Hey Fighting Tigers

All right, welcome to another edition of Hey Fightin' Podcasts, joined once again by Jacob Hester here at the Marriott Marquis in Atlanta from Jacob's hotel room.

Very clean hotel room.

Very clean.

Jacob, before we get into the football, how was your Christmas?

I know you came up Christmas Day, but how was your Christmas?

So it was good.

So playing football, you know, basically my entire life growing up in college and in the NFL, I missed a lot of Christmases. There was a lot of Christmas days that I wasn't able to be there. I think the first seven that I was married to my wife, I didn't see her. Yeah. So it was one of those deals where if I could be home for Christmas, I was going to do it. So I actually didn't travel with the team, stayed there for Christmas morning so I could see my boys and wife and the whole deal, open gifts. And flew Christmas Day, which was something I've never done before. That was a unique experience. Commercial? Yeah, to fly on Christmas. Was anybody else in the airport? No. Like, it was like a zombie land. Ghost town. Right? And then it was so that was a little bit different, but excited to be here, excited to have the opportunity to spend Christmas with the crew and get here and do a little work. We had Media Day that morning, so got to work as soon as we got here the media schedule for these things is crazy man

like i i'm very fortunate um i have two young kids and so i was ls u let me come up with kind of the

later plane after christmas so i got to do christmas day with my family which first of all was great

my four-year-old like you know how this goes with kids my four-year-old hit like peak christmas this year this was the first time she's really like gotten christmas right so she

was super excited about santa and every present she got she kept saying i always wanted this

for every present so it was adorable and i was that makes it the best though i know it like

as you you know this as you get older christmas gets less and less

exciting for you as an individual but then you get the kids and it just kind of reignized that flame

so that was great but kind of seeing the the media schedule and and what the team has gone through

it's just crazy especially with this semi-final game i think the national championship game

it felt as you gets here it'll be less intense but you know i thought I thought about it at the SEC championship game and certainly think about it now, and definitely thought about with the Heisman stuff. It's just unbelievable. The amount of media these guys are doing, the time that they're putting into this, the sacrifices they're making. You mentioned Christmas.

You know, it's one of those things that if you've gotten used to it, I'm sure, a little bit because you were gone so much.

But if you've spent every Christmas at home with your family,

you may not appreciate how difficult it is for some of these guys to be away from their

families on Christmas.

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