Will LaNorris Sellers succeed at USC? His story so far is blessed with good fortune

Cheryl Ford was gonna watch her baby die right in front of her.

She always hated that her oldest child couldn’t go a second without chewing on something. Gatorade caps, water bottle caps, sunflower seeds — ugh, sunflower seeds are the worst.

If sunflower seeds were a drug, LaNorris Sellers would’ve been in rehab a long time ago. He’s hooked and his remedy of choice is the dill pickle flavor of the “BIGS” brand. The issue isn’t that he chews them, it’s his means of disposing of the shells.

Offensive coordinator Dowell Loggains lost it when he found seeds in a urinal inside South Carolina’s facility. One time, Sellers little brother, Jayden (a South Carolina WR commit) found a single shell in the shower. “It just blew me (away),” he said. Sellers’ dad, Norris, put down the hammer and banned sunflower seeds in his house; “We don’t have a maid around here, sir,” Norris jokes.

And Ford, Sellers’ mom, likely thought about following suit.

“I would find them in my toilets,” Ford said. “I would find them in my shoes. I would find them in the kitchen on the floor. They’d be all stuck in my carpet.”

One night during his senior year, though, she would’ve been thrilled if Sellers was just scarfing on seeds. He was sitting on the couch next to Jayden, talking to his friends and laughing. He was laughing so much that Jayden started chuckling. Then Sellers pointed at his throat and ran into his mom’s room with this exasperated look, pointing to his neck around without saying anything.

“Quit playing,” she told him.

But he kept squirming and pointing. For as long as she could remember, she’d hound him: “Stop chewing on those bottle caps. You’re gonna swallow one, one day.” The day had arrived. Ford went into shock, but with some forceful pats on the back and the good ‘ole Heimlich maneuver, the cap dislodged.

Ford was nearly in tears.

“And he’s laughing,” she said of Sellers. “I’m like, ‘Are you freaking kidding me. That is not funny.’ ”

Coaches will say Sellers is poised — it’s a good coach-speak word. To normal folks, he’s laid back. Chill. The only way anyone could tell how he’s feeling during a game is if they strapped a heart-rate monitor to him. If he’s rattled, he doesn’t show it. If he’s nervous, no one knows.

His mom was recently asked if she’s ever seen him flustered. Of course, she said. But just once — while he was a senior at South Florence High.

The Bruins led A.C. Flora by 1 in the third quarter of the state semifinals. On second-and-long inside the red zone, South Florence called an option play. Sellers read the safety, pulled the ball out of the belly of his running back and was looking to run. At the same time, right guard Connor Jones was pulling to Sellers’ side and smashed the AC Flora safety toward the sideline.

Problem was, the safety stayed upright and basically ran into Sellers, wrapping up No. 16 and slamming him to the ground. Sellers pounded the ball on the turf, popped up and walked toward Jones like a parent who just caught his son stealing. He bent over and kept yelling until a teammate told Sellers to cool it.

Ford remembers the anger in her son. It’s the only time she’s ever seen it.

“That was the one time we saw him light into somebody,” his father said.

Over on the sideline, Sellers and South Florence coach Drew Marlowe talked about the play, about how he was supposed to cut inside, about how he was the only one at fault. Back in the huddle, Sellers apologized to Jones.

That is who South Carolina’s new starting quarterback is. Even the bad stories turn out good. If there’s adversity, it doesn’t last. Which, all things considered, is quite the change for the Gamecocks football team under Shane Beamer.

Let’s rewind.

The quarterback who started Beamer’s first game in Columbia was Zeb Noland, whose tale and journey were so bizarre you could make a based-on-a-true-story film about his football career and a studio might bite. In August, he was South Carolina’s graduate assistant. By September, he was the Gamecocks’ starting QB — and helped lead them to a bowl game.

Starting under center for the next two years was Spencer Rattler. His biography probably won’t turn into a movie, but boy is it fascinating. No. 1 quarterback recruit for most of his high school life. Had a Netflix documentary crew filming his senior year. Gets kicked off his high school football team. Goes to Oklahoma. Starts at Oklahoma. Gets benched at Oklahoma in favor of Caleb Williams. Then winds up at South Carolina and is QB1.

Now comes Sellers, who sometimes doesn’t dispose of his sunflower seeds in a proper receptacle and once yelled at a high school teammate before apologizing.

