CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Of all the moments that could constitute Sam Howell’s earliest football memory, most of them would have to be happy. At some point, years ago, he had to have thrown a football around with his father for the first time. There would have been a first game or first touchdown or first victory.
There would have been the first time, or times, that people took notice; those small moments when Howell might have provided glimpses of what was inside and what might be to come. Those moments existed, and Howell can tell stories about them if he’s pressed.
Yet when he considered recently the question of his earliest football memory, none of those things came to mind. Or, if they did, Howell brushed them aside. He did not talk about those times that brought him joy, but of a time that brought him pain. He thought of a loss, one he can still feel.
Howell is entering his third year at North Carolina, where he has become the quarterback he always expected to be: The metaphorical face of a college football program and, in some ways, of the sport at large. He is the rare player who has not only met the hype that surrounded him upon entering college but exceeded it. And he has done it without seeming all that impressed by what he’s done, as if it should be this way.
Growing up back home in Monroe, a small city of about 35,000 southeast of Charlotte, Howell daydreamed of glory the way kids always have, and will. The difference is that, for him, his reality isn’t too far from what he saw then.
“I always dreamed of just being the high school quarterback, then moving onto college, win a national championship, win the Heisman,” Howell, 20, said recently, checking off life milestones in a casual way, as if they were items on a list of weekend to-dos. “And then being a first-round pick in the NFL. And ultimately one day win a Super Bowl. I had all those dreams when I was a kid.”
It was a Tuesday in the middle of July, and Howell had just completed a summer workout before another one of these interviews he never seems all that excited about doing. He changed into a Carolina blue polo, checked his hair with his phone camera before taking a seat and pulled a large, sparkling cross, dangling from a chain, out from under his shirt to a more prominent place.
Spencer Rattler, the Oklahoma quarterback and perhaps the college player who is most often compared to Howell — or Howell to him — recently acquired a similar chain, Howell said. They used the same jeweler.
“We’re never around each other,” Howell said, “but when we are around each other, one of us can’t wear it.” Howell smiled, and his line drew a laugh from the media relations guy who stood sentry, guarding Howell’s time. He’d come to a room in the Kenan Football Center that’d been renovated after Mack Brown returned a few years ago for his second stint as the Tar Heels’ head coach.
There’d been much skepticism then about whether Brown could revitalize the program he’d built, for a short time, into a national power in the 1990s, and in a way, everything in this room on this particular day signified the new energy around UNC football. Rows of Air Jordan sneakers, every iteration, lined the wall — a popular feature for prospective recruits. There were slick backdrops for on-camera interviews and studio-quality lighting. And in the middle of the room sat Howell, who more than anyone, even Brown, has fueled the Tar Heels’ football resurgence the past two years.
On the field, and off, Howell can be a difficult man to read. He goes through life, at least those slices of it the public sees, with an air of detached zen. If a spectator were to watch him and not where his passes land, it’d be difficult to tell whether Howell had thrown a long touchdown pass or an incompletion. He does not get high, or low, but the calm cool belies something unseen that simmers beneath the exterior, and fuels him. His earliest football memory offers proof.
“When I was in first grade, we had a flag football team,” Howell said, setting up the story.
This was back home in Monroe, in Union County. A recreation league team. It was the championship game, and Howell was the quarterback because he has always been the quarterback. His team had the ball late, a chance to win in the final seconds. A player on the other team began counting down the time, out loud, only a few seconds ahead of the actual clock. Howell rushed his throw. Incomplete. He’d been fooled and lost.
“A game we should’ve won,” Howell said and, yes, he did see the deeper meaning — that after all these years a rec league loss from first grade still stuck with him; that instead of something lighter his mind went back there, to when he was tricked into throwing an incomplete pass as a little kid.
“The losses definitely stick to you more than the wins do,” he said, and it helped explain part of what drives him.
The other part hung around his neck. The cross. More than once over the past several months, Howell had felt empty, the wins and success of his first two years leaving him unfulfilled. For a while now, he’s been on a journey to discover a greater purpose.
Early lesson for Howell
That search for self-discovery began several months ago, Howell said, and more than anything else off the field it has shaped his outlook entering what many expect to be his final college season. Before the introspection began, though, his path toward football success began with a sense of ambition that matches his ability.
If Howell’s earliest football memory is that defeat from first grade, one of his father’s earliest memories about him is from around the same time. Duke Howell figures his youngest son must have been about 8 when he was riding in the back of a minivan with his older brother, Will.
Sam, like he was known to do back then, was going on about his football future, talking himself up and laying out everything that was to come. Will, two years older, was eating it up, going along with it, and “was like, ‘Oh yeah, I can be your agent,’ ” Duke recalled.
