On the football field, where he plays defensive end opposite that nation’s sack leader Dwight Freeney, Josh Thomas feeds off a lack of double teams. Off the football field, where he plays an easy target to a Syracuse defensive line full of comedians, he is the subject of them.

Teammates start with the unsightly mop of dark brown hair that nearly covers his eyes, a tangle of follicles Thomas hasn’t cut since before the season started. Then comes the cowboy boots, a recent purchase that has brought more embarrassment than style. And don’t get them started on the 6-foot-6, 256 pound lineman’s guitar skill or the songs he writes and plays.

‘He’s so embarrassing,’ fellow lineman Mark Holtzman said. ‘We go to Tennessee, and he has cowboy boots on. That’s embarrassing. You can’t take him anywhere. Around here, we have a real tight grooming policy. He’s got this incredible amount of hair. Once again, he’s embarrassing. He can’t roll with us with his hair like that, and those boots are terrible.’

The funniest joke, though, is on opposing defenses. Because no matter how much Thomas’ style clashes with his teammates off the field, it couldn’t mesh more on it.

So Holtzman doesn’t mind giving clarification.

‘Besides the hair and everything, he fits in perfectly,’ Holtzman said. ‘A young guy like him has the opportunity to play in the National Football League. Easily. Especially with the program, the type of defense we play here, the plays he makes now, he can only get better, bigger, stronger.’

Not surprisingly, Thomas is glad to have become the subject of constant jokes. Teammates barely laid into him last season because there simply wasn’t anything to laugh about.

That’s unless you consider a broken left foot funny.

Playing in only his second college game, at Cincinnati, Thomas heard his foot pop but paid it no attention. A short time later he knew his season was over.

The diagnosis from team doctor Irving Raphael? Thomas’ foot was broken, and he would not play again that season. But there was one more surprise: Thomas would have surgery the following day.

Sitting hundreds of miles away in his Pittsburgh living room, Dan Thomas couldn’t understand why his son never graced the television screen. Then the phone rang, and at first he thought it was a prank call from his brother.

‘I couldn’t understand why I didn’t see him out there,’ Dan Thomas said. ‘Then Dr. Raphael said, ‘Do you understand? Josh broke his foot. He needs surgery.’ I stopped what I was doing, grabbed a bag, jumped in the car and off I went. All I could think about was the concern for our son. He still had a number of years to play.’

Thomas had surgery the next day, and afterward his father tucked him in at South Campus and drove through the night back to Pittsburgh. Thomas remembers feeling pain, but the worst was yet to come.

Thomas watched his teammates struggle to a 6-5 record and not receive an invitation to a bowl game. That hurt even more. And listening to people doubt his ability to stay healthy after only one major injury hurt, too, but it was a pain that Thomas took to heart, a pain that may be responsible for his success this season.

‘It was definitely extra motivation,’ said Thomas, who has 36 tackles, seven for a loss, and two sacks this season as a starter. ‘A lot of people had the experience, and I didn’t have it. I wanted to prove that I could still play. It wasn’t like I was questioning myself, but I felt like, maybe, other people were questioning me.’

Thomas worked maniacally in rehab, yearning for a chance to prove the doubters wrong. In the off-season, he added more weight to an already filled frame. It’s not like he hadn’t worked hard before, but there was something different, something for him to prove, said Pam Thomas, Josh’s mother.

‘There was something to prove for the whole team, really,’ Pam Thomas said. ‘They all worked really hard. But Josh was so gung-ho about it because he’d missed a year. He wanted to make sure about everything, that he was healthy and strong. He was ready to take it all on.’

If Thomas needed to look anywhere for inspiration, he found it in his mother. After all, Pam Thomas took on a mass marketing campaign to get her son a scholarship in the first place.

Thomas was always tall in high school – all three Thomas boys stand above 6-foot-5 – but he failed to draw any interest from college recruiters. The summer before his senior year in high school, he drew enough attention at Penn State’s football camp to secure a meeting with the legendary head coach Joe Paterno.

‘I hadn’t really drawn any attention to myself,’ Thomas said. ‘Then he told me I could play Division I football and asked me if there was anything I was doing about it.’

The answer, at that time, was no. But after the meeting Thomas reorganized his goals, with playing Division I football at the top of the list. Pam Thomas took the initiative, sending letters and videotape to more than 30 colleges in hopes of drawing interest in her son.

‘That’s the only way we could do it,’ Thomas said. ‘That’s the way I got myself out of there, you know. None of my coaches really did anything about it, so we had to do it that way. She put in a lot of hard work.’

One such package found its way to the desk of Syracuse running backs coach David Walker. Packages from parents arrive at his desk almost daily, Walker said, but he saw potential in Thomas that few coaches had seen before.

‘He wasn’t really heavily recruited,’ Walker said. ‘I guess he was a little bit overlooked. But we saw that he would be able to develop. You could see in high school that he was a player who’s motor never stopped. Plus, he’s a giant as far as size is concerned.’

Thomas put on weight and the development was obvious. Along with Christian Ferrara, Louis Gachelin and Holtzman, Thomas provides a necessary complement to Freeney on the SU defensive line.

After a year spent in misery and hard work, Thomas is back on the field again. For the Orangemen, the two years have played out in nearly the same fashion as Thomas’ path.

‘You can parallel the two,’ Thomas said. ‘Our team was not expected to do well this year, and we’ve already won more games as we did last year. That’s great. For me personally, I don’t know how low the expectations were, but I try not to listen to what people say. I listened to what my family said. I just kind of went out there and did my best. I listened to what my coaches said.’

Which is why Walker’s closing statement should be sweet music to the defensive lineman’s ears – that is if he can hear it through the mop.

‘As long as he keeps playing the way he’s playing,’ Walker said, ‘he can wear his hair anyway he wants.’

Published on November 15, 2001 at 12:00 pm