Kevin Jennings is spending Thanksgiving at his alma mater, South Oak Cliff High School, doing a different type of pass than the one that’s made him the most famous collegiate athlete in Dallas. 

He and his SMU teammates are handing off turkeys to 1,000 people. The families form a car line backed up a mile down the road to I-35, inching closer to a happier Thanksgiving provided by young men they’ll soon watch on TV in the ACC championship game. And the more cars the players interact with the more they realize why they aren’t practicing on the Wednesday of Game Week, that whether 13 suits in a boardroom in Grapevine, Texas, deem them worthy of the College Football Playoff isn’t what really matters.   

The 12-mile drive the team bus took to get them here crossed the two different versions of the city they represent across their chest on game day. There is the Hilltop where SMU’s campus resides in the middle of Highland Park, the seventh-richest suburb in the United States. And then there is where SMU is today, Oak Cliff, where the median household income ($48,555) is less than a year’s tuition at SMU ($59,500).

For a long time, this area didn’t feel much connection and couldn't relate to the private, preppy university. South Oak Cliff defensive coordinator Kyle Ward describes a phone call with a family friend the other day, a man who attended South Oak Cliff when it was integrated in 1966. He hadn’t been an SMU fan in 30 years.

Until the star quarterback was one of them.

“It’s like Kevin Jennings fever around here,” Ward said.

That’s why South Oak Cliff head coach Jason Todd recently crowned him the ‘King of Dallas.’ Because somewhere along his journey from winning Dallas ISD’s first state championship since 1959 as a senior in high school to legendary Alabama head coach Nick Saban naming him the most underrated player in college football, Jennings’ story became about so much more than football. It became about bridging the old SMU to the new. About uniting this city. 

And that’s a lot to put on a 20-year-old’s shoulders, but Todd only says it because he knows Jennings can handle it.

“If it had been me in that type of position, I’d probably be walking around with fur coats on telling people I’m the shit,” Todd said.

Jennings might as well don a striped shirt and stocking hat, because his behavior off the field more closely resembles ‘Where’s Waldo?’ After passing out turkeys for 20 minutes, he disappears from the masses, as slippery in real life as he is in the pocket.

Like all elite quarterbacks, Jennings takes advantage of small windows, and he saw one to leave the turkey giveaway for the reason he was most excited to return to his alma mater, to watch South Oak Cliff’s practice for its third round playoff game against Marshall. 

By the time other South Oak Cliff alums eventually made their way to the practice field they made history on, Jennings was already there, spinning a football in his hands on the edge of team drills, talking to current quarterback Carter Kopecky.  

“Being able to come back and see the guys who helped me out throughout my high school years, being able to give back to them and talk to them, it’s a blessing,” Jennings said.

The current South Oak Cliff seniors were the only ones on campus when Jennings was the starting quarterback, but he is still the program’s standard all these years later. He didn’t say much back then, either, the epitome of ‘Act like you’ve done it before,’ even if what he did then and is doing now hasn’t been. The players and coaches interviewed for this story bring up his one nightmarish start, his five turnovers in the Duke game, in the same breath they mention his no-look passes and scramble drills because they admire most that he’s the same man through it all. Calm and collected.

SMU head coach Rhett Lashlee has said Jennings’ best big-game trait is that he doesn’t know it’s a big game. In five starts from high school to college, he won that state championship, a conference championship, the Iron Skillet game against TCU and then SMU’s ACC opener against Florida State. But maybe his best big game trait is that every game he’s played in since the first round of the 2021 Texas high school football playoffs was his biggest game.

If South Oak Cliff doesn’t make it to the fourth round of the playoffs that year, where Lashlee first saw him live while recruiting players from Lovejoy, Jennings is not at SMU today. He was the number 1,535-ranked player in the country, per 247 Sports, committed to Missouri State because his stats didn’t convey his talent. Playing in the overmatched Dallas ISD district, South Oak Cliff would kick field goals on first down so as not to run up the score. 

Those coaching decisions would prompt Jennings’ father to call the coaches after the game. He thought his son’s stats could get him a scholarship. The South Oak Cliff coaches knew only winning in the biggest games could.

“To get a scholarship as a senior in high school at quarterback, you’ve got to win big,” Ward said. “When nobody else is playing, people are going to start showing up. We’re going to be the only show, and he’s got to show up.”

Jennings showed up that night with Lashlee in attendance, and he’s shown up for Lashlee in nine consecutive wins this season. With each game his stature grows, but the man under the helmet stays the same.

“He’s the perfect guy for success to happen to, because it won’t change him one bit,” Todd said.

It did, however, change the outlook of what’s possible for the next Kevin Jennings to come after him. Maybe that kid was on the practice field that afternoon, when the neighborhood hero came back home.

Really, he never left.