“Reaching into his shepherd’s bag and taking out a stone, he hurled it with his sling and hit the Philistine in the forehead. The stone sank in, and Goliath stumbled and fell face down on the ground.” — 1 Samuel 17:49 (New Living Translation)

“You can’t always get what you want/But if you try sometimes, you might find you get what you need.” — Jagger/Richards, You Can’t Always Get What You Want

This is an old story. Not as old as the boy who became King David and the giant who didn’t recognize a threat when he saw one. But in the American sports tradition, nearly as old and nearly as epic.

Many years ago, there were two major pro football leagues, the NFL and the AFL. The NFL was the superior league, and it wasn’t even questioned.

But then in Super Bowl III, a white-shoed quarterback with more charisma than brains guaranteed that the underdog (18 points in Vegas) AFL New York Jets would shock the mighty NFL Baltimore Colts. Everybody remembers Joe Namath and his guarantee and the astounding 16-7 win by the Jets. Not as many remember that fullback Matt Snell churned out 121 hard-fought rushing yards on 30 carries, allowing the Jets to control the clock and the game.

Years later, Matt’s nephew, Ben Snell, starred at Division III Ohio Northern. Division III players don’t generally make waves in pro football, and Ben was as much a longshot as uncle Matt’s Jets had been in Super Bowl III. He spent a year on the Baltimore Ravens’ practice squad, played two more with the Scottish Claymores of NFL Europe and eventually drifted into the XFL, where he was a backup running back (behind XFL star Rod “He Hate Me” Smart) with the Las Vegas Outlaws.

Ben’s NFL dreams were confined to practice squads and training camps, but in his few years of drifting in pro football exile, chasing a dream that remained elusive, he crossed paths with many similar players, including a former NFL tight end named Vince Marrow, who was trying to prolong his football hopes, first with the Frankfurt Galaxy and then with the Orlando Rage.

The poet Langston Hughes famously asked what happens to a dream deferred. In Ben Snell’s case, the dreams of NFL stardom manifested in another generation of a hungry underdog running back with something to prove, with new traditions to make.

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Credit: Mark Zerof-USA TODAY Sports

Benny Snell was a baseball player. Well, David was a shepherd.

Baseball played a significant role in Benny Snell’s path to Kentucky.

“We actually were right around the corner from Westerville South,” in a northeastern suburb of Columbus, Ohio, says Ben Snell. “He played baseball from when he was 5 or 6 years old, and most of his traveling baseball team were going to Westerville Central, which was the baseball school. Westerville South was the football school, but I let it be in his hands.”

Westerville Central was — surprise, surprise — a football underdog.

Veteran high school coach John Magistro was the recently hired head coach at Central and was tasked with nothing short of a culture change.

“I took over the program in 2009, and before that they had only one winning season,” recalled Magistro. “The year before they were 0-10. This program was starving to get off the foundation. They hadn’t had any success.”

In more modest ways, Magistro had Central on the path to success even before a baseball-playing Benny Snell came along.

“(We) went 5-5 (in 2009), weeded some guys out, and the third year, we make the playoffs for the first time in school history,” says Magistro. “The following year, we got better. It got to a point where kids who were trying to go to the other Westerville schools, especially Westerville South, we started getting those kids.”

Kids like Benny Snell.

Magistro resists the notion that Benny was a highly-recruited prospect.

“It wasn’t like he was some kind of superstar or anything like that,” he said. “Matter of fact, his freshman year, he didn’t get to play the entire season because he had an injury from summer baseball.”

It didn’t take long for Magistro to see something special in Snell, though.

“He practiced with a chip on his shoulder,” remembers the coach, with his voice inflecting like Allen Iverson’s on the word practice. “When he walked in the weight room, he lifted weights that way. I don’t care what it was, he had the focus that you just can’t coach.”

That focus became contagious.

“I remember one day, he was running over guys, and some guys are going, ‘Can you back off a little bit?’ He said, ‘I don’t back off.’ I told our coaches, ‘I’m never going to ask him again to not run somebody over in practice.’”

