If you show up at any college football practice on any given morning in October, it’s a safe bet you’re going to see the usual suspects. Coaches and players take center stage, you’ve got the all-important supporting cast of athletic trainers, strength coaches and the like, and then there’s another group.
They know the players. They know which small town in Texas they came from, they know their height and weight, and they know their name, because as soon as that wide receiver heads back for another rep after connecting for TD, they let them know it.
Perhaps one of them knows them so well because to open his career at Southwest Texas State back in 1968, he was known as Frankie.