“I know in my heart coach (Shane) Beamer is never going to get a call at 2 a.m. that LaNorris was doing something wrong,” said David Prince, who coached Sellers during his freshman year at South Florence. “I don’t know how else to explain it. He’s just a great kid.”

And as the adage goes: Good things happen to good people and, well, Sellers reaps the benefits.

Dowell Loggains’ quest to humble Sellers

From the moment Sellers stepped on campus, South Carolina offensive coordinator Dowell Loggains has seemingly made it his mission in life to humble Sellers.

If Sellers tossed a pick in practice last year, Loggains would hound him. “Hey, (Spencer) Rattler just threw the ball 50 times in a game and didn’t turn it over once. And you get one throw and you throw a pick?”

Loggains’ philosophy is that tough love creates a shield and that shield is the only way they’ll be able to handle the burden of being an SEC quarterback. To be capable of rising to the moment when it’s third down and Bryant-Denny Stadium sounds like firecrackers exploding in your ear.

He knows Sellers is ridiculously talented. He knows he’s 6-foot-3, 240 pounds and isn’t getting brought down by one dude. He also knows that the killer trait in a quarterback is a big head, which sometimes means he has to deflate the ego every once in a while.

Even when it’s ridiculous.

In Week 2 last season, Sellers saw college action for the first time against Furman, completing all four of his passes for 86 yards, a touchdown to Nyck Harbor and another score on one of the prettiest 50-yard bombs you’ll ever see.

After the game, Sellers’ grandma, Eleanor Ford, saw Loggains.

“How do you think LaNorris did?” she asked.

“Oh, he sucks,” Loggains responded playfully.

Months later, after South Carolina beat Vanderbilt and Sellers had another highlight touchdown, Eleanor wanted to follow up.

“Coach,” she said, “do you still think he sucks?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Loggains replied.

“Good,” she said. “Keep telling him that.”

Things always work out

In a way, Loggains is trying to manufacture distress for a kid who has seemed to sidestep misfortune.

Which led to the biggest test of adversity Sellers has had, and as seemingly most things in his life do, ended up working about as well as possible.

In a win over North Myrtle Beach High during his junior year, Sellers ran on a read-option. He faked a pitch out to the running back, trying instead to rev up the engines and turn the corner. Just in front of him, a lineman fell and Sellers had to step on the brakes. He was tackled from the side, falling onto his left shoulder. As he hit the ground, a pair of defensive linemen fell on him, compressing Sellers’ chest.

Trainers initially thought it was a shoulder injury. Then they figured it must be a collarbone out of place. But Sellers sat on the training table inside the South Florence fieldhouse. He couldn’t lift his arm.

His mom handed him Motrin, but he refused. Sellers has watched too many documentaries about football players getting addicted to drugs that he steers clear of any pain medicine. Finally he grabbed the Motrin, split it, put one half in his mouth and chucked the other half on the ground.

Ford knew it was serious. The next day, she took him to get X-rays in Florence. Late in the afternoon, they called her.

“It’s actually worse than we thought,” they told her.

Sellers had dislocated a bone in his chest. The bigger issue was the bone had shifted three inches to the right and was laying on his heart, sitting around all of his major blood vessels.

Suddenly, it was like there was a starving lion in the room. The doctors told Sellers to sit still. A wrong movement could be lethal — a chance that a wrong shift could puncture his heart or burst a blood vessel.

The doctors in Florence wouldn’t touch Sellers, Norris said. It was too much of a risk. The family made the 90-minute drive to Columbia on Saturday, where a doctor at Prisma Health was expected to perform surgery on Sunday.

The doctors did a CT scan on Saturday night. Then they did one on Sunday morning. In between, Ford sat in the hospital room awake all night trying not to think of the worst.

When the Sellers family finally was reading for surgery, a doctor greeted them with this bizarre smirk on his face.

“Let me show you something,” he told them.

He pulled up the CT scan from Sunday morning. It made no sense. The bone laying over Sellers heart, the one that shifted three inches to the right, had somehow shifted three inches back to the left.

All the doc had to do was grab Sellers’ left arm, rotate it up, forward, then back. Voila!

There was no knife. No surgery. The Sellers family was on the road back to the next day.

“It could have only been God,” Ford said. “It was crazy.”

“I can’t explain it,” his father said. “Good things just happen to him.”