Tim Worley

Tim Worley went seventh overall in the 1989 NFL draft, out of Georgia, and has spent the years since telling young players what he did with the money.

Brad Banyas got to know Worley through a mutual friend, Andy Jordan, well before putting him in front of a microphone. When Worley came on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast they found they had been recruited by the same man, who chased Worley for North Carolina after leaving Tennessee, where he had chased Brad. Worley grew up a Tar Heel. He signed with Georgia.

He came out of Lumberton, North Carolina playing four sports, and says baseball was his better one. He threw a 93 mile an hour fastball at 16 and a Pittsburgh Pirates scout came and worked him out. In 1984 he won the Junior Olympic 100 meters in Baton Rouge in 10.4 and anchored the first high school 4x100 team to break 40 seconds, 39.63, with a 9.99 split, at 6 foot 2 and a half and 210 pounds. As a Georgia freshman in 1985 he ran 89 yards for a touchdown against a Florida team ranked number one. As a redshirt junior he was not allowed at the combine, so all 28 teams came to Athens on a day in late March. He ran a 4.38, asked to run it again, got 4.35, then asked to bench and put up 225 pounds 28 times.

He tore up his knee as a sophomore in 1986 and missed most of two years. The vertical never came back past 38 and a half inches. In 1988 he went to Starkville and put 178 yards and four touchdowns on Mississippi State, then took the opening kickoff 93 yards against the Ole Miss team that had wrecked the knee, threw a 35 yard halfback pass for another score, and ran in a third. That was the Heisman year. Then came the money, thirty five and forty thousand dollars a week, a new hundred thousand dollar car every six months, and ten thousand in his pocket for no reason he can now explain. His accountant told him he did not need that, and Worley fired him. He was suspended in 1992. He retired in 1996, did not watch football for three years, and finally sat in the stands at a Bears game in Chicago with his head down, crying the whole game, which is when he understood what he had held at 21 and let go.

Worley is 56 now and living in Alpharetta. Mark Richt brought him back to Georgia seven or eight times to talk to the team; his first NFL room was the Tennessee Titans in 2014, and he says the words former first round pick are what makes a room of rookies look up. The yes people did him harm, he says, and the ones who told him no were the ones who loved him. The thing he is proudest of learning is also the shortest. He can say no now without being ready to take your head off.