D14 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 13 , 2022
Super bowl lvisaying as the season approached.
“You have to think about tomor-
row instead of today. This is where
it starts. You’re playing for your
future in football.”
With LSU scheduled to begin
fall practice in late August,
Ja’Marr reported to school. The
family agreed to keep talking,
praying, debating before they
made a decision. But instead,
Ja’Marr requested a meeting with
his coaches, and Joseph, the wide
receivers coach, says he knew
Ja’Marr had made his choice be-
cause he struggled to maintain
eye contact. He would indeed be
opting out and declaring for the
NFL draft. Jimmy Chase would
say later that he was the “last to
know,” adding that friends called
to tip him off on his son’s decision.
Ja’Marr was the first high-pro-
file college player to opt out in- In the eyes of some tradi-
tionalists, he was an avatar of the
ongoing paradigm shift that con-
tinues to see amateur players
truncate their college careers to
pursue professional riches.
“If it was my son, I would’ve
wanted the same,” Joseph says.
“Nobody knew anything about
this virus, and it wasn’t like he was
going to pick up $2 [million] or
$3 million. He was going to pick
up $25 [million] or $30 million.”
After Orgeron was fired last
fall, Joseph left LSU to become
associate head coach at Nebraska.
“Coaches leave and go all the
time with no explanation,” he
says. “We don’t give them none.
We do what’s best for our family,
so why shouldn’t they have the
same right?”
Ja’Marr ran a blistering
4.38 seconds in the 40-yard dash
during his LSU pro day, months
before Cincinnati selected him
with the No. 5 pick, making him
the first wide receiver drafted and
reuniting him with Burrow. They
became a lethal tandem and per-
haps the league’s most surprising
story. The Bengals, who hadn’t
won a playoff game since 1991,
have won three this postseason
and are one more victory from
Jimmy Chase and Jimmy Burrow
lighting cigars to celebrate a Su-
per Bowl championship.
Ja’Marr finished his rookie sea-
son with 1,455 receiving yards and
13 touchdowns. He announced
himself as one of the league’s best
young route runners and a physi-
cal player who could post up to
win battles against NFL corner-
backs, then dunk on them with
his average of 18 yards per catch.
On Thursday in Los Angeles,
Ja’Marr began his acceptance
speech as the league’s top rookie
by thanking his parents for sup-
porting him, and Toleah and Jim-
my could be seen beaming at a
table behind him.
Jimmy and Toleah attended ev-
ery game, home and away. Two
weeks ago they watched from the
lower bowl at Arrowhead Sta-
dium as Burrow, Ja’Marr and
kicker Evan McPherson secured
an upset of the Chiefs to win the
AFC championship. Toleah franti-
cally waved a flag as players cel-
ebrated, and eventually Ja’Marr
located his parents.
He ran over and hugged his
mother. Then he saw his dad,
about to fire up a plump La Gloria
cigar in the parking lot, and
leaned over to wrap his arms
around Jimmy. Toleah noticed
something unusual happening,
and for maybe the first time, she
saw the father and son crying
together.
“I’m better talking to other
kids,” Jimmy Chase says, because
the teen stewing in his bedroom
wasn’t another client. It was
Ja’Marr, the social worker’s
younger son. “It’s always harder
with your own.”
Four years before he became
the Cincinnati Bengals’ best wide
receiver and the NFL’s offensive
rookie of the year, three years
before he made the controversial
but fateful decision to opt out of
his junior season of college foot-
ball and two years before he and
quarterback Joe Burrow led LSU
to a national championship,
Ja’Marr Chase was just a kid at a
crossroads.
He was 17, a high school senior,
a star wideout at Archbishop
Rummel High. His dependable
hands and exemplary work ethic
had him ranked as the nation’s
12th-best wide receiver, and more
than two dozen college football
programs offered him a scholar-
ship. His parents considered him
a homebody, but Ja’Marr kept
saying he wanted to leave Louisi-
ana for college. He committed
first to Kansas, then decided on
Texas Christian, then Florida.
This exasperated Jimmy, who
kept telling his son how misguid-
ed this was.
“Talking to Ja’Marr is very frus-
trating,” he says. “He doesn’t un-
derstand emotions, decisions. He
doesn’t understand the process.
And as soon as I open up my
mouth, I get a reaction, and when
I get a reaction from him, I react.”
