Wielding Thor’s hammer and a nickname that rhymes with ammo, Saraland QB Jamison Roberts is nearly a perfect 10

 

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Read this story in this week’s Call News along with the annual preseason football preview on all local teams available on Aug. 19.

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By JIMMY WIGFIELD

SARALAND — Few realized what would happen when Jamison (Jamo) Roberts fulfilled his promise to “let it rip.” Wouldn’t succeeding K.J. Lacey as Saraland’s quarterback involve some apprehension even if his nickname rhymed with ammo?

Before last season started, Roberts was asked to compare himself to Lacey, the Texas signee and reigning Mr. Football who had become one of the finest quarterbacks in state history.

“I’m taller,” Roberts replied without blinking an eye. “I feel like we’re pretty similar.”

Any doubts about that were dispelled in the season opener against Jackson, where and when the legend and the legerdemain of Roberts began. He didn’t just ease out of Lacey’s considerable shadow, he leaped out of it.

The first clue that he possessed the mental, physical and bloodthirsty skills of a great quarterback came against the Aggies and their two Division I defensive backs, Juice Gordon and Keegan Chapman. That’s when Roberts unleashed his replica of Thor’s mythological hammer, which can be invoked to hurl lightning, level mountains and smite enemies.

Roberts picked a fourth-and-20 in the second quarter to unspring a piercing ball into congested coverage in the middle that Jackson’s defensive backs could not get anywhere near lest they risk radiation burns. A.J. Martin, who may have been wearing Kevlar gloves, absorbed the ball and stored it away for a 31-yard touchdown catch to give the Spartans the lead for good. The smoky contrails of the pass hung over the field for the rest of the game.

“Jamison threw an absolute rocket in there,” Saraland coach Jeff Kelly marveled after retrieving his eyeballs rolling about on the soggy ground. “That was a big turning point in the game.”

Kelly — who feels the mark of a good quarterback is finding the easy completions — had to wonder if that one was as simple as Roberts made it look. Up to that point, opponents weren’t sure what Roberts was capable of. By the end of the year, they would have recoiled in horror if they had taken a Rorschach test with inkblots resembling the young quarterback.

“I definitely want the defense to fear me because I never want them to know what’s coming,” Roberts said. “You can drop back everybody in coverage and I am just going to take off and run. Then you can try to press our best receivers and I am just going to throw a perfect ball over the shoulder and keep the chains moving. That’s how confident I am in my game.”

 

First down every time

 

Many quarterbacks are scrutinized with a stopwatch, laser gun, calculator or yardstick but those just spit out cold, emotionless numbers. Roberts excels in the two true ways a quarterback is judged — with the eyes and on the scoreboard. His startling transition from competent backup to one of the nation’s top high school quarterbacks has been executed with precision and improvisation, with palpable joy and a prudent killer instinct.

There are, of course, many raw numbers to describe Roberts. He is 17 years old, stands 6-foot-3 and weighs 205 pounds. He is 15-1 as a starter. He is a four-star prospect in the 247Sports composite and the nation’s No. 18-ranked high school quarterback. He has a 4.4 GPA and will graduate early so he can get a head start at Oklahoma, which has produced Heisman Trophy quarterbacks Kyler Murray (2018), Baker Mayfield (2017), Sam Bradford (2008) and Jason White (2003).

Roberts averaged a first down every time he touched the ball last year and that’s counting his 81 incompletions. Finally emerging as a starter last season after two years backing up the wunderkind Lacey, Roberts was 219-of-300 passing for 3,370 yards and 37 touchdowns and evolved into a dangerous running threat, with 104 carries for 641 yards and 21 TDs. That’s 58 touchdowns — one every seven plays.

In his career, he has completed 73% of his passes for 3,870 yards, 45 TDs and just five interceptions.

Roberts is no longer compared with Lacey. Instead, they are grouped as the two best quarterbacks in the history of a school that regularly supplies them to Division I colleges. Roberts’ career quarterback rating is 142.3 and Lacey, who is at Texas, finished at 130.9.

“Sixty touchdowns last year, that’s a rare kind of company,” Kelly said. “I’ve been fortunate to coach some really great ones. Jamo and K.J., from a high school coach’s standpoint, are generational guys.”

Kelly has coached six Division I quarterbacks — Chris Weaver (Louisiana-Lafayette), Jack West (Stanford), Brett Nezat (Arkansas State), Karson Green (UT-Martin), Lacey (Texas) and Roberts (Oklahoma).

