BOULDER — I mean, sure, you could start a fight with Jordan Seaton. I’m just not sure you’d finish it.
Not in one piece, at any rate.
“Are the older guys … cool with you?” I asked the best lineman to sign with the Buffs out of high school since Jake Moretti as we kibitzed outside the Champions Center on Monday.
“Yes,” Seaton, CU’s five-star true freshman tackle replied.
“So no hazing?”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Hazing?”
He raised another.
“Like rookies carrying veterans’ pads at camp, stuff like that,” I replied. “It happens everywhere. You’ll find out at the next level. It’s what they do with rookies.”
Rookies! The light went on.
“Oh, like in The League,” Seaton said, referring to the National Football League.
“Yeah, in The League.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he continued, catching the drift and running to daylight.
“We don’t really have that. For me, freshman initiation is just — listening, you know? Just listening to the guys in front of me. They don’t really do the hazing. Or the fighting. No, we don’t do that. This is a brotherhood. Brothers fight. But not to the point where it’s like we don’t like each other.”
Seaton’s easy to like, stellar resume notwithstanding. His arrival gives quarterback Shedeur Sanders a wingman with a 6-foot-10 wingspan, which doesn’t hurt. No. 77 is 6-5, 285 pounds of mess-around-and-find-out, a lineman who ran pass routes at the Under Armour Next All-American Game and reportedly registered a closing speed of 17.7 miles per hour on GPS during another tilt. (Context: The fastest wideouts in the NFL usually max out at roughly 20-21 mph.)
“I feel like the O-line last year (at CU) lacked passion. And right now we’ve got a lot of it,” Seaton continued. “We’ve got a lot of dudes. We’re just going at it … One dude might have a bad day today, next day, it’s ‘Oh, I’m getting back at that guy.’ So I feel like passion is what this offense and defense has the most, and integrity, like, within themselves.”
Like his head coach, Seaton fears neither man nor microphone, regardless of how hot they happen to be at that given moment. The teen from D.C. calls it like he sees it. Even if some truths land harder than others.
“I actually thought this place was going to be really, really bad,” the Buffs’ star blocker said of Boulder, and his first impressions therein.
“This is my opinion. Everybody has their own opinion. But I took a risk. And then me coming in and having Coach Prime and everything he told me that he was going to do, he did.”
While CU sports staffers around us chuckled awkwardly and clutched imaginary pearls, we had to ask the big man to backpedal on that one.
“Bad?” I asked, raising an eyebrow of my own this time. “Define ‘Bad.’”
“Nothing really too crazy,” Seaton continued. “Just as far as ‘bad’ — you don’t know how much money we’re bringing in here. So you go to other universities — the Big Tens, the SECs, they’ve got $10 billion contracts, all (that) crazy stuff.
“So … I thought I was taking a risk. But then coming in here, it exceeded expectations. We actually have a great facility. We actually spend a lot of money on food, as you can see, which I was talking about (earlier). And everything’s exceeded expectations, from the littlest things to the biggest things for me.”
The biggest thing for Seaton this fall? Keeping Shedeur happy and healthy. Accent on the latter.
“His football knowledge, being a freshman, coming in (as) a guy straight out of high school, his knowledge is up there,” new offensive line coach Phil Loadholt said of Seaton earlier this year. “He’s a student of the game. He works hard. He comes up and watches film and does everything he’s supposed to do. So that’s been the most impressive part of him.
“Obviously, physically you can see that he’s advanced, you know what I mean? But his mental part has been impressive to me.”
Seaton is the thinking man’s hammer. Already lean, the freshman has spent roughly two months on a diet of fish in an effort to replace body fat with muscle. Hand him a syllabus, he’ll stick to the plan. It’s no coincidence that coachable stars make a habit of shining the longest. And brightest.
“Not too many people want to go to the … I call (CU) an ‘underdog school,’ you know?” Seaton stressed. “A lot of people want to go to a school that’s built — a school like Georgia (or) Bama where it’s, like, you’re (the) next guy up.
“But here … you never had (any) 5-star offensive linemen come here. You don’t have a Travis Hunter coming here every time. You don’t have a Shedeur Sanders that could be (here) every time. So it (was) a risk in that area. Not like it’s going to be bad or it’s going to be a terrible place to live in … just a risk as far as there’s nobody else to do it. So now it’s, like, ‘You can really be the first.’”
And if Seaton plows dudes from the jump?
The kid might not be the last.
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