Jimmy says now that he didn’t
want his son to get taken advan-
tage of, especially by the fast-talk-
ing adults who assemble college
recruiting classes. But he also
wanted Ja’Marr to suit up for LSU,
whose campus and stadium were
an hour away. Rummel games had
become block parties, and after-
ward Jimmy and a few other play-
ers’ dads would celebrate with
victory cigars. Besides, Jimmy
told Ja’Marr, LSU desperately
wanted him. One evening a
Sprinter van parked in front of the
Chase home, and out climbed
Coach Ed Orgeron, of course, fol-
lowed by the entire coaching staff
— offense, defense, special teams.
How could Ja’Marr say no to
that? Why would he?
“You never let me do what I
want to do,” Ja’Marr snapped at
his dad, as Jimmy recalls it,
stomping away as signing day
approached. Now he planned to
play at Auburn, mostly because it
wasn’t the one place Jimmy want-
ed him to go.
Jimmy was bewildered, but To-
leah, Ja’Marr’s mother, wasn’t.
Jimmy had always challenged
their son, telling him after a rec-
ord four-touchdown game in high
school that the performance had
been a “fluke.” A former football
player at Alcorn State, he com-
pared Ja’Marr not with team-
mates or local stars but national
recruits in Florida and California.
They drove to scouting camps,
and Jimmy insisted Ja’Marr en-
dure endless measurements and
tests. He compared the results
with those of five-star prospects.
Whatever Ja’Marr was doing, the
things helping him climb nation-
al recruiting rankings, he could
always do more.
“He was like, ‘Everybody else is
not doing that.’ I was like, ‘You’re
not everybody else,’ ” Jimmy says.
“I pushed him and I pushed him
and I pushed him.”
CHASE FROM D1
Burrow and Jefferson left LSU in
2020 before being selected in the
first round of that year’s NFL
draft. Chase, meanwhile, began
preparing for his junior season,
when he was expected to be
named a team captain. But that
March, Jimmy Chase says, their
family began suffering from flu-
like symptoms, and older son Jim-
my Jr. and Toleah would be hospi-
talized with what they later
learned was covid-19.
“I was like: Shake it off, man,”
Jimmy Chase Sr. says. “I can’t die
now.”
During a most unpredictable
spring, when the coronavirus
pandemic paused sports and shut
down the world, the Chase family
survived but eventually learned
about “long covid” and the heart
and respiratory problems some
patients reported. Jimmy Chase
says his son’s heart problem has
healed, but it remained a fright-
ening preexisting condition and
again placed the father and son on
opposite sides of a tense debate.
Ja’Marr wanted to play as a
junior, to be there for his team-
mates, to challenge his own re-
ceiving records. Toleah and Jim-
my wanted their son to consider
his health, and Jimmy couldn’t
help reminding his son that he
had nothing more to prove as an
unpaid college player. NFL draft
experts suggested Ja’Marr would
be a first-round pick after just two
seasons, and a new NCAA guide-
line made it a possibility. Not all
conferences resumed sports in
fall 2020, but those that did were
required to give athletes the op-
tion of sitting out because of
health concerns with no threat of
losing their scholarships.
“This is real life,” Jimmy kepthide his tears. When Jimmy asked
him later why he chose the Tigers,
Ja’Marr shrugged. He just had a
feeling.
Jimmy and Toleah made their
trips to Baton Rouge, and Jimmy
took his high school tradition
with him. Several players’ dads lit
up cigars at the pregame tailgate,
and 15 times in 2019, Jimmy
Chase and Jimmy Burrow, Joe’s
dad, celebrated victories and,
eventually, an undefeated season.
“[B]ro why my pops so funny,”
Ja’Marr wrote on Twitter in 2019.
He shared a video of Jimmy in his
“lucky shirt,” a gaudy purple-and-
gold pattern with Ja’Marr’s pic-
ture on it, nudging his way into a
videographer’s frame before de-
claring that “ever since I’ve been
wearing it he’s been going off.”
Burrow’s son won the Heisman
Trophy by the largest margin in
the award’s history, and Chase’s
son set SEC records for receiving
yards and touchdowns in a season
before winning the Biletnikoff
Award as the nation’s best wide
receiver.
