.
“At one point he was like, ‘I don’t know if I want to do this anymore, I’m just going to leave,’” his mother said. “We had to continue to pray and continue to encourage him to stay. We told him the best thing, no matter what happens, is you’ll get a degree from Georgia Tech, so keep pushing through.”
Finch, who went to high school at Kennesaw Mountain, could have saved everyone a lot of time and trouble by just testifying to what he witnessed when playing against his rival at Harrison.
“Watching him in high school I knew he could play at this level because he made people who were going other places on scholarships just look stupid,” he said.
First, the Tech coaches noticed Godhigh could block, and he earned a scholarship largely because of his willingness to plow the road. His strength and attitude found an outlet. And the grief he took about his height from opponents only made him stronger.
“I hear it all: ‘Shorty. You’re too short to be out here. Look at this guy.’ I just laugh because the next play I block them, cut them down,” Godhigh said.
By the first game of his junior season, he was rounding out the resume. His first collegiate touchdown run came in the opener that year, vs. Virginia Tech. Wouldn’t you know it, his father, who had followed him to so many Tech games in which Godhigh never saw the field, had to work that day.
Leaving work — he is in law enforcement in Atlanta — Robert Godhigh Sr. ducked into the first place he could find with a television, a restaurant/bar. He had been through far too much with his son to greet his breakthrough with any sort of emotional restraint.
“I could see him going around the corner, and I just knew he was going to score,” he said. “When he made that last guy miss I said he’s in there. I literally lost my voice and mind. People were looking at me wondering what is wrong with that guy? I was screaming, ‘That’s my son! He scored his first touchdown in college!’ I was almost in tears.”
When Godhigh put it all together, the results could be remarkable. Notably in the 2012 score-a-thon against North Carolina, he ran for two touchdowns and took the invisible escalator to go up over two taller defenders and snatch a touchdown reception.
As the games tick by, marking the impending conclusion of his college odyssey, Godhigh arrived at a revelation:
He is capable of surprising even himself.
“No, honestly, I didn’t expect quite this much,” he said. “I knew I wanted to get a shot to play and earn a scholarship, but I didn’t really picture anything like this. I’m just extremely grateful for everything that has happened so far.”
Godhigh proved himself to the one person who really matters.
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