Roberts said playing for Kelly is like playing for a college coach.

“I heard K.J. talk about that,” he said. “I know my coaches at Oklahoma said after watching my film, ‘The way coach Kelly runs the offense, I am surprised he’s not a college offensive coordinator because the way y’all execute on Fridays, it’s up there with the best in the whole country.’”

 

 

Many facets of a rare gem

 

There are many other facets that make Roberts the person and the quarterback he is — and he wants any difference between the two to be indistinguishable.

He continues to display precocious talent, confidence, astounding accuracy, maturity and the ease that lets him play without the anxiety of being perfect. He also relishes showing anyone who challenges him that they will likely find themselves face down inhaling grass and eating mole worms.

And even that isn’t enough: “We’ve still got to put our foot on their neck and keep on going,” Roberts said.

Kelly insists on extracting such leadership from the normally muted Roberts, who prefers to let his play speak for him.

“He’s got such confidence in himself as a player and also in himself as a person and leader that commands respect in a locker room,” Kelly said. “It’s just awesome. The year he had last year was huge. I thought he played as good as anybody in the state. You look at what he did last year — really his first year as a starter — it’s unheard of.”

Being more vocal may be Roberts’ toughest assignment.

“It’s something different for me,” he said. “I’m having to set the tone every day. I am not a very vocal guy in the hallways of school. I go on about my day and really don’t talk to many people unless I know you.”

He is more besotted with accuracy. It started with throwing a baseball, then graduated to throwing a football through holes in back-yard nets and tossing a Nerf ball in the room he shared with his older brother Jaxon and knocking out lights on the ceiling fan.

“I would just sit out there for hours and throw it to the net, working on different types of throws,” Roberts said. “Initially, they weren’t the prettiest throws but they were always accurate.”

As a fifth grader, Roberts made an early impression on QB Country founder David Morris, the quarterback savant who has developed many of the nation’s top high school and college quarterbacks and helped Roberts compact his motion and stride.

“Not many people are going to be mechanically sound when they’re in fifth grade,” Morris said. “He was one of those guys who was always an accurate guy.”

Roberts has long presented advanced skills. He scored eight touchdowns in his first game at West Mobile Park playing running back. He won the Cal Ripken World Series Home Run Derby.

He is mature beyond his years, waiting his turn behind Lacey instead of going almost anywhere else and starting.

“In this day and age, where a lot of high schoolers and even college guys transfer because they think the grass is greener on the other side, I feel like I am living proof that if you stay where you are at and you put your head down and work and become the best version of yourself, you can make the grass green on your side,” Roberts said.

Morris wasn’t surprised that Roberts played at a stratospheric level last year.

“It’s unusual for a guy without tons of experience to play that good that fast,” he said. “Usually, they have some growing pains and he never really had any. He’s pretty advanced and he’s not going to be an overthinker. He showed tons of maturity from the jump. Look at Ty Simpson, who did something similar at Alabama. It’s a quality that not a lot of human beings possess, the ability to wait your turn and trust it and have faith.

“I think Jamison’s going to have a very successful college career. There’s a lot of guys who can throw it but the thing that makes him a little different is his physicality and just his pure speed. You compound that with his throwing talent and then his maturity and communication skills and authentic confidence, I think he’s really a special one. He’s really damn good.”

Damn good but not perfect, a self-imposed demand Roberts finally discarded.

“Every young quarterback goes through this, especially trying to follow the footsteps that I had to follow,” Roberts said. “I had to feel like you want to be as perfect as possible because everything you are doing is getting compared to the guys that came before you. I realized over this past year that I am my own person. I play my own style of football, so why should I be comparing myself to somebody who came before me?”

 

The escape artist

 

Roberts craves playing the game to the point that he stood outside a gate and cried because he couldn’t play park football with his older brother. He also loves to exasperate defenders with extemporaneous brilliance, to make something good happen when a play disintegrates, as on a 67-yard, fourth-quarter TD run in the semifinals against Benjamin Russell.

“You miss a blitz pickup or you have a busted play and he pulls it down and breaks two tackles and makes three other guys miss and goes a long way for a touchdown and everybody’s clapping on the sideline like I called a good play,” Kelly said.

Roberts said he likes hearing and seeing defenders curse, spit and suck wind because he escaped a sack and turned it into a big play.

“It definitely makes the game more enjoyable,” he said.

