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COLUMBUS, Ohio -- The words were zipping around the world before Cardale Jones could even leave the classroom where he tapped them into Twitter. It only took a few seconds to fire off a 140-characters-or-less message that still has legs and follows him around more than two years later.  "Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL," Jones wrote. "We ain't come to play SCHOOL classes are POINTLESS."
The post itself would quickly be erased, followed by the entire account, but the damage was already done. The message had been passed on countless times already, embedded in stories and eventually immortalized in a textbook as a perfect example of why young college students need to think before hitting send. It's been over 24 months since that 24-word lapse in judgment, and Jones still deals with the insults on social media, and in the locker room, the No. 4 Buckeyes still use it as an easy punch line good for a quick laugh. But perhaps if Jones had simply followed up with some context, maybe some of the sting would have been removed from a misstep that might always be his most famous moment, even after winning MVP honors in the Big Ten championship game. Would the message have been viewed any differently if his venting would have been accompanied by an explanation of what prompted one of the most memorable tweets a redshirting freshman player who had never taken a college snap would ever blast to the social media audience? "I remember I was in class, and I think I got, like, a B on a [sociology] exam," Jones said. "It was just something so stupid; of course I didn't feel that way about academics, and I don't. Nobody in this program feels that way, we actually take that stuff very serious around here. "It was just a dumbass thing to do. I definitely didn't think that would happen. It was just a stupid thing to do at that time. It was something where I just got pissed because I studied my ass off." Grinding in the classroom certainly didn't match the public perception Jones had instantly created for himself, and it formed an overnight reputation that would follow him on the field as well as he became an easy target for not living up to his potential or taking his work seriously. And while there would still be growing pains while sitting and waiting behind a string of quarterbacks, starting with Braxton Miller and Kenny Guiton and then getting jumped by J.T. Barrett during training camp in August, his ill-fated tweet and the subsequent lesson learned at least planted the seeds of maturation for Jones. And he made it quite clear in a 59-0 blowout against Wisconsin that led to the Buckeyes' earning a spot in the College Football Playoff that he must have been using that time well. "He didn't just mature last week," his Cleveland Glenville High School coach Ted Ginn Sr. said. "It didn't just pop in his head last week. It was bred in him. That's what gets old. We can just mature in a week? We know what we need to know in a week? No. We talk about maturity, I know who he is, I know where he comes from, I know what his whole life is about. "I don't even want to talk about that [tweet]. I think when it happened, he was misread. You know what I'm saying? Nobody ever asked that question. Everybody was talking about the tweet, nobody knew why. He was a child, and he didn't even know. That's the reason I don't ever talk about it, because we're not in position to try to get in his shoes." Maybe the motivation doesn't make any difference anyway. The jokes at his expense aren't going to stop, though Jones appears to have become skilled at either ignoring them or laughing along with his teammates. Deleting the message and his original account didn't erase it from his past, and regardless of what he does against No. 1 Alabama in the Allstate Sugar Bowl in just the second start of his career, he will surely continue to be better known for his biggest mistake than a résumé that already has one shiny accomplishment for the Buckeyes on it. And when measured against the test of patience in waiting behind three quarterbacks or the challenges of learning Urban Meyer's playbook or maybe even just passing sociology, dealing with social media fallout undoubtedly pales in comparison -- and, of course, those are just football issues. But trivial or not, the tweet and what came with it are part of the overall package, and like just about everything else, Jones has grown from the experience and is doing everything he can to keep it from defining him. "He's one of the most improved players I've ever been around," Meyer said. "The correlation between handling your business off the field and on the field, he does a good job in the classroom now. It wasn't pleasant his first year here ... but he's changed. "Cardale is a great story, and it's still in process now." Even if Jones isn't yet a finished product, he mistakenly gave the world a glimpse of where he was in the process two years ago. "I don't really care about the reaction as far as I got, you know, people saying all type of stupid stuff [on social media]," Jones said. "You know, I can take the heat from people from the outside looking in. But I was more worried about the fact that I embarrassed the university, the football program and definitely my family. That's what I cared about. "Just growing up, I'd say that was one of the steppingstones." So just like school, maybe the tweet itself wasn't pointless either.
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