Do a Google search for Jamey Mosley and what you will find is his name in bold letters on your screen with the subtitle “C.J. Mosley’s brother” underneath it. Alabama’s senior linebacker doesn’t mind being overshadowed by his brother in the National Football League as long as he gets to play football.
The younger Mosley contributed 13 stops with 1.5 tackles for loss, one sack, two quarterback hurries and a pass breakup in the 11 games in which he has played during the 2017 season.
“As a kid now, with social media, it’s different,” Mosely said. “When I was a kid I just wanted to play football, I honestly didn’t even think about being this huge star, not saying that I am now. Now kids are like, ‘I want to be a five-star’ and be this and be that … and I just wanted to play football.”
When the younger Mosely brother began playing, he was 3 years old, taking after his older brother, C.J., four years his elder and his companion through years of growing up in the Orange Grove projects in Mobile. Jamey would play the game with anything he could get his hands on, including pennies and pencils that he used to forge miniature games by himself on a tabletop, unable to stop thinking about his passion for the game.
Sports were a connection to his brother, a hobby at which to excel and a way to show his father that he would not be a victim of circumstance.
“Was my father strict?” Mosley asked with a laugh. “Well, he just expected a lot out of us, he wasn’t going to let age or how we were raised or where we were raised or our circumstances affect us. He was very stern but very loving. He expected the most out of us.”
Mosley described himself as a “busy guy” while he was attending high school in Theodore as a four-sport athlete. He was occupied with track, football, basketball and baseball before walking on to the football team at Alabama as an undersized defender destined to play in the shadow of C.J., who had become a first-round draft pick of the Baltimore Ravens in 2014.
Comparisons and expectations were inevitable, but success was not. It was completely up to Jamey to put on weight, to get faster and stronger.
He made the decision to adopt his own way to find his path. Jamey joined the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and became interested in actively studying scripture.
“Christianity is not a religion for me, it’s a lifestyle,” Mosley said. “I have a vertical faith, which means that everything I do is for God and everything that happens to me is because of God. When God is in control, you can never get too high and you can never get too low.”
Mosley wakes up at 4:15 each morning to study the Bible, which he is going through in chronological order. He then completes a personal workout. The football team works out at practice, but Mosley always believed he needed the extra work to reach the physical goals he had in mind.
“My brother trail-blazed his own path as a star athlete. This guy had all the intangibles: He’s smart, he has size, he has speed. With me, I was always undersized. My first weigh-in here, I was 188 pounds. I always had a chip on my shoulder, people thought, ‘You’re too small to do this, you’re too small to do that.’ Because of that, I was a hard worker. I had to work harder than the next guy because I didn’t have the size, I didn’t have the speed.
“That fueled me to prove people wrong to show them that I could do this and I could do that.”
Mosley’s father, Clint, would wake up at 3 a.m. and leave for work at the shipyard by 5. Jamey began to get up early too as a sophomore in high school to go for a run before school.
The 6-foot-5 Mosley has put on 60 pounds to scale 248, right around his brother’s NFL playing weight. Although he may be fit for the NFL, the younger Mosley is looking for a career as a coach rather than continuing as a player.
Jamey and C.J. hosted and coached a football summer camp for kids for three years in Theodore, where they attended high school. The professional linebacker speaks highly of Jamey’s coaching skills.
“It’s a natural for him,” C.J. Mosley said. “Our dad actually coached him when he first started playing football, so he had that coaching ability in him the whole time. He’s like a magnet with kids, kids he’s never seen before or our godbrothers when they were babies. Maybe it’s because he’s so tall, maybe it’s the way he carries himself, his type of personality always draws positivity to him.”
The SEC is facing a time of major turnover of head coaches and assistants this offseason. In a way, for Jamey Mosley to enter the coaching world is no different from stepping on that scale four years ago as a 188-pound redshirt freshman, unsure of what was to come. He is eager to step on the scale, in a sense, once again.
