John King is on the phone, and the first thing he is doing is apologizing. He’s recently undergone surgery for mouth cancer, and earlier this week he had some teeth extracted for follow-up radiation on his jaw. Without expressing a syllable of self-pity or even concern for his well-being, he’s issuing a disclaimer about being hard to understand.
In truth, everything King said—and stands for—came through with unmistakable clarity. The deep East Texas twang, the Friday Night Lights colloquialisms of a high school coach, the unwavering belief that football is a hard sport played by hard boys. And the pride in his son, Haynes, one of the hardest of them all.
“This place is built on toughness,” John King says of Longview, Texas, where he is the coach of the Lobos. “That goes for the community and the football. It’s old-school football. Physicality.”
That’s the way King has coached for 22 uncompromising, highly successful years at Longview High. His tenure includes four appearances in the state semifinals, two in the championship game and one Class 6A, Division 2 state title in 2018 when his son was the star quarterback as a junior. Now Haynes is concluding a six-year college odyssey dotted by twists and turns. He is ending it in proper King family fashion, by being the toughest dude on an undefeated Georgia Tech team that is aiming at the College Football Playoff.
“It’s my last year,” Haynes says. “I’m going to lay it on the line. We all believe this can be a special year, and we’re trying to do whatever it takes.”
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Here’s what it has taken for Tech to go 5–0 for the first time since 2014: King has played like Tim Tebow did when he was winning the Heisman Trophy in ’07 and leading Florida to the national championship in ’08. He’s doing everything.
King leads all non-service academy quarterbacks in rushing yards per game at 95. He’s fourth in FBS in number of runs and passes per game at 45.3, which is 69% of Tech’s average offensive plays. And he has been the Yellow Jackets’ conversion machine on third down.
King leads the nation’s QBs in average first-down conversion runs with three per game, and his 67% conversion rate on third-down runs leads everyone at his position. In the four games King has played (he missed a rout of Gardner-Webb with an unspecified lower-body injury), he’s run or passed for 62% of the Jackets’ non-penalty first downs.
Short yardage has become King’s castle. He’s nine out of 10 picking up first downs rushing on third down with one to three yards to go. He’s a between-the-tackles sledgehammer, taking shotgun snaps and powering through tacklers, not around.
And King has been very much at his best when outcomes are hanging in the balance. After falling behind Wake Forest, 20–3, on Sept. 27, King converted seven out of eight third downs in which he ran or passed. Not always the smoothest passer (another Tebow trait), his efficiency rating by quarter in that game went from 67.53 (not good) to 122.15 (pedestrian) to 130.76 (respectable) to 160.91 (sharp). In overtime, King ran or passed all four plays, covering 25 yards and getting the Yellow Jackets into the end zone for what ended up a 30–29 victory.
Even when everyone in the stadium knows what’s coming, King is finding a way.
“His teammates believe in him,” Tech head coach Brent Key says. “Even when we’re down two TDs [against Wake], his teammates are telling him, ‘We’re riding with you, Haynes. It’s all you.’ ”
There is neither great artistry nor overwhelming athleticism in his quarterbacking. Training films will not be made of his passing. The NFL is not clamoring for him. King’s success is more a story of will than skill.
Here’s the most remarkable part: Tebow Lite is really, actually Tebow Lite. The Florida Gator was 245 pounds as a senior bowling ball, a menacing physical threat. King is listed at 6′ 3″ and a wiry 215 pounds—and he’s running like Marshawn Lynch on third-and-1. One look at his frame in shorts and a T-shirt and it’s fair to wonder: How is he doing this?
“The will to win, the hating to lose,” he explains with a shrug. “I guess that’s it.”
When Haynes King started playing football in third grade, the first thing he did was report to the running back line. That lasted about 10 minutes. It was obvious very quickly that he was quarterback material, and he’s played the position from then on.
John King understood, but was concerned. A head coach with a son playing quarterback was a recipe for second-guessing and allegations of favoritism. He laid out the ground rules to Haynes.
“There isn’t going to be any Daddy Ball,” John recalls saying. “You can’t be a whiny-ass growing up. Your daddy’s a head coach in East Texas and you want to play ball? You better toughen up.”
Haynes would be coached the hardest of anyone on the team, and it was his job to accept that reality. He became a three-year starter at Longview, and his junior season was one for the books—3,879 yards passing, 662 rushing, 50 total touchdowns. The Lobos won their first state title in 81 years.
With a racially diverse population of about 80,000, Longview isn’t a small town. But it’s not Houston or Dallas, either. A state title is a big deal there, and a forever deal.
“Black or white, on Friday nights there ain’t but one color that matters—that’s Lobo green,” John King says. “The community comes together for its high school sports. Football is king in Texas, and high school football damn sure is around here. Haynes is the favorite King in Longview. I’m not sure he’ll have to pay for a meal again in Longview, Texas.”
Despite the legend status accorded for winning that title, Haynes’s senior season was a bit of a letdown. With a depleted surrounding cast from the previous season, his production sagged and Longview was eliminated earlier in the state playoffs.
“He puts a lot on himself, and I probably put too much pressure on him his senior year,” John says. “Live and learn—daddy, too. I wanted that repeat as much as he did.”
But a promising college path awaited. A four-star recruit, King signed with Texas A&M and Jimbo Fisher. It was attractive staying close to home, but difficult to say no to Tennessee—specifically quarterback coach Chris Weinke, with whom Haynes developed a bond.
“The first time I ever saw my son cry was after he called Weinke to tell him he wasn’t coming,” John says.
