- November 28, 2024
-
-
Loading
Loading
Barrett Kernon, a backup FSU long-snapper, played for Auburn two years ago. Next week, he’ll face his former team in the BCS National Championship Game.
BY ANDREW O'BRIEN | SPORTS EDITOR
After graduating from Seabreeze High School in 2011, Barrett Kernon wasn't offered a football scholarship to Auburn, but he worked hard enough to walk on. He had made it: This was big-time college football.
After the fall season in 2011, though, he decided to leave the team and transfer to Florida State. It was a tough decision: His football career might be over because, once again, the only chance to make the team would be as a walk-on, and lightning doesn't often strike twice in the same spot.
But for Kernon, lightning has struck twice. He not only made the team as a backup long-snapper at Florida State, but he is now preparing for the 2014 VIZIO BCS National Championship Game in a little more than a week — against his old team, Auburn.
It has been a wild ride.
Kernon lived in Tallahassee when he was younger, and he always was a Seminoles fan. FSU was the dream.
So in the summer of 2012, after he left Auburn for FSU, Kernon contacted some Seminoles coaches. There was a chance he could join the team in the fall of 2012, but in the end Kernon was told there wasn’t room on the roster, and so he would have to wait until Jan. 1, 2013.
Then another setback: The coach he was talking to left, and so he had to start over.
Finally, in April, Kernon joined FSU’s roster as a walk-on. Now, he is a backup long-snapper for the Seminoles.
“It was a long process,” Kernon, a redshirt junior, said in a phone interview after practice Saturday. “Auburn just wasn’t the right fit for me, football-wise. “It just didn’t work out.”
Even Kernon couldn’t have predicted things to work out this way, though. He said it’s surreal.
“I thought there was a chance we could play (in a different bowl game),” Kernon said.
But in the BCS National Championship?
“No, I never thought about that,” he said. “I never thought it was going to happen. I don’t think it’s really hit me yet until we’re actually out in California.”
The Seminoles leave for California Dec. 31. Kernon said that when he sees the sights and sounds on the West Coast, it might settle in that playing for a national championship is a reality, not a dream. And he’s going to have to do it against former allies.
“It’s going to be crazy,” Kernon said, noting that a few of his former teammates have been trash-talking with him, leading up to the biggest game of the college football season. “It’s going to be weird to look across the field and see people that I used to stand on the same sideline with.”
But Kernon is a Seminole now.
“It’s pretty awesome, especially being a Florida State fan growing up,” he said.
FSU and Auburn play for the national title Jan. 6, at the Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena, Calif.
Follow @aobrien7 on Twitter.
