Windy City Gridiron
Having taught writing for longer than Ashton Jeanty has been alive, one football blogger has thoughts on the college standout’s “Letter to GMs.”
Since 1998, I have been a writing teacher. I do not know how many essays written by college students I have read, but the number has at least five digits before the decimal place in it, I’m sure. I’ve read at least two thousand personal narrative essays by students writing about their challenges and how they’ve overcome them. It’s a popular style, widely used in high schools and early college assignments. As a result, reading Ashton Jeanty’s “Letter to NFL GMs” engaged a different part of my brain that I usually use when talking football, but it was a part of my brain with plenty of experience.
In many ways, whatever someone thinks about this letter is probably going to be predetermined. That’s just how people tend to react to things, whether they acknowledge it or not. Confirmation bias is a powerful thing. Someone who liked Jeanty as a prospect and had already rendered a positive verdict is going to see a confident kid speaking up for himself and who knows his talent. Someone who disliked Jeanty as a prospect is going to see arrogance and make comparisons to “busts” who were overconfident coming into the pros. A handful of people will change their mind based on the letter, but not many. Certainly not any general manager.
Let’s be honest, this is not a letter for a general manager, because any GM who made up his mind based on these two thousand words and not the scouting reports, tape, and personal interviews available is an executive who does not deserve to be a GM.
I doubt this even exists for fans. I’m sure Jeanty and his team would love it if this helped make new fans, but there are other ways to do that–a link to virtually any clip of his games would go far, because it’s easy to love his style of play.
This letter might exist for a publicist or an agent. This could be something that Jeanty’s team asked him to do for whatever reason, and therefore the letter has a great deal of commonality with the assigned essays I’ve seen before. While plausible, that’s a boring answer.
My hunch, though, is that the real audience of this piece is Ashton Jeanty himself. Jeanty has done everything he can up until this point to shape for himself the career he wants. He has carved out a spot for himself in college football history–but it was a spot that fell just short of winning the Heisman, even though in many years his accomplishments probably would have won him the award.
For more than four months now, a young man who has proven that he is exceptional at influencing games when people give him the opportunity has instead been allowed almost no opportunity to influence the path of his own career. The decisions he has been...
