CLEVELAND — In the place where Cardale Jones calles home, he walked into a stuffy, dimly lit gymnasium at the Ginn Academy on Thursday afternoon wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt that read “12 Gauge,” the nickname his teammates at Ohio State have given the big and strong quarterback.
As the rapper Drake's "Started From the Bottom" boomed from a pair of loudspeakers, he made his way to a podium wedged in between two tables. On each of them, a cloth read: "It takes courage to be different; to be a Ginn man."
After assembling a press conference earlier in the morning to announce what he described on Twitter as a life-changing decision, Jones — once an unheralded misfit and a troublemaker — was expected to declare for the NFL Draft after helping guide the Buckeyes to the National Championship earlier this week.
Instead, Jones said thanks, but no thanks to the league. He’s coming back to school.
"Thank all you guys for coming out, I mean, I don’t know why you guys made such a big deal," Jones said with a wide smile.
He added: "The NFL, after three games, is really out of the question for me."
And if you understand what the Ginn Academy, Ohio's only all-male public school co-founded by Tedd Ginn, Sr., for at-risk teens in 2007, means to those who call it home, then you can understand why Jones pointed to academics over football when explaining his decision to return.
The Ginn Academy's creed goes like this:
"Our mission is to become exemplary students who will reach our full potential and beyond / We will recognize our genius and realize our self-worth / We will stay patient and poised to seize every opportunity for success / We are guided by scholarship, leadership and service to all mankind / The Ginn Academy will cultivate us to become global leaders of the century."
It offers perspective for why Jones, a redshirt sophomore, said graduating remained his top priority.
“It’s everybody dream and goal when they play football or any collegiate to make it to the next level, but in my point in my career, I feel like it’s best for me to go back to school and one of the most-important things for me to do is to graduate,” he said.
“So when I make that decision to play in the NFL, I want to be done with school.”
Yet Jones’ decision to forgo professional football and come back to Columbus while his stock soars at an all-time high is a curious one.
“Cardale's brand right now has never been stronger,” head coach Urban Meyer said Tuesday morning. “Might never be stronger again in his life.”
After all, in his first three-career starts, Jones has passed for 742 yards and five touchdowns in a furious postseason campaign that yielded Ohio State a Big Ten Championship, a Sugar Bowl victory and its first national title since 2002.
But now, Jones, who abruptly became the starting quarterback after Braxton Miller and J.T. Barrett suffered season-ending injuries, will have to earn the right to remain as such with both Miller and Barrett expected to return next season.
Head coach Urban Meyer, who has perhaps one of the most unusual quandaries at quarterback in recent memory, has offered Jones no promises in regards to whether or not he’ll keep a job that fell into his lap.
So why come back to school, again?
"My education is gonna take me 10-times further than my athletic ability,” he said.
This Cardale Jones — the one with a vision, the one who talks about class with a passion and the one who became a father a few months ago — appears far different than that the one Meyer inherited when he came to Ohio State.
“They was in bad blood together,” said Tyvis Powell, his roommate and redshirt sophomore safety. “It was Cardale who? We need to get rid of him probably was what they were thinking.”
Before all this, Jones was a problem on and off the field. Most notably, he tweeted this in October 2012: “ Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL. We ain't come to play SCHOOL classes are POINTLESS.”
He skipped class and blew off tutoring sessions to play video games like Call of Duty instead and approached practice like an 11-year-old might approach washing the dishes. Disgruntled. Distracted. Disinterested.
At Sugar Bowl Media Day, Powell offered an example of such daily interactions with Jones:
“I’d walk out the room, like ‘All right, Cardale, I’m about to go to class, whatchu doing?’” he said. “And he’d be up playing Call of Duty."
“You going to class?” Powell said.
“Nah, I ain’t going today,” Jones said.
“Oh really?” Powell said, laughing. “Cardale was off the hook, Cardale has really changed his ways, I don’t know what was wrong with him.”
Whatever it was, it almost landed him a “one-way bus ticket back to Cleveland” according to Meyer, who said he came close to dismissing Jones several times.
“I would say Cardale had this type of stuff inside of him, but with this situation and the way that it played out, it just brought it out of him.”
So what changed?
"I would say Cardale had this type of stuff inside of him, but with this situation and the way that it played out, it just brought it out of him," Powell said.
"The fact that he played the video games, I won’t say that he doesn’t play them like that because I would be totally lying to you if I said he didn’t play the games, (but) he has reduced his amount and he has put what’s important first.
And before this, he didn't do that. School and playing football? I don’t know if that was a top priority to him. I think it was just about him enjoying his life at the time and enjoying college. But now that everybody’s depending on him and he’s done it and he just went out there and showcased his abilities, his focus and what’s important in his life has completely switched around."
So what happens if Jones doesn’t win the starting job in the spring? What happens if he’s forced to go back into the shadows where he operated without a care in the world?
What's keeping the old Jones at bay? Himself.
"He actually tried new something new for once, he actually focused himself on football and put a whole bunch of dedication he has seen the results," Powell said.
If you get results in something, obviously you’re going to keep doing it. Since he’s seen that, that’s what he does what he does. That’s why he’s totally the different person that he is now."
And that's why at the place that molded him in front of the people who raised him, Jones focused on his educational pursuits and not football.
"Football has always been a stepping stone for my education," he said. "Being a first-round draft pick means nothing to me without my education.”
