‘Put those guys in the dirt’ — Buoyed by his mother’s strength, Kelvin Banks Jr. is doing damage at Texas

AUSTIN, Texas — The doctors told Big Kelvin that his wife wouldn’t make it.

We’re just trying to make her comfortable.

A few months ago, in the spring of this year, Kelvin Banks Sr. heard those words as the mother of his children lay sedated and on a ventilator.

For months, Monica Banks had suffered through this illness, needing a hospital trip every other week for fluids and more fruitless tests. She became incapacitated, mostly lost the ability to speak and walk, in enough pain to virtually be ridden to her bed, her body battling an unseen and mysterious monster.

No one knew why she was sick or how to treat the illness.

These were tough times, especially for her 20-year-old son away at college.

In fact, up until recently, Kelvin Banks Jr. has shied away from discussing his mother’s health, keeping his thoughts tucked away, perhaps suppressing them deep within. Outwardly, he was smiling, happy and starring on the offensive line for the University of Texas.

Inside, he was mad.

“I didn’t let people know how I was feeling,” he says. “I could feel myself being angry at others for something they didn’t do.”

All of this is now in the past.

As he sits here within the Texas football facility telling his story publicly for the first time, Monica Banks is on the road to recovery. She attended her first Texas football game last weekend — the season-opening 52-0 win over Colorado State — without any serious health issues for the first time since her son’s freshman season in 2022.

She watched as her son pushed around an inferior opponent. If you don’t know who Kelvin Banks Jr. is, you haven’t been paying enough attention. He protects the blindside of the other NFL Draft first-round projected pick, quarterback Quinn Ewers.

While much of the focus is on Ewers, the man blocking for him is in the middle of one of the more remarkable college careers for any player: Kelvin Banks has started every game of his college career at left tackle, one of the more difficult and important positions on the football field.

It comes with this added bonus: At left tackle, if you are part of the story, you’ve likely made an awful mistake. The failures are amplified more than any of the successes.

For the most part, Kelvin is not part of the story.

“Whenever somebody comes to me and asks, ‘Coach, what do I need to do and how do I need to do it?’ I say, ‘Be like Kelvin,’” said Texas coach Steve Sarkisian.

Incredibly athletic for his 6-foot-5, 320-pound frame — his high school coach said he had moves like a point guard as a ninth-grade basketball player — Kelvin is a big-bodied, physically imposing and downright mean-blocking you-know-what on the football field.

Off it, he’s a barbecue-loving, teddy bear of a 20-year-old, humble with a persistent smile.

His athletic skills come from his dad, Big Kelvin, a big-rig driver who competed in football beyond college at the arena level.

But his physicality? His aggression? That comes from his mom.

“When she can’t make a game, she’d call me, ‘You better put those guys in the dirt!’” Kelvin Jr. said.

At the game last week, Monica used a wheelchair as she continues to re-learn how to walk — the result of her illness. Doctors eventually found the catalyst, a leaky gallbladder filling her body with toxins. Over the summer, they removed the gallbladder in life-saving surgery.

The woman who gives Kelvin Banks Jr. his inspiration, the person who instills in him that nasty play as a football road grader, that person, his mother, is finally healthy.

Given her situation just months ago and considering a lifetime of other ailments, it’s hard to believe. Before her issues with the gallbladder, Monica Banks underwent brain surgery to remove a small portion of the temporal lobe to relieve her of epileptic seizures.

Eight years ago, Monica endured a seizure while driving her two children, Kelvin Jr. and brother Jalen — their vehicle luckily coasting untouched through a busy intersection. Four years later, she wasn’t so lucky. While driving alone, Monica crashed into a dump truck — a collision that left her with a broken hip and gashed neck.

“Most people would have died from everything I went through,” Monica said. “I was in a coma twice in the hospital and they told my family I was going to die.”

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Perspective is important. This Saturday, Kelvin Banks Jr. plays one of the biggest games of his career when No. 3 Texas meets No. 10 Michigan in the premier matchup of Week 2 in college football.

While it seems like life or death — a top-10 matchup of two of the biggest brands in football — it is not. Monica, unable to fly because of her condition, will watch from the family’s home in Humble, Texas. Kelvin Banks Sr. plans to travel to Ann Arbor to watch his youngest son compete on one of the grandest stages in the sport: at the Big House in a nationally televised noon kickoff on FOX.

The matchup is made-for-TV — arguably college football’s most historic blue-blood powers from the sport’s two most powerful leagues, each a participant in the College Football Playoff a year ago. In the game-within-the-game, there are massive stakes, too: Kelvin, a projected top-10 NFL Draft pick, against a Michigan defensive front that features a bevy of NFL talent, including tackle Mason Graham.

Kelvin is, of course, used to big stages and highly touted opponents. As a true freshman in 2022, his second game as a starter, he faced off against No. 1 Alabama and defensive freaks like Will Anderson and Dallas Turner.

What’s wild about that, Sarkisian said, is that Texas signed seven offensive linemen in the 2022 class, his first full recruiting class as coach. Of the seven, all but one of them enrolled early in January that year.

“Only one guy came in June in the summer and that was Kelvin,” Sarkisian said. “Inevitably, he turns around and ends up starting his first game as a true freshman.”

Three years later, he’s the central member of a Texas offensive line that returns all but one starter from one of the country’s best units last season. They’ve had 123 career starts combined. The Texas line is a tight group — all 20 of them, walk-ons included — bowl together and hold monthly dinners. All told, they can put down about 400 chicken wings (20 per player) in a single sitting.

On the field, Kelvin sets himself apart, both from his teammates as well as all others nationally. He hasn’t missed a start in Austin. He’ll make his 29th consecutive start this weekend. As it turns out, Kelvin hasn’t missed a start at left tackle over the last five years. He started 34 games as a high school left tackle from his sophomore season onward. It should have been more, said Kenny Harrison, the head coach at Summer Creek High in the Houston metro area.

Kelvin couldn’t play varsity as a ninth-grader because of Texas high school transfer policies. So, during his ninth-grade year, he served as a scout team lineman for varsity players.

“He was better than any lineman we played against the whole season,” a laughing Harrison said.

Kelvin returns home to Houston quite often, mostly to see his mother, but also to ride his ATV and go “mudding,” he said. He likes fishing, too. And he loves barbecue enough to have thought about eating it during an actual game.

“Call timeout and get a piece of rib,” he chuckles.

But football is his first love. More specifically, football blocking is his first love. Even more specific, pancaking an opponent and leaving him flat on the ground, like this.

There’s that nasty mentality he gets, of course, from mom.

While Monica is healthier than she’s been in years, she will never be perfect. Kelvin knows that. Despite her epileptic brain surgery, the seizures are only limited — not eliminated. If she endures too much stress, Monica is susceptible to more seizures, and at least for now, she’s bound to that wheelchair.

Kelvin can talk about it now. That, for him, is a big step.

“I used to be the kind of person to deal with it on my own, that I’m tough,” he said, “but me growing with age and maturity, I figured that it was OK to feel certain ways. That’s the biggest part of my growth from being young to now. Not letting it dwell and build up. Just needed to get stuff off my chest.”

He talks to his dad, position coach, brother, even teammates. Now, he shares his story with the world.

On Saturday, as the Longhorns meet the Wolverines, he’ll know a healthy mom is watching back home, rooting him on and quietly whispering under her breath, “Put those guys in the dirt!”