A football family

Hours before Tyler showed up at his youth football field, the Goodson family sat down for lunch at the Central City Tavern in downtown Suwanee, an upscale sports bar that opened before the start of the summer.

Tyler is seated between his parents on one side of the table, his back against the cushioned booth. He’s with his brothers, too. Taylor, a sophomore defensive back at Mercer University, sits across the table from his older brother, and Tavien, who is entering the 12th grade and attending an arts school this year, is at the end of the table.

Tyler and Taylor’s eyes wander to the handful of televisions in the bar playing the Summer Olympics and an Atlanta Braves game. Felicia and Tavien are posing for selfies together.

Food orders had just been taken when the first competitive football conversation of the meal started to heat up.

“Oklahoma is gonna get smacked,” Maurice said of the early reports of Texas and Oklahoma joining the Southeastern Conference. Apparently, Texas didn’t warrant a mention.

“Oklahoma and Texas could beat Missouri, Vanderbilt, the bottom of the SEC,” Tyler added. “They’re not gonna be able to compete week in and week out.”

“You don’t think Oklahoma could beat Auburn?” Felicia asked.

“No,” Tyler responded.

“So you’re saying Oklahoma would not be competitive in the SEC? I’m not buying it,” Felicia continued later in the conversation. “I believe Oklahoma would be competitive in the SEC.”

“No way,” Tyler said.

“You want to put your first NFL check on it?” Felicia taunts.

Tyler smiled and laughed off the comment as the argument settled down.

“This is how football conversations go in our family,” Felicia told me as I was spending the better part of two days in Suwanee with the Goodsons earlier this month.

“We’re all about football,” Maurice added.

From what Maurice and Felicia recall, Tyler has been all about football since he started playing at the age of 5.

Tyler later played baseball and basketball, and competed in track and field, standing out in all of them. Tyler still thinks he could take his good friend, Iowa point guard Joe Toussaint, in a game of one-on-one. But no sport was quite the same to Tyler as the first one he fell in love with — he even used to sleep with a football.

Tyler eats his two hot dogs and takes sips from water and lemonade while another football conversation — or, more accurately, argument — starts.

Taylor, jokingly, claims that Minnesota’s Mohamed Ibrahim — the conference’s leading rusher — is a better running back than Tyler. Then he takes it a step further.

“I was a better running back than you,” Taylor said, looking at his brother straight-faced.

“No you weren’t,” Tyler said, claiming his brother is exaggerating. “So that’s why you play [defensive back] now?”

The Goodsons are just as competitive with subjects other than football.

One year at a shopping mall around Christmas, Maurice challenged Tyler to a race after his son argued he was faster. Fellow shoppers started pushing tables and chairs out of the way and chanting as Tyler, at this time early in his high school career, beat out his father as they ran through the clear path created in the food court.

“I had on the wrong pants, I had on the wrong shoes,” Felicia said, mimicking Maurice, as Tyler points out they were both wearing jeans for the race.

Tavien is the only Goodson who doesn’t care for sports. When attending Tyler’s high school games, Tavien didn’t know what number his brother was wearing, and his only hope was that Tyler wouldn’t do anything to embarrass him — not that he ever did.

The rest of the family will still sometimes watch Tyler’s high school games, which they have recorded. They’re easier to watch now for Felicia. Especially now that two of her sons are playing college football, she starts getting butterflies days before a game even starts, hoping Tyler won’t fumble or that Taylor won’t get burned in the secondary.

Maurice flies to all of Tyler’s Iowa games. Felicia goes to most of them, too, just not the cold ones (“I love you, man, but it shows well on FOX, ABC, whatever you’re playing on,” Felicia tells her son). If there’s a magazine or preseason watch list that comes out involving Iowa or Tyler, his parents can’t help but read, especially if he’s on the cover.

“We have all the magazines,” Felicia said. “I’m probably worse than all of them [at collecting].”

Even the family dog, Delilah, a bichon frise and shih tzu mix that the Goodsons brought home about three months ago, has a small football chew toy by her bed.

Gwinnett County, where the Goodsons reside, is often referred to in the state as the “SEC of high school football” because of the area’s dominance. North Gwinnett High School is one of 25 high schools in the county, and many of those schools are packed with future college football players. Maurice said the local high school football environment is the closest thing you’ll see to college football at the high school level.

“We have so many kids in Gwinnett that get overlooked because there’s just so many of them,” Gerald “Boo” Mitchell, one of Tyler’s high school coaches and a former All-American wide receiver at Vanderbilt, later said to The Daily Iowan. “There are kids out there right now who are working at Walmart who just graduated who should be playing ball somewhere.”

The Goodsons originally lived in Forsyth County when they arrived in Georgia after Maurice took a new job. But Maurice and Felicia moved to Gwinnett County in large part because the football was better. They wanted Tyler and Taylor to face the best of the best.

And that’s what they did.

“I don’t think I really knew he was special, special until we got here,” Felicia said. “Because this atmosphere really forces you to pay attention because it is so intense … I knew he was good. But as a parent you can always think more of your kid than they really are because you’re the parent —  you tend to not be objective. Then his junior year, I was like, ‘Woah. We’re onto something here.’ I think that’s when I really realized he could go a little further than we anticipated.”