This Sentell’s Intel rep on Georgia football recruiting has the latest with 4-star EDGE commit Chase Linton. He ranks as the nation’s No. 11 EDGE and the No. 132 overall prospect for 2025 on the 247Sports Composite. The On3 Industry Ranking has him as the No. 10 EDGE and at No. 108 overall.
Every Georgia football commitment has a story about the first time he started playing football. A lot of those first-game stories are true classics.
But I feel confident nobody has a tale like the Chase Linton story When I told a few folks his first football game and what I was planning to write this week, they were amused.
They said it sounded like something in a children’s book. And I guess it does.
It just sounds like clean, old-fashioned hate to me.
Perhaps the appropriate place to start here would be to ask Linton how he feels about the topic of those specific insects.
“I despise yellow jackets,” he said.
Well, he should. Truly.
It goes back to when Linton played his first football game.
“I think I want to say I was seven,” he said with a doubting look. “Seven. Or eight.”
The team he was facing was even called the Yellow Jackets.
“We started doing karaoke,” Linton said. “I have no idea what it is at the time. So my coach is like ‘Go karaoke’ over there, and I’m like ‘I don’t know what that is’ coach.”
His coach showed him, with all the shaking and moves. Linton absorbed them and then went over to the side to try to repeat his first set of pregame hip and feet-swiveling karaoke.
“There are bugs all over that place,” Linton said. “I might get bit by something.’
“No, you’ll be fine,” his coach said.
Linton was not fine.
He walks over there and starts warming up.
“Sure enough,” Linton said. “I get stung all up on my ankle before the game. They are like, ‘Alright, we are just going to send you home. Send you to Mom’ now.”
Linton wasn’t having any of it.
“No, I’m not going to do that,” he said.
It was my first padded game. He was really excited.
“I was amped up,” Linton said. “I just had a lot of sugar. That’s when they gave you a pre-game meal and it was a lot of sugar.”
This isn’t a total tough guy ‘Dawg story. He said he got lit up by three or four yellow jackets and those wounds stung.
“It hurt,” he said. “Horribly. It was very painful. I hated it. Now, I mean, probably it wouldn’t hurt. But back then, it was bad.”
But Linton was confident he could do it. He didn’t even have to rub any dirt on that ankle and go in.
“Sure enough, I went out there limping on the field,” he said. “Played my first game. I didn’t do too terribly for someone who had been bit up by a bunch of yellow jackets.”
His mother, Keeva, had been a little concerned watching all of this take place.
“What is up with Chase,” she asked his older brother as they watched him limping all over the field.
Linton’s older brother didn’t have any idea.
“When we got home, she saw my ankle and she freaked out,” Linton said. “But I did what I had to do.”
The 4-star Georgia Bulldog commitment is a little fuzzy on the details. He wasn’t sure when his mother freaked out. She might have seen him at halftime and tried to pull him out. Keeva thought he stepped on a yellow jacket next and was stung about eight times, she said.
But Linton stayed in. They both agreed on that. There would be no immediate trip to urgent care.
“No, no, no, I want to play,” his mother recalled Chase saying.
“By then, I was used to it,” Linton said.
When they got home, those jackets had left a present.
“He’s got these big swollen patches,” his mother said. “I’m just looking at him thinking, ‘he didn’t complain not one time during that game.’”
She couldn’t believe he played the whole football with that going on.
“And he played a good game, too,” she said. “It was the first time I had to think that he really likes football to be this engaged about this game in the face of all this very obvious pain.”
It sounds like Linton was already a ‘Dawg. Way back then. Those yellow jackets couldn’t stop him.
“It is pretty fun now when you think about it,” his mother Keeva Linton says now.
Linton’s first game was against a team called the Yellow Jackets. He was stung by a bunch of yellow jackets, but that couldn’t stop him from getting out on the field.
Now, he’s a Georgia Bulldog commit in the class of 2025. When he committed to the Dawgs, the Yellow Jackets were one of his finalists.
When he picked his final school, Linton actually put on a Georgia Tech hat and T-shirt before pulling those items off to reveal that he was all red and black and Georgia Bulldog underneath.
He believes it was at NYO Park near Chastain Park in Metro Atlanta.
We can’t make stuff like this up. It wouldn’t be this good.
That is the story of why 4-star Chase Linton hates yellow jackets before he suits up for UGA and also starts hating the Yellow Jackets.
Give him about a year or two.
The feeling here is that those Yellow Jacket quarterbacks are going to despise Chase Linton, too.
SENTELL’S INTEL
(check on the recent reads on Georgia football recruiting)