On an offense packed with tal-
ent, in a wide receivers room load-
ed with stars, the quiet kid once
pegged as a defensive back had
become the most explosive ath-
lete on the field.
“He can flip the switch on you.
He can just dominate you and not
even say a word,” says Mickey
Joseph, who coached LSU’s wide
receivers in 2019, when Ja’Marr,
Justin Jefferson and Terrace Mar-
shall Jr. combined for nearly
4,000 yards. “We had three spe-
cial ones, and how you sold that to
the guys: They can’t take all three
of y’all away, and for 15 games
nobody took them away.”
Only time could do that, andJa’Marr wasn’t fast enough to be
the next Odell Beckham Jr., not
elusive enough to be the next
Jarvis Landry. Miles saw Ja’Marr
as a defensive back, a position he
had never played.
“I was in total shock,” Ja’Marr
told SEC Country in 2018, “that
someone would tell me to play
defense and not know what I
could do on defense.”
He wanted to prove Miles
wrong, so he worked to get faster,
stronger, more reliable. He stayed
after practices to catch hundreds
of passes and never missed a
6 a.m. workout. Before his senior
season at Rummel, a physical
exam revealed a small hole in
Ja’Marr’s heart, Jimmy says. He
suited up anyway, leading the
Raiders to the state playoffs with
61 catches, 1,011 yards, 15 touch-
downs. He dropped only one pass.
LSU fired Miles two years be-
fore Ja’Marr was to sign with a
college team, but he hadn’t forgiv-
en the school. Maybe someday, he
told his dad. Just not yet. When
his son had finished, Jimmy said
it made sense. He stopped trying
to push Ja’Marr toward his own
preferences, acknowledging that
his little boy was now a man. He
could make his own decision.
“He wanted me to know he was
smart and that he knew what he
was doing,” Jimmy says he real-
ized. “Kids just want to be under-
stood. They want somebody to
understand their situation. He
wants to be his own man, and I get
it.”
In February 2018, Ja’Marr re-
ported to Rummel and said he
had finally made a decision. He
sat at a table and produced a
purple LSU hat, and when he put
it on, Ja’Marr tried, as always, toToo much, Toleah told her hus-
band. She preferred he stay close
to home, too, but she reminded
Jimmy that if Ja’Marr wasn’t al-
lowed to make his own decision,
they would wind end up pushing
him away. Besides, for all the
things Jimmy had told their son,
had he ever actually asked why
Ja’Marr didn’t want to go to LSU?
“He just talks to us like we are
his clients and not his wife or son,”
Toleah says. “He always wants to
talk about stuff, like, how does
that make you feel? Like, really?
Just speak to us like you’re not a
social worker. We’re not your cli-
ents; stop talking to us like that.”
She has always struggled to
decide whether Ja’Marr and Jim-
my are too alike or too different,
but either way, family meetings in
the kitchen became clashes.
Ja’Marr, after all, is soft-spoken
and can be shy. Jimmy is opinion-
ated and brash, a ham who has
appointed himself as the family’s
unofficial spokesman. They are
both confident, maybe a little
stubborn, and neither father nor
son lets the other see him cry.
“They just internalize their
emotions,” Toleah says. “When
you’re a social worker, you are a
good listener. You have to listen to
what other people are dealing
with. He just wants to solve the
problem and get to the solution.
But sometimes we want you to
listen.”
So one day Jimmy tried a meth-
od he used often with other peo-
ple’s kids, though rarely with his
own. He asked why. Then he said
nothing as the young man vented.
Early in Ja’Marr’s recruiting, for-
mer LSU coach Les Miles told him
he could wear the purple and
gold. Just not as a wide receiver.Thrill of Chase supplies Cincinnatiwith an enormous jolt of electricityICON SPORTSWIRE/GETTY IMAGES
Wideout Ja’Marr Chase, this season’s NFL offensive rookie of the year, f inished with 81 catches for 1,455 yards and 13 touchdowns.plainly: “There’s no egos in the
locker room.”
And these teammates have a
relationship outside of the
locker room. Reader said fight
nights bring out a crowd.
“ ‘Hey, we’re watching the
UFC fight here on Saturday. Pull
up.’ And guys pulling up,”
Reader said. “Guys going out.
Hanging out. Whatever you’re
doing, you’re just around guys.
“A lot of guys on this team are
really friends,” he added.
