����������

Classic comic book characters carried traits that stood in conflict with one another, allowing their creators to traffic in suspense and mystery, generate unique storylines, and engender a broader consumer appeal. Superman had his Kryptonite, the Incredible Hulk had his softer side, and the Joker's grin belied dastardly plans.

Descriptions of a young Mac Jones depict some contrasts, as well.

How could a kid have so much fun, wholly embracing the notion that sports are, at their core, performative art, and yet still be so deadly serious about winning and excelling?

Start, of course, with a keen sense of humor.

Dawn Collins, his fifth-grade teacher at The Bolles School in Jacksonville, Florida, recalls Jones' ability to see more sophisticated humor than his fellow 10-year-olds could recognize. He'd tilt back his head to project his voice, open his mouth wide and yell, "Ha!" Sometimes the joke would still pass over the heads of his oblivious classmates; other times his laugh would serve as a prompter, and they'd catch onto the humor that Collins might have preferred them to have never noticed.

"He was so much fun, but he could laugh at the wrong time or out of turn," Collins said. "I loved him, but sometimes I would have to give him the big eyes. There was a party going on in his head at all times."

Jones' smile could command attention, such that he got some work as a model as a child, his big grin and blonde hair combining to garner appearances – ever the showman -- in various local commercials and pictorial advertisements.

And on the football field, wins followed his knack for fun and flair.

At 13, he once audibled to a fake spike in the final seconds of a youth game with his team trailing by three and within field goal range. With the defense assuming Jones was stopping the clock for the field goal unit, he instead lofted a deep touchdown pass for the win. The celebration, of course, went unchecked.

"That was Mac," said Melvin Huff, one of his youth coaches in Jacksonville's Mandarin Athletic Association.

Years later upon his arrival at Alabama, Jones' jokester side made its appearances, even if it was just on the practice field. He'd find ways to needle Alabama's starting defense as the scout-team quarterback, and in turn, goad fiery head coach Nick Saban as well. Once on what was supposed to be a Hail Mary drill, he instead threw a short checkdown pass to fellow scout-teamer Derek Kief, then took a lateral from Kief and ran 50 yards to the end zone. With no defender near him, he dove across the goal line with the ball extended – yet another Saban no-no -- and finished with a spike.

The scout team exploded with excitement.

Saban exploded with something else.

The Joker strikes again.

"The straw hat flew, and he was so mad, he started running at me," Jones said with a laugh. "For a second I thought he was going to tackle me."

Just a few days removed from his second and final pro day workout, which he finished with the fun of catching a pass from running back Najee Harris, Jones sits in the comfort of a third-floor flat in Tuscaloosa's new Westgate Condominiums. He reflects on some of the funniest moments of his four years – three spent in relative obscurity – on Alabama's campus. With a balcony view of Bryant-Denny Stadium, his scout-team days provide much of the fodder.

The Crimson Tide defense Jones faced as the scout-team quarterback featured draft picks from top to bottom, including first-rounders Daron Payne, Rashaan Evans and Minkah Fitzpatrick. Eventual No. 3 overall pick Quinnen Williams was a backup. The talent advantage over the scout team was beyond unfair, and, of course, they'd been game-planning to recognize and stop the very plays Jones was being asked to run. He wasn't about to give them any more advantage than they already had.

Not even anticipating the snap count.

The Joker would occasionally blow Saban's stack in practice with a hard count to draw the starting defense offsides. A clever means of keeping them honest, perhaps, but to Saban, it was simply a wasted rep and a waste of 30 seconds to reset.

"There are all sorts of little tricks that made (scout team) more fun," Jones said, "but it would piss off the defense at the same time."

If the UA football program had to buy more balls than usual in 2017, the scuffs Jones put on them would've been the reason. Rocketing spirals so far out of bounds in practice that they'd hit the brick façade of the Mal Moore Athletic Complex will do that. Saban would want balls thrown to certain scout-team receivers whether they were open or not, to give the defense a look at the play to expect from an upcoming opponent. Jones, who was redshirting his first year on campus, would have none of it.

