BATON ROUGE, La. (KBTX) - Mark Roman still remembers the day his son, wearing a worn-out replica of his San Francisco 49ers jersey, jumped off the family couch and ran a football into another room without breaking a stride.
It was about that time — when Ashton Bethel-Roman was approximately 5 years old — that the young athlete told his dad he wanted to follow in his footsteps and one day become a professional football player. He asked Roman if he’d watch his games.
“Son, if you play on the moon, I’d follow you to the moon and watch you there,” Roman told his son.
Saturday, Roman and his wife, Ashley Bethel-Roman, will continue to live up to that promise by attending No. 3 Texas A&M’s Southeastern Conference bout with No. 20 LSU. While Baton Rouge isn’t quite the moon, it’s a place that’s been central to the orbits of both parents.
“Going back to Baton Rouge, for me, that’s like home,” Ashley Bethel-Roman said. “It feels like home when we go back.”
In 1998, Ashley Bethel was six months into her college track career at LSU. She took a call from a friend while spending Christmas break with family in Lake Charles, and during the call, the phone was passed to Roman. By the end of the call, the then-junior defensive back on the Tiger football team asked the track freshman out on a date.
Thanks, in part, to the intense strength-training regimen of then-LSU coach Tommy Moffitt and a 1998 season in which Roman pulled down three interceptions for the Tigers, Roman was drafted in the second round of the 2000 NFL Draft by the Cincinnati Bengals. During his father’s nine-year NFL career, Ashton Bethel-Roman was born, practically with a football in his hand. The youth-sized 49ers jersey that bore his father’s name and number on the back was so attached to the youngster’s body, the screen-printed numbers practically wore off the bright red fabric.
The young Bethel-Roman so desired to start his career as a football player that he would force his older sister into the backyard to defend routes he would run. That sister, Taylor Roman, became an athlete in her own right and played softball at Ole Miss.
“He always had a football in his hand, or he would want to wear helmets, or one of our friends bought him his first pair of shoulder pads, and he would just wear them around the house with a jersey on and didn’t care,” Ashley Bethel-Roman said.
At that time, Ashton Bethel-Roman envisioned becoming a Tiger, like his mother and father.
“If you would have told me when I was a sophomore in high school that I was going A&M in two years, I would have laughed in your face, because I grew up an LSU Tiger,” Ashton Bethel-Roman said. “I only wanted to go to LSU.
Under his father’s coaching, Ashton Bethel-Roman began his competitive football career as a quarterback and linebacker. Even at that early age, Roman saw his son’s ability to track and catch a ball.
“He was a ball hawk on defense,” Roman said of his son. “At the time, the Honey Badger \[defensive back Tyrann Mathieu\] was at LSU, and he loved the Honey Badger. So, if the Honey Badger stripped the ball, he wanted to go in the game and strip a ball. Whatever he did, he just wanted to emulate him.”
It wasn’t until Ashton Bethel-Roman entered middle school that he honed his focus on wide receiver. At Fort Bend Ridge Point, head coach Rick Lafavers immediately saw his speed and athletic ability. However, it was the toughness and competitive nature of the 6-foot receiver that predicted his future in college football.
“He just wanted to win at everything,” Lafavors said. “He did not like to lose and would get in a bad mood if he ever did. Just so highly, highly competitive. Very mentally tough. Surprisingly, he’s thin-looking, but surprisingly very, very strong. He was an over 300-pound clinger. He’s much stronger than he looks.”
He turned that toughness and competitive drive into a 1,997-yard, 17-touchdown career, earning him a consensus 4-star designation. While schools like Oregon, Texas Tech and Kansas State, then under offensive coordinator Collin Klein, recruited Ashton Bethel-Roman, the speedster always had eyes on the Southeastern Conference. Ultimately, he signed with Arkansas, recruited by then-wide receivers coach Kenny Guiton. Shortly after Bethel-Roman signed, Guiton left, and a sickness in the receiver’s extended family left him wanting to be closer to his home in Houston. Arkansas ultimately released him from his commitment, and it wasn’t long until the Aggies, under the direction of then-new head coach Mike Elko and Klein, were in pursuit.
“I remember watching his tape when we got hired, before he signed with Arkansas, thinking he was a really talented player and I wished we had recruited him,” Elko said of his initial recruitment. “So, we did everything we could in the final hours to try and get him to flip to us and just couldn’t get it over the hump.”
For Roman, A&M’s interest was surreal. As a senior at New Iberia High School in Louisiana, Roman went on a recruiting trip to College Station to meet with then-Aggie head coach R.C. Slocum. Later in his career, the Aggie connections continued when he played for head coach Mike Sherman in Green Bay, several years before he would take the helm of the Aggies. Not to mention, Moffitt, his former strength coach at LSU, was now in the same position at A&M.
“\[Ashton Bethel-Roman\] couldn’t understand it, because he was not alive and he hadn’t experienced it before,” Roman said. “But I was like, ‘Man, this is kind of cool. I was considering coming here, and now you have an opportunity to come here at that time.”
After Ashton Bethel-Roman’s visit to the Aggies in December of 2023, he was stubborn. He still didn’t know if A&M was the right fit. After all, the Aggies under former head coach Jimbo Fisher spent no time recruiting him.
“But just talking to Coach Elko, he really made the decision way easier for me to go from a place I barely knew anything about, for me to feel comfortable here,” Ashton Bethel-Roman said. “He knew what he was talking about, and I’m glad he did it.”
The decision finally paid dividends last weekend, when the sophomore posted a career-high 83 yards on four catches and his second career receiving touchdown. The location of the breakout performance was not lost on the receiver, having been signed to play for the Razorbacks two years prior.
“It felt good because I’ve been here so many times as a recruit and I signed here and then didn’t end up coming,” he said. “It felt good playing, especially playing the guys at Arkansas. A lot of them are my guys, so it felt good.”
For Mark Roman, though, that performance wasn’t the proudest moment. It was a text message from his former LSU strength coach, who now trains his son at A&M.
“He’s a dog,” the text message read. “He’s working his butt off.”
The family will experience another full-circle moment Saturday, when their son runs out onto the field at Tiger Stadium for the first time as the Aggies match up with the Tigers for a 6:30 p.m. kick. For this trip to Death Valley, their allegiances will be vastly different.
“Make no mistake, you know who we’re cheering for... But I enjoy going back to LSU. It’s a beautiful campus. The atmosphere is crazy,” Ashley Bethel-Roman said. “And so, I can’t wait till these two teams meet each other and both of their fan bases meet each other. It’s going to be a crazy game.”
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