Hilton recalled how the
secondary had a tradition
during the season to gather to
watch Monday and Thursday
night games. This kinship works
because guys enjoy each other’s
company, and the small town
feel of their home market has
something to do with it. As a
party town, Cincinnati may be
lacking. But it’s the perfect
setting for an ensemble cast
with a key role in football’s
biggest game.
“Like Joe said a couple weeks
[ago], there’s not much to do in
Cincinnati,” Hilton said, smiling
and almost whispering this into
the microphone. “So we kind of
just vibe with each other. That’s
what’s important, chemistry on
and off the field. If you can trust
them off the field, you know you
can trust them on it. It’s
something we thrive off.”“America’s Team.”
In 2020, Cincinnati signed
defensive tackle D.J. Reader and
Bell. Last offseason, Hilton
inked his four-year, $24 million
deal. Now they may be valuable
pieces, but all three carry
memories of feeling
underappreciated or
overlooked. Reader was a
backup at Clemson. Bell
reportedly refused an offer to
re-sign with the Saints, who
promptly moved on from him.
Hilton went undrafted out of
college.
They don’t have the
household name recognition
like a few players on the Rams’
defense, and yet here they are.
“It’s just the collective group
of the people we have,” said
Hubbard, who went to high
school at Cincinnati’s famed
Archbishop Moeller before
starring at Ohio State. “There’s
so many great dudes. We just
don’t have too many huge-name
guys that are worried about
themselves. Everybody’s worried
about the team collective, what
it takes to get the job done and
whoever makes the play, I’m just
as happy for them as if I made
it, and that’s the mind-set across
the board. Guys feel that and
can play harder for that than
just for themselves.”
Reader put it even morebut take a swipe at both fan
bases. Awuzie said this week he
preferred the blue-collar
mentality of the Bengals as
opposed to the additional fluff
that comes with playing forcareer in Dallas, needed a
change of scenery. Apple didn’t
have the best time in New York
or New Orleans, and even as his
new team was marching along
in the playoffs, he couldn’t helpMaybe they would name this
fictional show something corny
like “Meet the Who Deys” and
the season finale would end
with confetti streaming down
from SoFi Stadium following
the city’s first Super Bowl
championship.
For this show to have that
happy ending, sure, Joe Burrow
and the rest of the stars on the
Bengals’ offense will be the
main writers of the script. But
it’s the mostly anonymous
defensive standouts who have
created an organic and effective
chemistry, playing a crucial role
in the team’s surprising run to
meet the Los Angeles Rams in
Super Bowl LVI.
“It’s just a mixture of
personalities, and we just all
mesh well,” Hilton said Friday.
As a unit, Cincinnati finished
the regular season 17th overall
in points allowed but owned the
NFL’s fifth-best run defense.
Only two starters remain from
the 2019 season-opening lineup
— which would go on to rank as
one of the league’s worst —
while the current group was
quickly and effectively remade
through free agency, trades and
the draft.
On the surface, it seems like a
collection of hodgepodge parts.
Both Apple and Awuzie, who
spent the first four years of hislos angeles —
If you’re a young
NFL player living
in Cincinnati,
there’s little to do,
apparently, so
Bengals
cornerback Mike
Hilton has had
plenty of time to imagine the
Bengals’ secondary as sort of a
sitcom family.
Hilton considers himself the
dad of the group, a little more
settled than the younger ones
but still cool enough to vibe out
to a Young Thug playlist before
games. Cornerback Eli Apple, a
former first-round draft pick of
the New York Giants, would be
the adopted little brother they
rescued from bright lights and
big expectations. Chidobe
Awuzie, the one they call
“Chido,” is the chill one who also
now enjoys a drama-free life
away from his former team. And
safeties Jessie Bates III and
Vonn Bell are the perfect pairing
of an odd couple — Bates brings
the Zen, and Bell acts like the
loud uncle in the room.
Hilton could have gone on,
casting the rest of the defense:
linebacker Logan Wilson as the
interloper from Wyoming and
defensive end Sam Hubbard as
“Cincinnati’s own,” the local
hero they all rally around.
On this Bengals defense, sum has been greater than its mostly anonymous parts
Candace
Buckner
ANDY LYONS/GETTY IMAGES
Cornerback Mike Hilton, undrafted out of college in 2016, is one of
several overlooked players on Cincinnati’s thriving defense.