He recalled that Mason McClure, a friend of his who played for Spain Park, shared that the Jaguars’ coaches felt Roberts was one-dimensional going into last year’s second-round playoff game. They seemed prescient, as Saraland trailed 17-14 at halftime.

“Mason said they were really harping that I couldn’t run the football, yada, yada, yada, that I am a dropback passer,” Roberts said. “Coming out for the second half, it just flipped in me. I was like, ‘I am not losing this game. I am not going home in the second round. No way.’ So, on the first drive, I took off 60 yards and Mason was like, ‘Dang! I did not know you were that fast.’”

Spain Park should have known — Roberts had already peeled off runs of 42, 50 and 57 yards before that game.

 

Making the hard seem easy

 

Roberts routinely finds the easy completion but it requires a demanding regimen of film study and repetition.

“What goes on between the ears is what separates quarterbacks,” Kelly said. “Quarterbacks that are really good in this game are better than anybody else at finding the easy throws. There are a lot of guys that throw the football at camp or just in a workout but the guys that are really special are the ones that can find the easy throws very fast under duress. We’ve been fortunate to have guys that do that at a high level. Jamison’s a great example of that.”

Roberts got that message early from Kelly.

“He harps on it every single day at practice,” Roberts said. “Sometimes as a young quarterback, you can get antsy and try to make dumb throws. I call them highlight reels that make the wide receiver look good and make yourself look good. But the real winners and the real guys that win championships are the guys who take the easy completions and they find the open guy and they know what the defense is trying to do before the play even starts. That’s how all the quarterbacks here have operated over the past 15 to 20 years. We have a lot of timing routes. If you are on time and you know what the defense is trying to do to you, you can’t be wrong.”

Roberts is almost never wrong in his execution because he has a degree in advanced quarterbacking from Kelly and Morris, each of whom played the position in college — Kelly, who started at Southern Miss, and Morris, who backed up Eli Manning at Ole Miss.

They have each imprinted something of value in Roberts.

“Coach Kelly is more like a father figure,” Roberts said. “I see coach Kelly more than my own parents in the fall and he sees me more than his own kids in the fall. I like sitting down having those one-on-one conversations with him and just learning from him how to be a better man off the field and on the field and be a better football player. He’s also helped me with a lot of new details that can get me better in my game, like certain route concepts. At the beginning of last season, the defense didn’t know what to throw at me because they didn’t have film on me. But towards the end, we started getting these funky defenses and if I didn’t have coach Kelly, I don’t feel like I’d have been able to go out there and execute as good as I did toward the end of the season.”

Roberts said Morris has not only improved his mechanics but played a large part in settling his future because of his friendship with former Senior Bowl Executive Director and Oklahoma General Manager Jim Nagy.

“I have so much respect for David and to see that David has so much respect for Jim Nagy, a guy that I never met, it made me intrigued,” Roberts said. “It made me want to go see what was actually going on (at OU) and go see Jim for myself.”

 

Old soul in a young body

 

Roberts has become a complete quarterback whose presence lifts his teammates, gives the Spartans explosive plays on the ground and in the air, nearly flawless decision making and the calm maturity to turn bad plays into good ones.

But he had to get on the field first.

“When my oldest son was playing tackle football, Jamo would do anything he could to help because he wanted to play,” said his father, Lawrence Roberts, who coached youth football. “So, he would get the water bottles and the balls for me. I’ve got a picture of him and his twin sister (Elle) standing outside of the gate. I am leading the boys onto the field to play the game and he’s sitting outside the gate crying because he couldn’t play at that point in time.”

When he finally got to play, Roberts used a sidearm delivery because he didn’t feel he had the requisite arm strength to release the ball higher. But Kelly and Morris got him to alter it to more of a three-quarters motion and Roberts now has excellent mechanics and the arm strength to make all the throws.

Kelly has also installed more designed runs for Roberts, who has demonstrated his breakaway ability.

“Now the defense has to be scared of me running the football and passing the football, so they can’t be right,” Roberts said.

His ceaseless quest to get better has always found an appreciative audience in the huddle, even among the older players. His father said his son has always gravitated to friendships with older boys, which in turn made him more mature.

“He was just far more advanced than other kids,” Lawrence Roberts said. “He’s always hung with my older son’s friends. You’ll very rarely find him trying to hang with a crowd his age.”

The feeling is mutual, at least on the field. Few of any age can hang with him now.