A decade after he went 47-0 as Bremond's starting quarterback, Roshauud Paul is still a legendary name in Texas High School Football. Funny thing is, in the midst of that spectacular run, no one in Bremond knew him as Roshauud.

His father called him “Jujack” growing up, a nickname Roshauud says runs in the Black community. His elementary school buddies then abbreviated it to Jack. 

To this day, Bremond head coach Jeff Kasowski has his most famous player ever in his phone contacts as “Jack Paul.” Kids, don’t ever let anyone tell you that a playground nickname won’t last. Some do. Even if you become the winningest quarterback in state history. 

But, like much of Roshauud’s, or Jack’s, story, that only could’ve happened in a place like Bremond, Texas, a rural town 44 miles southeast of Waco. Every student in the district, from Pre-K to high school senior, is in the same building. So the high school coaches figured out early on that Jack Paul and the boys could play some football. 

“By the time we were in sixth grade, we had coaches saying, ‘This is the group of guys that everybody is looking at to be that next group to make a run,’” said Josh White, Paul’s high school teammate.  

Bremond was a program that was often the bridesmaid, never the bride. After winning a state championship in 1981, the Tigers had lost their next four appearances. Sensing the talent they had - and the chance to break the streak one day - Paul and his friends started Bremond’s first-ever Little League football team in sixth grade. The high school’s starting quarterback, John White, even coached the team, installing Bremond’s offense so the little leaguers could get a head start on the playbook. That year, the Tiger Cubs raised the league trophy, the championship that started it all. 

Paul, while talented, was not the clear-cut best player. Joe Williams, who would go on to win two state championship game defensive MVPs, was the fastest kid on the field. In fact, Paul never played a varsity snap as a freshman, which is more common at the 2A level. He was a 5-foot-6, 150-pound JV quarterback.

He wasn't even scheduled to start at quarterback as a sophomore, either. The coaches believed RayAndre Browning, a class older and a varsity player since his freshman year, would take that role. While Paul hit a growth spurt that summer, sprouting to 5-foot-11, there was no ‘Holy Smokes’ moment where Paul took a stranglehold on the job.

“RayAndre caught the ball better from Roshauud than the other way around,” Kasowski said. “That’s how he got put at quarterback.”

All this to say, Paul was not some freak athlete that Bremond had waited years to unleash onto the world. Even the coaches who had watched little Jack Paul grow up could not foresee what Roshauud Paul became. 

“That’s how good a coach I am,” Kasowski smirked. “This kid went from not playing a varsity snap as a freshman to getting a Division I football offer from SMU after his sophomore season.”

Bremond did not lose a game over the next three years, and Paul earned three consecutive Offensive MVP awards in the state championship game. And while it was a straight line of dominance, there are three distinct chapters to the dynasty.

In 2014, Bremond was one of the feel-good stories of TXHSFB. Here was a storied program breaking an over 30-year state championship drought while starting seven sophomores on each side of the ball, including the dual-threat quarterback taking the sport by storm. 

By 2015, Bremond was a juggernaut.

“Our junior year, I’ve had coaches say after the fact say, ‘The hardest thing we had to do that year was get y’all to the games,’” White said.

As the years have passed and Paul’s mythic persona has grown, it begins to push out of the picture how well-rounded those Bremond teams were. The Tigers had a massive offensive line, and the defense, led by lockdown corner Williams, oftentimes held teams scoreless until the second half. This slightly revisionist history is no fault of Paul’s own - quarterbacks simply get too much of the credit and too much of the blame. But Paul’s character ensured there was no rift on the team, even if he grabbed all the headlines. 

“The way I can describe him is humble beyond what you would expect from a kid on that run that we had,” White said. “He started getting offers our sophomore year, but he really never let it go to his head. He was the exact same kid all the way throughout school.” 

The final installment of Bremond’s dynasty in 2016 proved just how special Paul truly was. Just as much as we love building teams up, we love tearing them down. After two state championships, Bremond was no longer the fun upstart, but the Death Star everyone wanted to destroy. Not only was everyone hunting them harder, but Bremond was more vulnerable than ever. That offseason, the Tigers’ offensive tackle and defensive end moved to Bryan High. Then, Williams tore his knee up in the fourth game of the season after scoring six touchdowns through the first three games. 

By now, however, Paul had reached final form. He was able to mask some of the deficiencies one spin move at a time. That season, Paul earned Mr. Texas Football honors after throwing for 2,256 yards and rushing for nearly 3,000 yards, scoring 79 touchdowns. 

“Roshauud made everything a lot easier with his vision, especially once he broke past the first level,” White said. “It looked like he was playing in slow motion, just dancing around until he made the sixth person miss.”

Paul’s resume as one of the most decorated TXHSFB players ever earned him a scholarship at Texas A&M. College Station is less than an hour south of Bremond, but it might as well be a different world. Paul played 2A football for a town of under 900 people. Now, he’d be playing SEC football in a stadium that held over 102,000.

Make no mistake, Paul’s college football career is a resounding success story. He graduated in three years, then played another season at Arkansas State. But if you had asked TXHSFB fans after that third state championship whether Paul would have more than 434 receiving yards in his entire career, every single one of them would have slammed the over. And there is no clear-cut answer as to why it didn’t happen. Paul was a model student and teammate. He worked as hard as anybody. He just found out what many people think they know but don’t fully respect: That jump in competition between high school football and the SEC is a son of a gun.

“He’s coming from Bremond, where he won Mr. Texas Football,” Kasowski said. “Everybody knows about him; everybody is worshiping him. He was almost set up for failure a little bit, because I think he didn’t know where to rate himself as an athlete going into college athletics and the SEC.”