The three Howell children grew up in a home that valued athletics and the lessons of competition, that against others and also that against the self. The primary rule that his parents instilled in him and his siblings, Sam said recently, “was whatever we started, we had to finish.”
Duke Howell, who works as a probation officer in Charlotte, appreciated his son’s early athletic aspirations but he didn’t patronize him, either. Duke didn’t sugarcoat the work it would take for Sam to make reality out of those childhood fantasies. Some people have the talent and not the drive and others the drive and not the talent, and that Sam has both — especially the drive — is reflective of his upbringing.
“I was like, ‘If you’re going to go there, the road to the top is going to be a lonely road, you know?’ ” Duke said. “I tried to be completely honest with him about how hard it was going to be.”
Duke and his wife, Amy, were college athletes at Appalachian State, where Duke wrestled as a heavyweight and Amy was a middle blocker on the volleyball team. They met in an athlete study hall, lived for a time in Waynesville, in the mountains, after graduating and moved to Monroe, where Duke is from, when Sam was still a baby.
Anna, the oldest of Duke and Amy’s three kids, played softball and volleyball. Will played football and was a high school teammate of Sam’s. And in addition to football, Sam played baseball and was already throwing pitches 87 or 88 mph when he was in eighth grade, his father said.
By then, Sam Howell had made a name for himself around Union County. People had heard stories about this up-and-comer who could throw a football a good long way, who’d been playing beyond his age group for years. When he was in third grade, Howell started playing on a youth team with fifth-graders. In the youth league back home, he played eighth-grade football twice — the second time when he was actually that old.
Tad Baucom, Howell’s head coach at Sun Valley High in Monroe, first met Howell the year before he entered high school. Baucom by then had been coaching high school football for more than 30 years, long enough to see enough, but this was a rare sight.
“I meet him that spring, and I can’t believe he’s an eighth-grader,” Baucom said. “He’s got a beard. He’s 5-9, 175 ... and he’s thick.” The beard was not full, Baucom said, but Howell’s “face was black” with stubble, even in middle school. Around then, Dabo Swinney, the Clemson coach, came to town for an FCA banquet. He was the keynote speaker, and Baucom the high school speaker.
Baucom told Duke Howell that he wanted to introduce Sam to Swinney, and so Baucom invited Sam to the banquet and dressed him in khakis and a high school jersey, like the rest of Baucom’s team. Baucom made the introduction and Swinney looked him over and, the next week, a Clemson assistant visited Baucom and asked about a prospect Swinney had mentioned meeting.
Sure, Baucom told the coach. You can visit him. But you’re going to have to go across the field, to the middle school.
“He went, ‘The kid (Swinney) described to me is in middle school?’ ” Baucom said. “I went, ‘Yes sir.’ ”
Months later, Howell entered high school and quickly became Sun Valley’s varsity starting quarterback. Throughout some parts of the country, and in North Carolina, football’s future is in question. In some of those places — like Orange County, for instance, and the home of UNC — some high schools struggle to field teams because of low numbers and lack of interest.
Union County is different, and Baucom and Duke Howell credit that to the strong youth football program there, the desire boys grow up with to play on Friday nights. In recent years the county has been home to a number of prospects who’ve gone onto Division I programs: Austin Kendall, who went to Oklahoma before transferring to West Virginia; Emeka Emezie, the N.C. State receiver; Grayson McCall, the Coastal Carolina quarterback. Will Shipley, a Clemson freshman, became one of the nation’s prized prospects at Weddington High, which has won state championships in three of the past five seasons.
“The football tradition in Union County goes deep,” said Duke Howell, who was Sam’s coach in youth football and his offensive coordinator at Sun Valley.
Sam’s freshman year there, he threw for more than 3,500 yards and 35 touchdowns and beat out Kendall for his conference’s player-of-the-year award. That sort of success is practically unheard of for a player so young, and yet it led to a feeling of rejection that still boils. The events after his early high school success led Sam to develop “a chip on his shoulder,” Duke said, because it took a while for college programs to start to believe.
“No matter how hard he works, whatever, they’re fixated on how tall he is,” Duke said.
Among the schools that doubted Howell in those days was UNC. Sam visited there “numerous times,” Duke said, and during one of those visits with the coaches at the time, led by Larry Fedora, then the Tar Heels’ head coach, measured Sam and timed him in the 40-yard dash. They could see that he had an arm, as anyone who’d ever seen Howell throw a football could see.
And yet there were his measurements. Too small. Too slow.
