If not the team, at least the state.
“I vacationed there last winter,” said McNeese State's junior defensive end, who will return to the Treasure State with the Cowboys for the first round of the Division I Football Championship Playoffs Saturday against Montana. “We left the day after Christmas and stayed until Jan. 6. We were up in Great Falls, but I spent a day in Missoula. Didn't see the stadium or anything like that, but I saw Montana.”
The Newton, Texas, native set the McNeese single-season record with 12.5 sacks, breaking the mark of 11.5 set by his position coach, Jake Morrison, six years earlier. And Smith has done it with a relentlessness and blue-collar effort of a small-town kid, the kind who would seek out the northwest wilderness as a place to get away.
“He's a different kind of animal,” Morrison said. “And it's not just against the pass. He's also good against the run. I've seen him run down quarterbacks, running backs, wide receivers.”
Part of his talent is purely physical, a 40-yard dash time between 4.4 and 4.5 seconds that more than makes up for his lack of weight (Smith, who is a long-limbed 6-foot-3, is listed as 217 pounds on the team roster, but Morrison said he is up to 224 pounds). But a bigger part of it is an uncanny ability to never stop running full speed after the ball.
“It says a lot about his upbringing,” Morrison said of Smith's record. “He works so hard, practices so hard. He practices at a different level from everybody else. I think that goes back to his upbringing and that small-town upbringing he has.”
But Newton, a Texas piney woods town just west of the Louisiana border near Merryville, is not your ordinary small town. Just a Class 2A program, Newton has produced a steady line of college talent, including Smith's teammates, starting linebacker Trey Bennett and promising freshman tailback Toddrick Pendland.
“The coaches there push you,” Smith said. “They expect more from you than you expect from yourself.”
They pushed Smith to quickly learn enough football to become a college prospect despite not playing the sport until his junior year, getting a shot at defensive tackle. Smith was a basketball and track star his first two years at Newton.
“It didn't matter that I wasn't big,” Smith said. “Our defense was all about speed.”
That, he had plenty of. Not only was he a nimble hoops player, he was also one of the state's top high jumpers, finishing third in the state in the high jump as a senior.
“You can see that athleticism,” Morrison said. “He has those long arms and he can just jump so high.”
He moved to defensive end as a senior where he caught McNeese's attention. He had to sit out his freshman year at McNeese as an academic non-qualifier, but quickly made an impact as a first-year sophomore, leading the Southland Conference with seven sacks and recording 11 tackles for loss. He became a starter early in the season and never let go.
“He really should have been first-team all-conference last year,” Morrison said. “But he was the newcomer.”
This year he's been a marked man. Starting from the season opener at South Florida, opponents have lined up with a tight end to chip Smith, or perhaps a running back to help block him low.
“If I see a back on my side, I know why he's there,” said Smith, who always lines up on the right side of the defense line, the quarterback's blindside. “He's going to cut me. Early in the year, I'd start outside, then spin back inside. Now I just keep containment and let the defensive tackles hopefully get the sack.”
Often, he gets the sack anyway. In McNeese's 26-10 win over Nicholls State last week, Smith got the record-breaking sack on a play where he was double-teamed and kept quarterback Zack Chauvin in the pocket.
But that wasn't enough. When Chauvin stepped up in the pocket, Smith made a move toward the quarterback, split the two blockers, and smothered Chauvin for the record.
That relentlessness is why Morrison, who went to a training camp with the Washington Redskins after his McNeese career, said he thinks Smith has a pro future, possibly as an outside linebacker in a 3-4 scheme.
“First, we'll get him up to 230-235 and he'll do that in the weight room,” Morrison said. “I can see him as an outside pass rusher.”
Smith has another college season and before that, another trip this week to a favorite vacation spot, only this time with something other than relaxing on his mind.
“It's another challenge,” Smith said. “Last year, we played Nicholls and they had a tackle who was 6-6, 330, kind of like these (Montana) guys. Teams have used tight ends, running backs. This team is physical, but they also like to drop back and throw it. So I'm going to have to concentrate on containing, not getting chipped and keep after him.”
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