The Big House on the Prairie.

[Soapy]

The Big House on the Prairie
Chapter Eight :: The Warden, Part Two

Sometimes life doesn’t so much fall into place as it shoves you where it wants you to go. The road trip to Atlanta was exactly that.

Irene picked me up from the Las Vegas airport, and within minutes we were already on the highway—maybe intentionally skipping the awkward stop at her old apartment, the same place where Keiyana had left her bruised and battered. Even after months of texting and FaceTiming, I still felt uneasy when her car pulled up to the curb. She hadn’t shown up at any of Keiyana’s court appearances, so this was the first time I’d actually seen her since. She looked different—not just the faint scar above her eye, likely permanent, but something else in her demeanor.

The small talk was stiff at first, but it didn’t last long. Soon she was debating whether to stop in Phoenix or Colorado, and I half-jokingly suggested both. She agreed.

What was supposed to be a quick cross-country drive stretched into a two-week journey, and one of the best stretches of my life. We stopped in Phoenix to wander through the Desert Botanical Garden, then pushed north to Colorado, where we explored Red Rocks. After what was supposed to be a shared driving day—but turned into me behind the wheel the entire way—we rolled into Chicago and spent a day there. From then on, it became a rhythm: Detroit, Louisville, Memphis, Nashville. By the time we neared the Georgia border, we were equal parts exhausted and unwilling for the trip to ever end.

Meanwhile, it was a busy time for me off the road as well. The transfer portal had opened, and this third round of recruitment felt a lot like my first. Texas called almost immediately, apologizing for ghosting me the year before when I was the one desperate for a shot. Did I buy the apology? Not really. Did I resent them for it? Not anymore. College football was a business, and after I’d stood them up two years earlier, I figured we were even.

From there, the calls came nonstop. LSU, now led by Kenny Dillingham, leaned on their “DBU” pedigree. The defending national champions, Texas A&M, pitched me on replacing Julian Humphrey, their soon-to-graduate star corner. But in the end, Texas still felt right. I started working with the Longhorns’ staff to set up an official visit.

The problem was, our road trip kept getting longer—and I didn’t really want it to end. By the time Irene and I finally hauled our bags up to her seventh-floor apartment just outside Lenox Mall, Georgia, both Oklahoma and Clemson were hammering me for a visit. Even without an agent, I knew the more schools I entertained, the better my NIL deal would be. So after two weeks of highways and hotel rooms, I pulled up the maps. Atlanta to Clemson, Atlanta to Athens. Athens was half an hour closer, so I booked a quick visit to Georgia with every intention of flying to Austin the next week, leveraging the offers, and signing with Texas.

Those thirty minutes would change my life.

[djp73]

[The JZA]

[redsox907]

Those thirty minutes would change my life.

Sounds like he going to Georgia


Texas ain't gonna like being stood up at the prom twice

[Soapy]

Those thirty minutes would change my life.

Sounds like he going to Georgia


Texas ain't gonna like being stood up at the prom twice

alright, alright, alright!

[djp73]

Came here expecting a real update

[Soapy]

Came here expecting a real update

I'm writing it

[Captain Canada]

Guy sure does love himself some burnt orange

[Soapy]

The Big House on the Prairie
Chapter Eight :: The Warden, Part Three

I don’t know if I believe in love at first sight, but the moment I stepped onto Georgia’s campus, I knew I was going to sign there. I had visited before—once as a sophomore in high school and twice the summer before my senior year. Back then, Georgia was already one of college football’s elite programs, fresh off back-to-back national championships behind a historic defense. Naturally, they were at the top of my list as one of the nation’s top corners.

And yet, visiting in the winter of 2026 felt like the first time. On my earlier trips, I had been a spoiled, snot-nosed brat, taking the red-carpet rollout for granted. I expected elite facilities, elite coaching, elite everything. Two years of hard lessons had changed me. I no longer took anything for granted. I understood, intimately, the advantages playing at Georgia would afford me. Coming off an All-Big XII selection and Freshman All-American honors, I was hungry to compete with better teammates, under better coaches, in better facilities.

Watching the Bulldogs’ workout instantly gripped me. At Oklahoma State, the gap between top players and the rest of the team was wide; by the end of spring, roles were clear, and competition was scarce. No matter how self-motivated a player is, there still needs to be an external force to push them to their limits. Georgia, I realized in those first minutes in the training room, would provide exactly that.

By the end of my two-day visit, Kirby Smart—two-time national champion as Georgia’s head coach and four-time champion as an Alabama assistant—had sold me on the vision: me on one corner, Ellis Robinson IV, a former five-star, on the other, with Elo Modozie, Joseph Jonah-Ajonye, and Elijah Griffin up front on one of the nation’s better defensive lines.

Texas, to their credit, had talent and depth, perhaps even more experience in the secondary. But Georgia needed me more, and the excitement I felt during my visit stuck with me, even after returning to crash on Irene’s couch.

Subconsciously and consciously, Irene played a role in my decision as well. While we never directly addressed it, we had gotten to know each other deeply on the road trip. She shared stories of her family, her upbringing, and the financial abuse she witnessed between her parents, which drove her to leave home at eighteen and move first to Atlanta, then to Vegas. She was a bartender initially and then was convinced by her boyfriend at the time, who was a promoter for the club, to get on the stage as a dancer in Atlanta but couldn’t deal with the grabby hands and oversexualization that naturally came with the position, especially in a city like Atlanta where strip clubs were woven into the fabric of the culture.

When she decided to stop dancing, she sought a fresh start. Los Angeles had been her first plan, but a friend relocating to Vegas changed her path. She met Kyle there and built a new life, though it quickly grew stale, accelerated by the incident with Keiyana. Over our conversations, I realized that Irene was rarely meant to stay in any situation—city, job, or partner—for more than a few years.

And yet, there was a stability and consistency to her that attracted her to me as a friend. Unlike Keiyana, I knew what I was getting from Irene and since she was a few years older, she proved to be a good person to bounce ideas off of. A few days before I was set to visit Clemson and then Texas, I asked her should I still go through with those visits after really liking Georgia. She thought about it for a while and instead of giving some cliche answer, she gave me a definitive one.

"Don’t go chasing for something better when something good and well is in front of you."

It’s a motto I would carry with me for the rest of my life.

[djp73]

Irene's statement is lasagna