His first scholarship offer didn’t come until the spring of his sophomore year, after he’d thrown for another 3,200 yards and another 38 touchdowns, and it came from Walt Bell, a former UNC assistant who was then the offensive coordinator at Maryland. Baucom recounted with a laugh the story behind the offer, with Bell stepping forward while Howell worked out in front of several other college coaches and Bell “called them all out” for still being on the fence, Baucom said.
By the start of his junior year, Howell had more than 15 offers and “now everybody’s wanting him,” Duke said. “But he never forgot when they didn’t want him. And really where it started was Chapel Hill.
“It wasn’t no fault of them. It’s just because that’s where Sam was interested in at the time.”
Success has come so easily to Howell that the rare moments of failure, even if they’re beyond his control, have become magnified in his mind. It’s why he remembers that one game from first grade. It’s why he remembers when he had to prove himself — or allow biology to take its course, and grow a couple of inches — before college coaches became convinced. It’s why, sometimes, Duke can catch the look in his son’s eyes after a loss, even now, and see something that needs no articulation.
“Sam’s the type of kid that he just — he doesn’t forget, you know?” Duke said. “And I tell him all the time, let that burn all the way through.”
It wasn’t until recently that Howell felt something equally strong pulling at him.
‘He’s just pure business, you know’
He began to feel like something was missing after his sophomore season at UNC, where Howell had come to find all he’d ever wanted in football. On the field, he’d made it look easy during his first two years. The slights of his past were becoming distant memories, though ones, as his father said, Howell has never forgotten.
He had everything: The records and the accolades; the adoration of a legion of Tar Heels fans; the national attention that’d come with all he’d accomplished. The Heisman Trophy talk started to build at the end of last season and into the summer. UNC hasn’t had a viable preseason candidate in a long time — so long that it’s difficult to identify one. Howell was charting new territory, and he’d been so good his first two seasons UNC saw no need to promote him entering his third.
“Sam is so good,” Brown, the UNC head coach, said recently at the ACC’s media day in Charlotte. “He’s about winning ... (and) whether it’s name, image and likeness, the awards you’re going to get, it’s about your ball, it’s not about your brand.
“If we play well, if Sam is going to play great, if we play well enough as a team around him, and we have a chance to win a lot of games, he’ll be right in the mix of that Heisman thing regardless of what we say or do. If we don’t play well as a team, it will drift away.”
Howell understands the stakes and the pressure that will come with them, and he is nonchalant about it all — at least externally.
“You’re always going to have pressure as a starting quarterback,” he said. “And I’ve done it all my life.”
The stoicism comes in part from his upbringing — “my parents raised me very well and just always (said) make sure to stay level-headed,” Howell said — and in part from somewhere within. Howell has never been the rah-rah type, nor the most animated, nor the most talkative. Even in high school, when boys can be easily distracted, Howell was focused “like a laser,” Cesar Minarro, a Sun Valley teammate who’s now an offensive lineman at North Carolina A&T, said recently.
It became a running joke, Minarro said, that Howell wouldn’t even indulge in red meat. No hamburgers. No steaks. Howell has said he’s still never had a burger.
“Just eats chicken and whatnot,” Minarro said with a laugh, and one of Howell’s aunts made sure to have chicken and vegetables ready at the pregame meals Sun Valley ate at a local church. Minarro said he and the rest of the offensive linemen loved blocking for Howell, for he “legitimately cared about us,” Minarro said. Still, it took a while for Minarro to figure out Howell. At first, he thought it strange how quiet he could be before games. No speeches or anything.
“He’s just pure business, you know?” Minarro said. “I think he’d rather go out and do it then talk about it.” It was similar to something Baucom, the Sun Valley head coach, told his assistants when Howell arrived there: “He’s not going to be super loud, but people are going to run through walls for this guy, because of how he carries himself.”
Indeed, Howell had always been the portrait of calm, of having it together, a living example of having a plan and executing it. After two years at UNC he’d established himself as one of the best college quarterbacks in the nation, a sure-thing future first-round selection in the NFL draft, and yet there had to be something more, or something that was missing. A void.
“I just spent so much time chasing success at the college level and once I had that, it just wasn’t enough, from a self-fulfillment standpoint,” he said.
Moments later he described it another way:
“I just didn’t feel as fulfilled as I thought I would after the success I had.”
That feeling led Howell on a process of spiritual self-discovery. It began, he said, with the realization that he’d been “getting caught up in things that aren’t as important as my faith.”
Howell grew up a Christian but was never a regular church-goer. During the lockdown of the pandemic, he began “just kind of looking around online,” as he put it, with the goal of recommitting himself to his faith. He described his faith as his “main thing,” and his process of introspection as a way to “keep the main thing the main thing.”
