Sixteen years ago today, on July 21, 2010, a man named Randy Jackson died in Wichita, Kansas, at the age of 61, after a battle with pancreatic cancer. If you’re not deep into NFL history, that name alone might not ring a bell. But Jackson’s story is one of those sports tales that says more about survival and quiet resilience than it does about touchdowns and highlight reels, and it starts long before he ever put on an NFL uniform.
Jackson was born in Atlanta, Texas, in November 1948. He grew up to become a running back at Wichita State University, a program that, in the fall of 1970, was building a season worth remembering. The Shockers were flying to Logan, Utah, for a game against Utah State when their chartered plane, an aging Martin 4-0-4 that hadn’t flown in three years before being pressed back into service, went down in the Colorado Rockies near Silver Plume. The aircraft had strayed into a valley near Loveland Pass that it simply couldn’t climb out of. It struck the mountainside, broke apart, and caught fire.
Thirty-one people died that day. Fourteen of them were student-athletes, players Jackson had trained and traveled with all season. Only nine people on that plane survived. Randy Jackson was one of them.
It’s hard to overstate how much that single afternoon reshaped the rest of his life. The Wichita State plane crash remains one of the deadliest tragedies in American college sports history, and for decades afterward the university held an annual ceremony each October 2nd to honor those who didn’t make it home. Jackson carried that day with him for the rest of his life, as did every other survivor.
What he did next says a lot about who he was. He didn’t quit football. He kept playing, finished out his college career, and in 1972 the Buffalo Bills selected him in the fourth round of the NFL Draft, 79th overall. He spent time with the Bills before moving on to the San Francisco 49ers and later the Philadelphia Eagles, closing out an NFL career that, on paper, wasn’t enormous. Thirty rushing attempts, five receptions, one touchdown. Those numbers don’t capture much. What they do confirm is that a survivor of one of the worst tragedies in college football history still found his way onto NFL rosters just a couple of years later, which by itself is a fairly remarkable thing to have done.
After football ended, Jackson didn’t disappear from public life the way a lot of former pros do. He became a teacher. Specifically, he taught physical education and coached basketball at Robinson Middle School in Wichita for more than three decades. There’s something worth sitting with in that. A man who survived a plane crash that killed most of his teammates went on to spend the majority of his adult life working with kids in a middle school gym, year after year, long after anyone was writing articles about his NFL stats.
Jackson wasn’t alone in that instinct to keep going. The other survivors of the Wichita State crash, players like Mike Bruce, John Hoheisel, and Rick Stephens, all carried their own versions of that same experience forward, some staying closely tied to the university and its memorial services for the rest of their lives, others processing it more privately. Every October, the school still places a wreath at a memorial called Memorial ’70, honoring the fourteen players, athletic staff, and boosters who never made it back from that trip.
What makes the Wichita State crash even more haunting, in a strange historical footnote kind of way, is that just over a month later, on November 14, 1970, another college football team’s plane went down. The Marshall University crash killed 75 people, nearly the entire team, and became the subject of the well known 2006 film “We Are Marshall.” Wichita State’s tragedy happened first, killed nearly as many people, and yet it never received anywhere near the same level of cultural attention. Wichita State didn’t get a major Hollywood film. It got a wreath-laying ceremony that continues quietly, year after year, largely known only to the people connected to it.
Randy Jackson’s NFL career, brief as it was, exists almost as a kind of quiet rebuttal to that tragedy. He didn’t let October 2, 1970, be the end of his story. He built an entire second act out of it, first in professional football, then in a middle school gymnasium teaching kids the fundamentals of basketball for over thirty years.
When he died in July 2010, the news coverage was modest, a few lines in football history archives, a mention on Pro Football Reference. There was no wave of national tributes. But for the people who knew what he’d been through, and what he chose to do afterward, his death marked the passing of someone who had quite literally been given a second chance at life and had spent every day since making something worthwhile out of it.
Sixteen years later, his name still surfaces in one specific context almost every October, whenever people revisit the story of the Wichita State plane crash. He’s listed among the nine survivors, a footnote in a tragedy that reshaped an entire athletic program. But footnotes like that deserve a fuller telling sometimes. Randy Jackson wasn’t just a survivor of a disaster. He was a professional athlete who earned his spot on three different NFL rosters after living through something most people can’t imagine, and then he spent the rest of his working life teaching physical education to kids who likely had no idea what their gym teacher had been through.
That’s the kind of story that doesn’t always make it into the record books, but it’s exactly the kind of story worth remembering on the anniversary of his death