His freshman season in 2017, Paul played in every game and had his best statistical season (16 catches for 187 yards). But that offseason, Texas A&M fired Kevin Sumlin, the coach who recruited Paul, and hired Jimbo Fisher. Kellen Mond, Texas A&M’s quarterback from 2017-20 and one of Paul’s best friends, remembers Paul dropping a pass in the first quarter of the 2018 season opener against Northwestern State. He was pulled from the game, then caught seven passes the rest of his Texas A&M career. So goes life in major college football.

Mond and Paul’s friend group used to discuss Paul’s lack of playing time in post-practice video game debriefs. His teammates would tell him they didn’t know why they’d taken him out for dropping a ball when everybody drops a ball or two. But Paul always put on a smile and said he was happy with how things were going. That attitude was better for the team, but Mond always wonders if it was better for Paul.  

“It’s a bit of a double-edged sword,” Mond said. “If he were more rebellious, even though those rebellious people are on the cancerous side to the team, then maybe he would have continued to play a bit more. But he chose the other route, like, ‘I’m just going to be blessed with whatever opportunity is given to me.’”

Paul had that same signature smile he flashed at Bremond, except now it was a mask. He wasn’t straight-up lying to teammates, per se. Paul did love everything about Texas A&M and his time there. But his brain was a warzone even his closest friends couldn’t see. Texas A&M’s Roshauud Paul wasn’t starting on the field, and Jack Paul from Bremond was in an existential crisis because of it. 

“From early success through high school state championships and Division I opportunities, my identity was built around the game,” Paul wrote in a recent LinkedIn post. “On the outside, things looked great. But during parts of my playing career, I was deeply isolated and I masked it with smiles, distractions, and partying instead of dealing with things in a healthy way.”

The mindset that allowed Paul to reach Texas A&M’s football team prevented him from simply enjoying the fact that he was on Texas A&M’s football team. He was pushing himself to be the very best, which is admirable. But he was so focused on the climb that he couldn’t enjoy the view. 

“It’s the cyclical nature of, ‘I’m not going to give myself credit until I reach the next level,’ Mond said. “But if the levels are infinite, that means you’ll never give yourself credit, because there was always a level to go above.”

As Mond says, if you make it to the NFL, then you want to start. Then if you start, you want to win the division. Then if you want to win the division, you want to win the Super Bowl. Then if you want to win the Super Bowl, you want to win two. And for those who delude themselves that they’ll be satisfied at this marker, insert Tom Brady, who came out of retirement for one more year despite already having seven Super Bowls. Defining yourself on your athletic accomplishments will always leave you feeling like you didn’t do enough.  

Every year, like clockwork, Paul’s game-winning touchdown from the 2014 Class 2A DII State Championship would pop up on his Facebook page. As Paul sprints to the end zone, a Red Sea of Bremond fans rise in the AT&T Stadium bleachers behind him. The longer he didn’t play, the more he started looking at the crowd instead of himself, and wondering what they were thinking about him now. 

“I felt like I had let everyone down,” Paul said.

His college football career had ended, but Jack Paul was still tethered to the perfect image of ‘Roshauud Paul: football star’ that he had built. So now, with no more yards to define himself by, he sought validation in dollars earned. He chased jobs he had no passion for for the money, working as an insurance agent and consulting firm recruiter. He was so busy maintaining appearances that he didn’t know who he actually was anymore, like a house with a pristine foyer because everything is in disarray in the closet under the stairs. 

“Who am I? What can I really bring to the table?” Paul said. “I’m not really sure, because football is the only thing that I’ve applied this to.’”

But when Paul re-examined his football career, he noticed a through-line. At every step of the way, from losing playing time to transferring to Arkansas State to transferring to the business world, he’d tried to do it by himself. He was scared to ask for help and be judged because of it. It would mean the facade he’d carefully crafted was crumbling. 

“There’s a lot of wisdom and knowledge out there,” Paul said. “You just have to be vulnerable enough to speak up.” 

Every person interviewed for this story says they’ve noticed a growth in Roshauud in the past couple of years that’s hard for them to explain.

For Mond, it came when Paul texted him about his new job coaching at Caldwell ISD and how excited he was to mentor younger athletes. 

White, his friend since elementary school, said Paul didn’t have much time to text in their Bremond team’s Snapchat group message when he was at Texas A&M. But when White was finishing up school at Sam Houston, Paul roomed with him for a semester and helped talk him through issues in his own life. 

Kasowski, Paul’s high school coach, ran into Paul when he took Bremond’s basketball team to a Houston Rockets game. Paul wrapped him in a bear hug and thanked him for all Kasowski had done for him.

In all of these stories, Paul has shifted his focus from his identity as a football player to that of a friend and mentor. 

Today, Paul is working in Cypress in the sports and events management space. He’s volunteered at Texas A&M baseball games and track events, even sitting down with Texas A&M Athletic Director Trev Alberts. Last week, he completed his Youth Mental Health First Aid certification to help the next athlete like himself fighting a battle others cannot see. Paul’s playing days are over, but he’s entered a new arena in sports. 

For the most part, his eyes are fully forward. But every now and again, that Snapchat group text will flash on his phone. The app sends users a memory of a video or picture they took on this day years earlier. Whenever a video of the Bremond locker room after a rivalry win pops up, Paul’s old teammates will send it to him. This December, videos of the state championship locker room after Bremond’s three-peat will pop up with the caption, “Ten years ago, today…” 

Paul will look at the screen and smile. At that moment, and just for that moment, he’ll be Jack Paul again. 

“They always say you wish you knew you were in the good days when you were in them,” White said. “We knew we were in the good days, but they still went way too fast for us.”