ScottPatrick
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ANDY STAPLES
Monday July 17th, 2017
So when were you Kenny Trill?
Jarrett Guarantano didn’t mean for the question to come out that way. The redshirt freshman Tennessee quarterback was trying to recall which year Kenny Hill burst into the national consciousness by torching South Carolina in his first career start in the first game broadcast by the SEC Network. After some brief mental math, it was determined that Guarantano was a high school junior in 2014 when we made Hill a Heisman candidate after one good game as a Texas A&M sophomore.
Hill and Guarantano were among five college quarterbacks who spent their spring breaks in San Diego working with coach George Whitfield, and Hill was the most grizzled of the group. Hill, now a fifth-year senior at TCU, shook his head. “Man,” he said. “I’m old.”
Hill is only 22, but it feels as if he’s been in the public eye for a decade. To him, it feels even longer. Ask about the Texas A&M days, and he furrows his brow like a Baby Boomer trying to remember disco. “That feels like forever ago,” he said. “That feels like a whole other lifetime.”
In college football years, it was another lifetime.
As he heads into his final collegiate season, Hill can laugh about the nuclear reaction to that South Carolina game. The boy who struggled to handle all that adulation has grown into a man who understands his football mortality. He wants to play in the NFL, but he has seen how tough it is to get there. This might be Hill’s last season under bright lights, and he hopes to lead the Horned Frogs better than he did as a junior. He knows he may never match the hype thrust upon him following the first game of the post-Johnny Football era at Texas A&M, but at least he knows how to manage it now. In fact, he has some advice he’d love to give to Kenny Trill. “I would tell myself not to worry so much about going to parties and getting out and meeting all these people,” Hill said. “I wouldn’t worry about all that stuff. I’d worry about making sure I did my laundry all the time. I would have no clothes. It’s little stupid stuff that you take for granted, but it’s stuff that I think would have been a lot better for me to be doing at the time.”
Hill now understands the value of a night in while the permanent press cycle spins, but his younger self had to get embarrassed on and off the field to learn that. He still dreads the moment a new acquaintance Googles him. “If you look me up,” he said, “that mugshot is the first picture you see.” The mugshot, which is indeed the first image Google pulls up of Hill, is the second-most-embarrassing photo snapped of Hill early on the morning of March 28, 2014. The most embarrassing one, which remains the second image Google pulls of Hill, shows him passed out in a planter in front of a bar called Chimy’s.
Hill makes no excuses for anything that happened at Texas A&M. He led Dallas-area power Southlake Carroll to a Class 5A state title as a junior in 2011. He arrived in College Station as a freshman in 2013 and immediately became Johnny Manziel’s backup. Hill figured he could play and live like Manziel, who had posted gaudy stats while keeping a full social calendar. “When I was coming out of high school, I was going to A&M to sit behind Johnny for this one year, go in, play two then I'm out to the league after three,” Hill said. His first start as a sophomore only reinforced that notion.
The Gamecocks had reeled off three consecutive 11-win seasons thanks in large part to a suffocating defense. Hill appeared to have the legs and the arm to play like Manziel, so when he completed 44 of 60 passes for 511 yards and three touchdowns in a 52–28 win at Williams-Brice Stadium, the assumption was that the Aggies wouldn’t miss an offensive beat without Manziel. Only later did it become apparent that South Carolina’s defense had fallen off a cliff following the departures of star pass rusher Jadeveon Clowney and several other key role players. Those of us who cover the sport were too busy heaping praise upon Hill to notice. Five days after that first start, Hill found himself surrounded by reporters trying to figure out if they had another Johnny Football on their hands. In fact, Kenny Football was a nickname that had been suggested in the days between the game and that interview session, but no one seemed quite satisfied.
“To me, I wasn’t asking to be called Kenny Trill,” Hill said. “I could watch the interview again and be completely wrong. But if I remember right, they had asked me what nicknames I’d heard. I named them off. They were like, ‘Which one sounds good to you?’ I said ‘I don’t know, Kenny Trill sounds good to me.’ Sure enough, I get an ESPN notification as I’m walking into the office to watch film: ‘Kenny Hill wants to be called Kenny Trill.’” This was the story that popped into Hill’s phone that day, and it backs up his recollection. However the name came to be, the man who coined the term “trill”—a combination of “true and real” was prophetic after learning the news.
