Jack Barton

Jack Barton played four years on the defensive line at Furman and spent his last year of eligibility at Georgia Tech.

He came back onto the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast with the transfer settled. He was one of the first athletes the brand signed and a SALTYmf player of the week on the NIL House show on Brinks TV. Banyas knew Barton's father in high school and a little in college, and for this episode he dug out his own father's Georgia Tech jacket, which he decided meant Barton was in for a good year. Barton's line on the arrangement was that Salty took him on before he had done anything on the field.

He arrived at Furman the year the team went six and five and left with a conference championship and 42 seniors graduating in his class. He led the FCS with three blocked field goals. He credits the culture over the talent, and the culture to a strength coach named Andre Bernardi, who ran everything on detail and punished anything done another way. The players decided at the time that he was a maniac. Barton's read now is that nobody wanted to mess up in front of the guy next to him, which is a different thing from being yelled at. He went to Georgia Tech to be an established voice on a defense he thought was short one, into a facility two years from the end of its renovation, where the weights are about what he remembers from a high school gym under the stadium.

He got in trouble a lot at Furman and says Coach Hendricks stuck his neck out for him. A week after losing to Montana in overtime he was in the portal. He had promised that coach he would not make a lateral move inside the FCS, that he was taking his shot at a higher level or he was done with football, and then he sat with his friends freaking out about where he would land and what he was giving up. The DMs came in from every direction with no way to filter them. Oklahoma and TCU showed interest. Georgia Tech, the school that never offered him out of Centennial High School, did not wait around. Inside a week of that Montana game he was filing paperwork and signing a lease in West Midtown.

He does not think culture and the portal fit together, and he says it as somebody who used it. His advice to anyone considering it is to go outwork the man starting ahead of them first, because a player who moves without fixing that lands in the same position somewhere else. He is glad NIL exists, and points at a kicker at FIU who had to shut down a YouTube channel with 200,000 subscribers because the old rules made him choose. That same day he had told a teammate who was struggling with the work that he had to fall in love with it or he would never be as good as he wanted to be.