Thomas Jones has advice for Virginia players as they prep for BYU: believe your coaches about the altitude.
“Don’t be caught off-guard, because the altitude was definitely a factor at first,” said Jones, in an interview for “The Jerry Ratcliffe Show” podcast this week.
The all-time UVA great had 210 yards on 35 carries in a 45-40 win at BYU in 1999. What he remembers most about the trip, though, is 10 minutes into pregame warmups, when the altitude – LaVell Edwards Stadium is 4,630 feet up, not quite a mile, but close enough – hit him like a brick.
“I wore a visor on my helmet, a shield on my helmet, and probably about 10 minutes into warmups, I just couldn’t breathe. That’s when the altitude out there really, really hit me,” said Jones, a consensus first-team All-American in 1999, who went on to rush for 10,591 yards in 12 NFL seasons before retiring in 2011.
“That was one of the first games that I actually said, I went to an equipment manager, and I said, Hey, you have to take this visor off. I came back in, I can’t breathe, like yeah, we took the visor off,” Jones said.
Once you get into the flow with the altitude, “things will kind of normalize,” Jones said, but it was still a shock to the system, despite repeated warnings from late coach George Welsh.
“We heard about it all week. Coach Welsh, one thing about him was, he would emphasize the same thing over and over again. But sometimes, because Coach Welsh said so many different things, sometimes you just you just tuned him out. That was one time that we should have listened,” Jones said.
Jones is excelling as much, maybe more, at his second career, as an actor and producer, as he did in football. The Big Stone Gap native is known for his roles in “Straight Outta Compton,” “A Violent Man,” “Luke Cage” and “Johnson,” the latter of which has him in a lead actor role and behind the scenes as producer and showrunner.
Now based out of Miami, Jones is still an avid follower of his alma mater.
“I think they’re having a great year,” Jones said of the 6-2 ‘Hoos. “I know they struggled a little bit at the top of the year, I guess, trying to kind of figure out who they were, but it seems like they’ve come into their own. I mean, their offense, I mean, it’s just explosive. They have so many weapons on offense, and obviously, that quarterback is, to me, I don’t see how he’s not a Heisman frontrunner. I mean, he’s proven to make big plays against every defense, and I think that’s a sign of a Heisman-caliber player, it’s, you know, are you doing it against the teams that are, you know, having great seasons and have great records and are ranked?
“Their defense is solid, and they’re making plays as well. They seem to have a really good chemistry, you know, their team, they it looks like they’re having fun out there. So, it makes it fun to watch,” Jones said.
Jones will be tuned in late Saturday night. The 10:15 p.m. ET start was also the start time for the 1999 game out in Provo.
The late start, the altitude – Jones also would advise the Cavaliers to be prepared for a raucous home crowd.
“They have a pretty rowdy fan base out there,” Jones said. “The stadium is so isolated, it’s literally like someone just took a stadium and just put it in the middle of nowhere, so there’s nothing around you but mountains. It’s beautiful, a beautiful backdrop for football. Mountains and just the landscape. I wish I had a picture of that game in the stadium, pregame, before it got really dark, and you could actually see the background. It was beautiful.
“But yeah, they have a pretty pretty rowdy fan base, and their stadium gets pretty loud. So that, definitely prepare for that, too,” Jones said.
Story by Chris Graham
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Chris Graham