“I just think so many times in my life, I’ve kind of lost track of what’s really important,” Howell said. “I think I’ve gotten so caught up in chasing greatness in sports. Which is good. ... Obviously, I still want to pursue football and I’m still chasing greatness in football, but I think after I had success my first two years, it just wasn’t enough for me, personally.”
Howell came to discover a church in Chino Hills, Calif., with a pastor named Jack Hibbs. From more than 2,000 miles away, Howell watched some of Hibbs’ sermons and felt a connection. Hibbs, who fits the mold of an outspoken televangelist, is not for everyone. After listening to a few minutes of him, it becomes clear that he can be bombastic — that he’s more fire-and-brimstone Old Testament, cut from the cloth of a revival preacher.
Pastor Jack, as he’s known, has a large following — more than 90,000 followers on Instagram, and a daily podcast with nearly a perfect 5-star rating on Apple Podcasts. His “straightforward, truthful, and insightful teaching style will help you come into a greater understanding of God’s Word,” says his website, and Howell came to appreciate Hibbs’ directness and how much different he sounded than other pastors.
Howell said he’d found that “a lot of churches” these days are “a little scared to tell the truth.”
“They’re more about getting people to attend their church and stuff like that,” he said. “And they’re going to try to make people feel good when they come to church. And I think if you leave church feeling good about what you’re doing in your life, I think the pastor’s not doing that good of a job.”
Some of Hibbs’ preachings have been controversial, or factually incorrect. A video clip of him on his knees and crying after the election, asking God why former President Donald Trump would lose, went viral. Last December, he said that COVID-19 vaccines were conditioning Americans to accept the “mark of the beast,” a baseless claim that runs counter to science — and contradicts Brown’s pleas (and that of many college football coaches) for players to become vaccinated.
Howell was asked directly about his vaccination status last week but didn’t offer a direct answer.
“I think that’s just one of the great things that you have with living in this country,” he said, “is everyone has the chance to do what they want and everyone has the freedoms, whether they want to get the vaccine or not. I don’t talk about those type of things.”
He acknowledged that it’s a “different time,” and added that “no one really likes” the ACC’s COVID-19 guidelines, which in part stipulate that teams forfeit and be awarded a loss if they’re unable to play because of the virus. Brown, and other head coaches around the conference, have attempted to mitigate the possibility of COVID-19 disruptions by emphasizing the importance of becoming vaccinated.
“He puts us in contact with all the people you could want to talk to — doctors, anybody you would want to talk to about it,” Howell said. “From a players’ standpoint, we don’t really talk about it with each other.”
An assistant to Hibbs, meanwhile, did not respond to a question seeking clarity about whether the pastor still believes that COVID-19 vaccines are conditioning Americans to accept the mark of the beast. Though that statement undermines public health, Howell nonetheless came to appreciate Hibbs’ command of the Bible and his ability to motivate. When Howell traveled to California for a football camp earlier in the summer, he called Hibbs’ church and set a date to be baptized. Howell took an Uber — “it took probably close to two hours, honestly,” he said, because of Los Angeles traffic — and shared the baptism photos on social media.
Howell open about his faith
Becoming more open about his faith is not something Howell is shy about. It has helped him manage the expectations that surround him, he said, and has “helped me stay grounded.”
“I just want to make sure I’m chasing the right things,” he said.
Throughout the next four and a half months, Howell will have a chance to chase more than most who’ve come before him at UNC, and more than most in his position at other schools around the country. In some ways, he has been building toward this moment his entire life. In another, he believes the self-discovery of the past several months has made him that much more prepared.
In his typical way, he sounded unaffected and unfazed by the expectations surrounding him. He knew it was there, the talk of the Heisman, because these days it’s more impossible than it has ever been to escape what people say. But, Howell said, turning philosophical, “There’s always going be a lot of noise on the outside.”
“All I’m trying to do is just get my team everything I have,” he said. “I think if we have the best team, I think I’ll have a chance to win the trophy.”
He was still looking for a regular church in Chapel Hill, and he’d come to wear the cross every day around his neck. Not as a reminder to himself — “I’m always reminded,” Howell said — but more as a message to the world, “that every time someone sees me, they’re going to see the cross and know that’s something I stand for.”
The symbol had become one of the few things he shares with the world, a sign of what drives him. He has kept other parts of his inspiration inside, a combination of the memories that won’t leave him and the natural drive to be the best fueling his ascension through two years of fall Saturdays, building to this moment of great expectation.