"He just refused to throw a ball he wouldn't have thrown in a game," said former Alabama quarterback Kyle Edwards. "When he realized the play was dead, and against our defense that happened a lot, Mac would roll out and chuck the ball 20 yards out of bounds, into the brick wall, into the parking lot. Coach Saban would get furious, but that was Mac being competitive."

Joe Dickinson, a former Oklahoma assistant and Jones' longtime private coach, believes he might be a bit to blame. Dickinson, 64, was on the OU staff when Troy Aikman was a scout-team freshman there early in 1984, prior to his transfer to UCLA. Aikman displayed the same refusal to feed the Sooners' starting defense cheap interceptions, a story Dickinson had imparted to Jones before he ever got to Alabama.

The Joker, however, was largely impervious to Saban's bluster. Much credit for that goes to his high school coach, the late Corky Rogers of The Bolles School. Rogers, who passed away last year, was to Florida high school football what Saban is to the college game. His teams won a Florida-record 10 state championships, never enduring a losing season in 45 years as a head coach. He drove players hard with an old-school style that evolved slowly, tolerated no nonsense, and would chide Jones for his use of social media to enhance his recruitment.

During Jones' senior year, Rogers was so upset by a bad Thursday practice, he reconvened the team Friday morning for a practice on game day. A tongue-lashing from Saban can be a jarring experience for incoming Alabama freshmen, but thanks to his exposure to Rogers' ire, Jones arrived at UA with thick skin.

"I was definitely used to it," Jones said.

Jones' passion for the game had no bounds. He'd butt helmets with youth-ball teammates to hype himself up before games -- the skinny quarterback who didn't care that helmet-butting was more of a lineman's ritual. Jones could barely contain himself when he'd throw a touchdown pass, pointing skyward or ginning up the crowd.

But as much fun as the Joker had, his emotions also could flash anger – always self-directed – when he made mistakes.

"He did have a little history of struggling with his emotions because he's a passionate kid," said Mandarin Tigers coach Eric Yost. "He was never a negative kid. But when things didn't go his way, he could have a meltdown for a couple plays. And then he'd shake it off and throw a 40-yard rope. One play you'd be mad at him, and the next you're saying, 'OK, that's why he's our guy.'"

It was this fiery Jones, beneath that happy-go-lucky surface, who understood that all the fun was in the winning. He was once ejected as the coach of an intramural sorority flag football team but contends with a broad smile that it was a different coach who made the thumb-worthy remarks to officials. Jones, competitive to the last, continued calling plays from his car, via cell phone, and the Zeta Tau Alpha team eventually won the championship.

"If you stole it from Mac in basketball, he'd just as soon tackle you than give you a layup on the other end," said Gordon Jones, his father.

At Alabama, however, the harsh reality for scout offenses is that the vast majority of plays are abject failures. Blocks can't be sustained, receivers can't get open, and quarterbacks are sitting ducks. Not an optimum combination for a guy who could briefly lose his temper over a bad play. Saban had his own nickname for Jones, and it wasn't the Joker. He called him "McEnroe" for his first couple of years on campus, a reference to tennis legend John McEnroe's reputation for brief fits of anger and bad body language.

"You gonna slam your racket today?" Saban would ask.

For a kid named Mac, whose father was a pro tennis player, it was a pretty clever nickname. But it wasn't the one that stuck.

As much as Alabama freshmen typically fear Saban's wrath, Jones would be Jones. That meant having fun and competing as though the scout team was playing for a national championship, even if the true role was something far less glorious. Saban's well-known temper didn't bother the quarterback in part because the McEnroe in him was always more self-critical than anything Saban could dish out.

"If I missed a throw or threw an interception, it'd be hard to move on from it. I'd complain about how I suck," Jones said. "But the next day would be better. I'd just have to get that out and say it, that I suck, but I'd always come back [stronger] the next day."

Dickinson sips on a breakfast juice on the bank of the Black Warrior River in Tuscaloosa, heels his dog, and takes in the water view. Having worked with Jones for 10 years, he's seen various stages of his development. There's a bond between them that carries a lot of trust; when Jones finished interviews with ����������clubs at about 11 p.m. during the Senior Bowl week in Mobile, he then huddled with Dickinson via Zoom until 1 a.m. before going to bed.

