To B-gap or not to B-gap? That is the question for Georgia State senior Tra Barnett.
He might be the only 1,400-yard running back in the country to double as an aspiring actor. Lawrence Taylor meets Sir Laurence Olivier.
When the record-breaking running back is not shedding tackles for the Panthers, he’s shedding his ego.
The embarrassment! Can you imagine? A 5-10, 185-pound football player, all pent up bravado, on his hands and knees, barking like a dog?
These are the moments actors live for, though. When it is just them and the spotlight.
“That first class, I was like, ‘What the hell is going on here?’” said Barnett, whose team will take on Wyoming in Tuesday’s Nova Home Loans Arizona Bowl at Arizona Stadium.
“It was kind of funny; they were so serious. Acting like a monkey. I was like, ‘This is not acting.’ Making animal noises, crawling on the ground. I said, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’”
On the stage, he is vulnerable, raw, emotive.
On the field, he is brutal, violent, aggressive.
They paint two very different pictures of the same player.
Barnett comes from tiny Elberton, Georgia, population 4,700. “Probably three stoplights,” he said, “three at the most.” He was an all-county running back for Elbert County High School, and when he told his friends and family back home he wanted to be an actor, they scoffed.
Elberton is about as far away from Tinseltown as Timbuktu.
But when the acting bug bites, it bites hard. He remembers telling his mom he’d someday be on TV. So what if he was 5 and he was mainly talking about cartoons. He just knew.
And then he tried it out himself, and said he “fell in love with the process.”
A friend — an acting major — told him about a class, and he liked what he heard. He enrolled, and he found himself as uncomfortable among his peers in theater as he is comfortable among his peers in football. But he liked testing his own boundaries.
“I felt so stupid,” he said. “It felt very weird. I had to get used to it. I saw other people do it, I thought, ‘I might as well.’ Everything goes out the window. In acting, you have to let go of everything. You can’t be afraid to look stupid. You have to warm up to it.”
One role he was born to play: prime-time running back.
If 2018 was his first taste of the big time, 2019 has been his star turn.
In a Week 1 upset of Tennessee, Barnett had 95 yards and a score. Two weeks later, he went for 127 yards against Western Michigan, and two weeks after that, he kicked off a five-game streak above the century mark, peaking with a school-record 242 yards on 34 carries in a 52-33 win over Troy on Oct. 26.
Barnett’s school-best 1,389 rushing yards ranks 11th in the country, and his 12 touchdowns are tied for 21st.
This is no surprise to Georgia State head coach Shawn Elliott.
“I saw it in him over the summer,” he said. “Out there with cones, going through cuts and reads, doing the extra stuff I haven’t seen him do before.”
Every year the night before the Panthers begin fall camp, Elliot has the team come together for a meeting that sets the stage for the next 28 days. It’s the unofficial kickoff to the season.
“Before we had the meeting, he was out on the field going through cuts, plays,” Elliott said. “I say to him, ‘Buddy, we’re practicing in the morning; relax tonight.’ But he was out there doing it.”
Inspired by the tragic offseason drowning of his cousin, former Clemson and Eastern Illinois running back Tyshon Dye, Barnett has seized the day this season. He took out his stress in the weight room, improving his strength and stamina, adding good weight.
“That gave me a different type of drive,” he said
After the Tennessee upset, he started to sense the spotlight. He pushed harder.
“After the Tennessee game, it was like, ‘OK, he’s good, he might be special,’” Barnett said. “But after the Troy game, they noticed. After Troy, I put up 200 and it was like, watch out for him.”
For now, he’s pouring everything into this role. He’s hoping to take football as far as it will let him, whether that’s the NFL or otherwise. The Arizona Bowl matchup with Wyoming will be an important platform for his professional ambitions.
But after that, might there be other roles in his future? Shakespeare with shakes, if you will?
“At first, I was intrigued, but now it’s a passion,” he said of acting. “While doing it, you can get so locked in. It feels like an escape sometimes. It’s an escape from reality.”