ANDY STAPLES
Monday July 17th, 2017
So when were you Kenny Trill?
Jarrett Guarantano didn’t mean for the question to come out that way. The redshirt freshman Tennessee quarterback was trying to recall which year Kenny Hill burst into the national consciousness by torching South Carolina in his first career start in the first game broadcast by the SEC Network. After some brief mental math, it was determined that Guarantano was a high school junior in 2014 when we made Hill a Heisman candidate after one good game as a Texas A&M sophomore.
Hill and Guarantano were among five college quarterbacks who spent their spring breaks in San Diego working with coach George Whitfield, and Hill was the most grizzled of the group. Hill, now a fifth-year senior at TCU, shook his head. “Man,” he said. “I’m old.”
Hill is only 22, but it feels as if he’s been in the public eye for a decade. To him, it feels even longer. Ask about the Texas A&M days, and he furrows his brow like a Baby Boomer trying to remember disco. “That feels like forever ago,” he said. “That feels like a whole other lifetime.”
In college football years, it was another lifetime.
As he heads into his final collegiate season, Hill can laugh about the nuclear reaction to that South Carolina game. The boy who struggled to handle all that adulation has grown into a man who understands his football mortality. He wants to play in the NFL, but he has seen how tough it is to get there. This might be Hill’s last season under bright lights, and he hopes to lead the Horned Frogs better than he did as a junior. He knows he may never match the hype thrust upon him following the first game of the post-Johnny Football era at Texas A&M, but at least he knows how to manage it now. In fact, he has some advice he’d love to give to Kenny Trill. “I would tell myself not to worry so much about going to parties and getting out and meeting all these people,” Hill said. “I wouldn’t worry about all that stuff. I’d worry about making sure I did my laundry all the time. I would have no clothes. It’s little stupid stuff that you take for granted, but it’s stuff that I think would have been a lot better for me to be doing at the time.”
Hill now understands the value of a night in while the permanent press cycle spins, but his younger self had to get embarrassed on and off the field to learn that. He still dreads the moment a new acquaintance Googles him. “If you look me up,” he said, “that mugshot is the first picture you see.” The mugshot, which is indeed the first image Google pulls up of Hill, is the second-most-embarrassing photo snapped of Hill early on the morning of March 28, 2014. The most embarrassing one, which remains the second image Google pulls of Hill, shows him passed out in a planter in front of a bar called Chimy’s.
Hill makes no excuses for anything that happened at Texas A&M. He led Dallas-area power Southlake Carroll to a Class 5A state title as a junior in 2011. He arrived in College Station as a freshman in 2013 and immediately became Johnny Manziel’s backup. Hill figured he could play and live like Manziel, who had posted gaudy stats while keeping a full social calendar. “When I was coming out of high school, I was going to A&M to sit behind Johnny for this one year, go in, play two then I'm out to the league after three,” Hill said. His first start as a sophomore only reinforced that notion.
The Gamecocks had reeled off three consecutive 11-win seasons thanks in large part to a suffocating defense. Hill appeared to have the legs and the arm to play like Manziel, so when he completed 44 of 60 passes for 511 yards and three touchdowns in a 52–28 win at Williams-Brice Stadium, the assumption was that the Aggies wouldn’t miss an offensive beat without Manziel. Only later did it become apparent that South Carolina’s defense had fallen off a cliff following the departures of star pass rusher Jadeveon Clowney and several other key role players. Those of us who cover the sport were too busy heaping praise upon Hill to notice. Five days after that first start, Hill found himself surrounded by reporters trying to figure out if they had another Johnny Football on their hands. In fact, Kenny Football was a nickname that had been suggested in the days between the game and that interview session, but no one seemed quite satisfied.
“To me, I wasn’t asking to be called Kenny Trill,” Hill said. “I could watch the interview again and be completely wrong. But if I remember right, they had asked me what nicknames I’d heard. I named them off. They were like, ‘Which one sounds good to you?’ I said ‘I don’t know, Kenny Trill sounds good to me.’ Sure enough, I get an ESPN notification as I’m walking into the office to watch film: ‘Kenny Hill wants to be called Kenny Trill.’” This was the story that popped into Hill’s phone that day, and it backs up his recollection. However the name came to be, the man who coined the term “trill”—a combination of “true and real” was prophetic after learning the news.
