Kelan Luker was different from the other quarterbacks who came through Art Briles’s Stephenville dynasty in the 1990s.

Most grew up dreaming of playing for the Yellowjackets. Luker, however, moved to Stephenville in eighth grade, unaware of the program’s significance. He didn’t even know who Briles was. His junior high coach had to chase him down after practice just to get him to lift weights—Luker preferred sneaking home.

But on the field, he played quarterback with the freedom, creativity, and risk-taking honed in the six-man football he grew up playing while his father coached in Valera, Texas. That gunslinging background was a perfect fit for Briles’s revolutionary spread offense, where the Yellowjackets lined up with five wide receivers and aired it out every two to three plays.

In his 1998 senior season, Luker threw for 4,697 yards and 49 touchdowns—despite often sitting after halftime. Stephenville’s offense set the national single-season yardage record with 8,664 yards. Luker was named Dave Campbell’s Texas Football “Quarterback of the Decade” for the ’90s.

“He’s got the quickest release of any guy I’ve ever been around,” Briles told Sports Illustrated in 2008. “He’s got an amazing arm, and he gets rid of the ball faster than I thought was possible.”

Yet even as he led a football-crazed town to a state championship, Luker felt out of place. His long hair and laid-back demeanor hinted at a musician’s soul he hadn’t yet discovered.

“You’d think he might be a surf instructor out in California,” said Sterling Doty, Luker’s former teammate and now Stephenville’s head coach.

It wasn’t until he left Stephenville for SMU that Luker found an outlet to explore that other side of himself. He met Texarkana guitarist John David Black, whose talent on the strings was mesmerizing. His roommate, fellow Stephenville grad Robert Lilly, bought a guitar and started playing Texas country riffs late into the night.

Luker’s older brother, Seth, wanted to manage a rock band, and Kelan tagged along to shows across Dallas-Fort Worth. He fell in love with a band called Edgewater and realized he was more of a rock guy than his country-loving roommate. He remembered the adrenaline rush of “Mandatory Metallica” days in the Stephenville weight room.

But his football career at SMU stalled. As a freshman, he completed just 39% of his passes in limited action, then redshirted his second year. In 2001, he was benched after three starts. By 2002, he was favored to reclaim the starting job under new head coach Phil Bennett—three other quarterbacks had quit the team.

Bennett, however, refused to let quarterbacks wear red non-contact jerseys in spring practice. He wanted to test Luker’s toughness. Late in camp, Luker took a QB draw up the middle and was hit just wrong. Spinal concussion. A week later, Bennett asked if he was ready to suit up again, dismissing the nerve shocks Luker felt down to his feet.

The injury, combined with three straight losing seasons and constant coaching turnover, made Luker realize he didn’t love football anymore.

“Luckily, music was there,” Luker said. “Because I didn’t know what I was going to do. Football was pretty much my life until that point.”