Dickinson is in town this day to train Jones for his pro day, but it's a training session from more than a year earlier that has his attention.

"February 18," he says. "[I] remember it like it was yesterday."

At Jones' request, Dickinson made a trip to Tuscaloosa on Feb. 18, 2020, to work with the quarterback on his deep ball. In the same indoor facility where Dickinson conducted Jones' two pro day workouts last month, he watched the quarterback launch about 150 high-arching bombs to DeVonta Smith and Jaylen Waddle that February day – more than twice as many throws as in a typical offseason throwing session. Jones began to dial in the right timing and trajectory to connect rainbow throws to the most talented receiving tandem in the college game. Then Dickinson took him into the film room and pulled up video of Joe Burrow's 2019 national championship season at LSU.

"Now tell me what Burrow is doing that you can't do," Dickinson.

"Nothing," Jones replied after the film session.

"Right," Dickinson replied. "Nothing. You've got those two receivers we just threw to who can get open against anybody in the country. If you can hit them deep, you might mess around and win the Heisman."

It was as much of a breakthrough as an offseason workout can be. Still, Jones' transformation into the diabolical Joker, replete with 41 touchdown passes, an NCAA-record 77.4 percent completion rate, and the highest college QBR (96.1) in the 17-year history of the measurement, was forged in a near-maniacal work ethic that bubbled beneath the surface of his more emotional, fun-loving exterior.

Perhaps it was fitting that Jones took over Alabama's starting job just as Joaquin Phoenix's Joker persona was frightening theatergoers like never before. The deep ball Jones honed in the offseason devastated opposing defenses, particularly those that chose to walk up a safety to help control Alabama running back Najee Harris. Alabama receivers caught 11 touchdowns of 30 yards or more in the regular season, and while not all were thrown over the top of the defense, Jones' proclivity for connecting on deep balls was uncanny. He completed a staggering 64 percent of throws that traveled 30 or more yards in the air.

Naturally, nobody had more fun scoring those touchdowns than Jones. Holding for extra points, normally a job for the backup but one Jones didn't relinquish as a starter, helped keep his excitement under control.

"If he didn't have to do that, he'd be turning flips," Huff said. "Nobody can celebrate a touchdown harder than Mac Jones."

For decades dating back to the 1950s, the Joker character was softened and tamed by a regulatory body known as the Comics Code Authority. The CCA was founded within the comic book industry in response to public outcry and government scrutiny about the appropriateness of its content for children. Comic books weren't sold without the CCA stamp, and Batman's green-haired rival was reduced to a folly of a nemesis. The Batman television series of the late 1960s followed suit, with actor Cesar Romero clowning his way through devious plots against Adam West's Batman that were more corny than cunning.

Like Jones at one time, nobody took the Joker too seriously. But like Jones, the character came of age as a feared menace.

In the 1970s and 80s, kids who'd been subjected to sanitized supervillains became parents themselves. Comic books began losing a battle with television for the attention of American youth, and harder-edged characters began to look more like the medium's only path of survival. The Comics Code Authority's doctrine was relaxed and revised, with DC Comics – which counted the Joker among its properties – demanding more creative freedom for its story boards.

The Joker was unleashed.

When Mac Jones came off the leash, he terrorized the Southeastern Conference like his own personal Gotham – with Batman nowhere in sight.

For Hereford, Jones' ascent to a feared Joker was marked by a crushing hit he absorbed in a 2019 Citrus Bowl win over Michigan that foretold his dominance in 2020. Defensive end Aidan Hutchinson, flagged for roughing the passer on the play, leveraged his body weight to drive Jones' head into the turf.

One of Jones' molars split into pieces. He was spitting blood and chunks of his tooth. A commemorative jersey patch was half torn by Hutchinson's hit, and Jones ripped it off and tossed it to the turf.

Trainers stepped toward him; Jones yelled for them to stay off the field, and he didn't miss a play.

"I thought he was dead," Hereford said. "But he'd waited three years to get hit like that, and everyone on the sideline could relate. That was the Joker. You can't kill him. He looks over like, 'Let's go, what's the next play?' It was legendary."