Haynes arrived on campus in College Station, Texas, shortly before the pandemic hit in 2020, part of the No. 6 recruiting class in the country. King backed up Kellen Mond, who had a great season as the Aggies went 9–1, narrowly missing what was then a four-team College Football Playoff.
The next season, he was the starting quarterback. In the first quarter of the second game, King broke his leg, scuttling his season. The entire Aggie program began to drift that year, going a disappointing 8–4 after starting the season ranked sixth in the country.
King regained the starting job in 2022 but was benched after A&M’s home loss to Appalachian State—a stunning upset that Fisher never really recovered from in terms of popular support. The Aggies started three different quarterbacks while staggering through a 5–7 season. In early November 2022, King played his last game in an A&M uniform. He’d been targeted for plenty of fan criticism, but there was a lot to go around on that team. It was time to find a new home.
“That hurt me,” John King says. “We’re old-school people—you start something, you finish it. But he did get his degree and an Aggie ring. He’s an Aggie.
“But you learn a lot about yourself when you face adversity like that. Nothing but respect and love for Jimbo, it just didn’t work out. He had injuries and he didn’t play his best, but he gave his all. You can’t worry about the idiot fans who don’t know their ass from third base.”
King reconnected with Weinke, who had moved on to be quarterbacks coach at Georgia Tech. Key, Weinke and offensive coordinator Buster Faulkner flew to College Station to visit King, who brought three A&M teammates who were looking to transfer with him to the meeting. He was already recruiting for his next school.
“All three end up wanting to come to Georgia Tech by the end of our conversation,” says Key. “So I’m like, This dude’s got some major influence on guys. Major influence. If receivers want to follow this guy, there’s something to him.”
Jeff Sims was the returning Tech starter, and it was widely assumed he would retain that position in 2023. But Key went with King, sending Sims into the transfer portal to Nebraska. King seized the position and hasn’t let go since.
Key didn’t hesitate to make him the dual-threat focal point of the offense, even if it came with some cost last year. A shoulder injury sidelined King for losses to Notre Dame and Virginia Tech, in which the Yellow Jackets scored their fewest points of the season (13 and six, respectively). Even when King returned, his shoulder was hampered to the point where he could barely throw.
But simply having him in the lineup mattered. King threw just six passes against 9–1 Miami but ran it 20 times for 93 yards, including the clinching touchdown in the fourth quarter. The win helped push the Hurricanes out of playoff contention, while catapulting Tech to its first back-to-back winning seasons since 2013–14.
The single most impressive element of the season, however, was a loss. Tech pushed bitter rival Georgia to the brink in an eight-overtime Black Friday marathon that became a Haynes King centerpiece. He ran 24 times for 110 yards and three touchdowns, threw 36 times for 303 yards and two more TDs, and kept willing the Jackets forward against a fierce Bulldogs defense. If you watched that game, you became a believer in King’s talent and his intangibles.
“He’s just a great competitor,” John King says. “Always has been.”
This season has upped the stakes. Tech isn’t just undefeated; it’s undefeated with a very manageable schedule in front of it. The Yellow Jackets don’t play Miami, Florida State, Louisville or SMU, and might be favored in every remaining game. Meanwhile, their hard-knocking quarterback is a Heisman Trophy contender.
“It’s been unbelievable,” John King says. “I know he probably gets too much credit, but he gets a lot of blame when things don’t go right, too.”
That dynamic has been a bonding element between King and Key.
“We could play the best game in the world,” Key says. “Biggest win. Everybody’s getting their asses kissed. When it’s a bad one, there’s two people who hear about it, the quarterback and the head coach. It doesn’t matter who else messed up. Doesn’t matter if someone runs the wrong route or the line breaks down, the quarterback has got to eat it. And that’s a bond me and him share, isn’t that? They’re yelling at us both? Let’s walk out with our chests out and our heads up.
“I’ll do that with him. He’s special.”
At the Georgia Tech–Miami game last year, writer Andy Vodopia saw two women wearing Haynes King jerseys. He introduced himself and wound up talking to Haynes’s mom, Jodie. Before long he was pitching the family on writing a children’s book about Haynes.
Vodopia knows his way around the NIL space—he’d written a book with the Michigan offensive line a couple of years ago. But he became a Georgia Tech fan after three of his kids graduated from the school. This was a way to marry fandom with business.
Haynes King: A Helluva Quarterback was published earlier this year. (The title is an homage to the Georgia Tech fight song.) King went back home this summer and surprised some of his teachers at Longview Elementary School with signed copies of the book.
“They’re solid people,” Vodopia says of the King family. “They had a farm, and Haynes had to tend to the chickens and cows and mow the lawn before it was time for sports. He’s a country boy who was raised right.”
One of the family traditions over the previous five years was for Haynes’s family to scramble from a Longview game Friday night to wherever he was playing the next day. It wasn’t always possible, but they put in the effort where they could.
This year has been different.
John King missed the first several Longview games after his cancer surgery. He returned last week but didn’t do much coaching, and this Friday he will watch from the press box when the Lobos play Forney at home.
Then he will get on a plane and head to Atlanta for Georgia Tech’s 3:30 p.m. home game against Virginia Tech. It will be his first chance to see Haynes play in person in this, his final college season.
Senior Day is coming in November. As it stands today, cancer isn’t going to keep John King from that one. He made it through one Senior Day as both coach and dad (“That one got my heart good”). He can do it again.
“He wasn’t sure he wanted to play anymore after A&M,” John King says. “He was at the lowest of the lows. He went to Georgia Tech with no promises. But he’s been around people he wants to be around, and he’s put everything into it. He ain’t perfect, but if he fails it’s never for a lack of trying.”
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