A long time ago, football ceased to be sport to the Shaws and became family tradition.
It may even be a trait. Someone check to see if their red blood cells are pointed at each end and laced down the middle.
Just a game, you say? Clearly not on weekends like this one when football is nothing less than the tie that binds.
On Friday, Lee Shaw, the head coach at Flowery Branch for 10 seasons, took his Falcons into the second round of the state Class AAAA playoffs.
On Saturday, his quarterback sons both started games at two of the South’s landmark college stadiums.
The eldest, Jaybo, the one-time backup at Georgia Tech who downsized to find happiness at Georgia Southern, took a colossal step up to face Alabama in Tuscaloosa in his final regular-season game as a collegian.
Connor, the South Carolina sophomore who assumed command at midseason when Stephen Garcia goofed up one time too many, took a step down for his home game vs. The Citadel.
And they all came out of it unbowed, unbroken, and a best-you-could-hope-for 2-1.
“It has been a great journey for the Shaw family,” Lee said earlier in the week. “When you talk about our family you automatically talk about football because it has always been there.”
Some may take football as a frivolity. Some may hold it a little closer to their hearts. Then there are the Shaws, who are virtually consumed by it.
When dad’s Falcons play on Friday night, Dawn is texting play-by-play to both sons.
Once a brother plays on Saturday, his first priority is to relay the result to the other. “[Connor’s] the first person I call once I get back to the locker room, if he’s not playing at the same time,” Jaybo said.
On college Saturdays, Lee and Dawn split, one driving to Jaybo’s game, the other to Connor’s. While his season is still going, Lee has to get back in time to meet with his assistants on Sunday and begin planning for Flowery Branch’s next opponent. Lee coached one game last season, drove all night to Maryland, watched Jaybo lose a close one to Navy, then drove straight back home. He figures he can sleep when his sons run out of eligibility.
“We’re blessed,” Lee said. “People may have sons that go off to college at different times and play ball, but I have to sit back and kind of pinch myself sometimes and say, you know, we’re having to choose which Saturday to go see which son play quarterback in Division I football. It’s almost surreal sometimes.
“I want to make memories with them, and we’re making a lot of good memories.”
In Shaw’s office at Flowery Branch there is a familial feng shui at work. In one corner are shelves dedicated to Connor’s work in Columbia. In the opposite corner, an identical set of shelves display the photos and clippings of Lee’s deeds in Statesboro. On the coach’s desk and another nearby shelf are photos of his tennis-playing daughter Anna Kate, a junior at Flowery Branch.
There is one theme common to the displays. Here’s a hint: In a photo of a 3-year-old Anna Kate, she is holding a football.
Georgia Southern coach Jeff Monken is himself the son of a long-time Illinois high school football coach. He can testify to the fact that a game can become genetically imprinted upon a person.
“You’re carrying water bottles, putting tackling dummies away, crying after your dad loses a game, just living and dying with every snap. When you’re a coach’s kid that’s the way you grow up. Football becomes so important to you,” Monken said.
Both the Shaw boys were steeped in the game. They served as ball boys as their father worked his way up the career rock wall at various North Georgia high schools. They learned the option at their daddy’s knee, the way a carpenter’s son would learn to shim a door frame.
From the first days of their youth football, the boys were skilled mimics.
“On Saturday when they played ball, they would re-live that Friday night’s game, be that high school kid they were idolizing at that time,” Lee said.
For two seasons at Flowery Branch, Jaybo threw to Connor before graduating and ceding the quarterback job to his younger brother. People would call Friday night in Flowery Branch “The Shaw Show.”
As both boys began showing unusual athletic gifts, their father warned them that they’d be subject to inevitable comparisons, that they couldn’t let their egos get in the way of family. “We always talked about how Shaws stick together,” Lee said.
To this day, you can’t get one Shaw to talk up his talents above the other.
So, Jaybo, which of you Shaw boys has the better arm, the quicker feet? “I’ll go with Connor on both. I’m just going to say I taught him well, that I brought him up right,” he said.
“We’re pretty similar in the way we play. I’ll give him the nod, how about that?” Connor said.
Similarly, they both have had breakthrough seasons. Since following Monken from Tech to Georgia Southern last season, Jaybo has helped lead a resurgence in Statesboro. This season, the Eagles are No. 2 in the FCS (formerly Division I-AA) rankings and are back atop the Southern Conference for the first time since 2004.
Connor started the season opener for South Carolina against East Carolina, sputtered, and gave way to Garcia. But when the oft-troubled senior was thrown off the team Oct. 11 — three days after Connor had replaced Garcia as starter — it was up to the young Shaw to stabilize the Gamecocks offense. He has managed the position well enough to win five of six starts over that stretch.
When all three Shaws win on a weekend, they call it the trifecta. That happened as recently as two weeks ago, when Flowery Branch won a first-round playoff game on a last-second Hail Mary, Georgia Southern clinched the Southern Conference title and South Carolina beat Florida.
A repeat of a Shaw sweep this weekend, with big, bad ’Bama looming, would have been almost too much to ask.
First game — check. With her husband’s team trailing Thomas County Central 14-10 on Friday night, Dawn sent a worried text about the opponent to her boys: “They run the midline veer really well.” But the Falcons took back control of the game with a bit of daring — an onside kick to start the second half. It worked, they scored, the defense adjusted and they went on to win 31-21. The Falcons live to play again, next facing top-ranked Tucker.
Second game — check. Connor threw for three touchdowns and rushed for 90 yards and another score as South Carolina beat The Citadel 41-20. ’Nuff said about that.
Last game — not quite. But shouldn’t you get partial credit toward completing the trifecta when you score 21 points on Alabama and give a far better account of yourself than those Vegas cynics predicted?
“Hopefully, yeah,” smiled Jaybo, whose 44-point underdog Eagles lost by only 24 (45-21).
“Absolutely, he does,” agreed his father, as he mingled with other Georgia Southern fans outside Bryant-Denny Stadium. “They earned a lot of respect.”
Every football Saturday is hardest on the parents. “It’s almost unbearably stressful sometimes,” Lee said. “My games are actually easier than my Saturdays because I have a sense of being in control on those Friday nights. But Saturdays I’m no longer on sideline. It seems like I worry more for their health and over their performance.”
This Saturday with Jaybo facing Alabama, there was no squabbling between dad and mom over who would get the Tuscaloosa trip. Dawn wanted no part of a watching the nation’s top defense chase her son. “Jaybo running the option, he’s going to have a lot of linebackers coming at him. Some real good ones,” she said.
But the afternoon was relatively kind to the oldest Shaw boy. He stood straight afterward, in fine shape for the start of the FCS playoffs.
And he even had enough strength to wax fondly about the whole thing. “It will be great to have the chance to tell my kids one day that I played in such a great stadium with such a great tradition,” Jaybo said.
That next generation might well be killing time around some practice field somewhere when it hears that story told. Jaybo’s future is in coaching, say all the people around him.
The tradition is in good hands. There will always be another game to get to for the Shaws.
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