Magistro continues, “How many guys do you get who are willing to be good practice players? I coached some good ones, but in practice, they knew how to take a play off here and there. He doesn’t.”

Snell’s work ethic and intensity spread through Magistro’s burgeoning program.

Ben Snell thoughtfully considers that extra motivational spark that sets apart his son.

“I think it’s just being the underdog, being someone who knows that they’re good, but it might take that little edge for that extra little effort to come out of Benny or the football team,” admits the elder Snell. “I think it’s contagious with the team. The team wants to buy in that they’re doubted and they’re at Kentucky and they’ve got to give that little extra effort for a play or a snap or an extra yard. Sometimes those things count, and sometimes those things win football games.”

They mattered in Benny’s junior and senior seasons at Central, when the team finished 11-2 and 10-2, playing multiple rounds into the Ohio playoffs.

Those things matter today when Central is no longer an Ohio football doormat. Magistro, who handed off the program to an assistant in 2017, reflects, “Now everybody wants to come to Westerville Central.”

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Credit: Jim Brown-USA TODAY Sports

But for all Benny had accomplished, for all the walls the Snell family had broken down, one would not fall. Ohio State University, where Matt had played in college, where Ben had wanted to play, did not recruit the bruising running back who played practically on their doorstep.

It was Penn State which first seriously sought Snell. Benny visited as a sophomore and loved the school. If you can’t be a Buckeye, maybe being their best competition was a good second plan. But not an underdog’s plan. When Bill O’Brien left Happy Valley, so did the interest in Benny as a Nittany Lion.

Enter Vince Marrow. The NFL Europe and XFL vet who played against Ben Snell now found himself working as Kentucky’s top recruiter.

“There were a few schools that didn’t want to take a chance,” says John Magistro. “Kentucky took a chance. They saw something in him that some other schools didn’t.”

And that was reciprocal. At the time Benny considered UK, the Wildcats had won two SEC games in their last three seasons, and Mark Stoops, tasked with the unenviable job of rebuilding an SEC cellar dweller, was 7-17 in Lexington.

“Kentucky was the next one that was on him,” says Ben Snell. “We met the coaches, saw the campus and the new buildings, and Benny just fell in love from Day 1. He loved Coach Marrow and everything just kind of lined up, the stars lined up. He didn’t want to visit any other schools. He immediately called Vince Marrow and told him he wanted to commit to UK.”

That was February 2015. Snell stayed firm in that commitment despite a tough 5-7 season for Stoops, who was on something of a hot seat when Benny arrived on campus in 2016.

Kentucky lost Benny’s first two games as a Wildcat by an 89-42 margin as Benny played a few snaps, mostly on special teams. In Week 3, Kentucky gave the true freshman Snell a shot. Neither has looked back.

Since that day, Benny has amassed more than 3,300 rushing yards, second in UK history (he’s within reach of all-time leader Sonny Collins’ 3,835 yards), and he broke the UK rushing touchdown record in his sophomore campaign. Meanwhile, Kentucky has gone 21-11 since they decided to hand the ball to Snell. That includes a 13-8 run in SEC play that is virtually without precedent in Lexington. Certainly without recent precedent.

It figured that Benny Snell would find himself an underdog (9 points per Vegas) on Saturday against Georgia in the biggest football game of his career and the biggest one in Lexington, Ky., since … who knows, maybe ever. From a distance, it may look like a fluke or a coincidence that Snell ended up playing in Lexington instead of leading Ohio State to a CFP berth.

But it was hardly a fluke. The stars aligned right because Snell is part of a tradition of underdogs who don’t just wait for the stars to align right, they make them align right. If he had led Ohio State to the CFP, that would have been a great experience. If he leads Kentucky to one, it’s a culture change.

I bring up those culture changes to Ben Snell — the Super Bowl Jets, turning NFL Europe and the XFL into a training ground for the future, making Westerville Central and Kentucky into football schools.

“It’s such a good, proud feeling as a father to know that your son has touched people like that,” he says.

But he’s not done. And neither, he knows, is Benny.

“We’re going to shock the world!” he tells me.

Just like they already have.