There are two plays that Jeff King made in Virginia Tech’s upset win over Duke in Blacksburg, Va., in 2005 that then-Hokies basketball coach Seth Greenberg still enjoys describing to this day.

“To have a chance to beat Duke, we needed to have someone who could lay a body on Shelden Williams,” Greenberg said. “And I remember King just absolutely taking his ass out.”

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Williams crossed King’s face and went up for a dunk.

“I said, ‘The first time he cuts in front of you, put your forearm into his chest,’” said Greenberg, who is now an analyst for ESPN. “I said, ‘Sweep his leg and knock his ass back.’

“And sure enough, Jeff did that.”

The second play came later with the Hokies’ upset possible.

“He lays out flat for a loose ball and comes up with a 50/50 ball,” Greenberg said. “We secure it, and we win the game. I was just hoping he didn’t get up and start running with it.”

King was a football player first. Or he was at Virginia Tech. The 2004-05 season was the first and only year he played basketball for Greenberg. But it came after his third season playing tight end for legendary Hokies football coach Frank Beamer.

A standout basketball player from Pulaski County High (Virginia), King played pickup games in college, including with Jamon Gordon and Zabian Dowdell, two starters on the Hokies’ basketball team. He played so much and so well that others in the athletic department noticed, including trainer Kevin Doolan, who recommended King to Greenberg.

The basketball coach did his own research and found himself a good basketball player — one who fit what he was trying to build, especially being in the same conference as Duke. Pulaski was a rival of J.J. Redick’s high school team in Virginia.

King received Beamer’s approval without any issues.

“(King) said he loves basketball,” Greenberg said. “He told me it could help him with his ability to run, change speeds, change direction, improve in an area that he was trying to improve on.”

Duke blew out Virginia Tech 100-65 in their first meeting. Greenberg got tossed.

“It was a 20-point game before you blinked in Cameron (Indoor Stadium),” King said.

The rematch was different starting with King vs. Williams. King played a career-high 21 minutes with Coleman Collins in foul trouble. King’s seven points were a career best. He also had three rebounds and an assist. King made a baby hook in the final three minutes to give the Hokies the lead back after Redick tied the game. Williams had 25 points and 17 rebounds in the first meeting. In the second, he had 16 and seven.

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After the Hokies’ 67-65 victory, Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski stopped King between media interviews. Coach K told King something along the lines of: “Hey, I wish I had somebody like you on my team.”

Every team needs a Jeff King. Krzyzewski saw that and Greenberg had it. And now you can ask the Chicago Bears about it. Virginia Tech’s upset win over Duke doesn’t happen without the grit, tenacity and work ethic of the Bears’ current co-director of player personnel.

The “accident” happened on second-and-1 for the Panthers from the Saints’ 38 in the first quarter. Officially, it was recorded as a 27-yard completion from David Carr to King.

It’s also Brandon Beane’s favorite play involving King. Beane, now the general manager of the Bills, can’t get through his account of it without laughing.

“He (crapped) his pants on the field,” Beane said “And we were wearing all whites that day.”

Jake Delhomme, the former Panthers quarterback, provided a more specific account.

“David Carr threw a pass a little high and Jeff went up to get it,” Delhomme said. “I don’t remember (the) safety to be honest, but he hit him pretty good directly in the stomach. And let’s just say there might have been an accident.”

Geep Chryst, a longtime NFL assistant coach and the Panthers’ tight ends coach at the time, won’t confirm or deny the story. But he’ll tell you that King didn’t want to leave the game before halftime and that the Saints safeties approached him differently.

“No one wanted to touch him,” Chyrst said, laughing.

They all laugh out of love for “Kinger.” Beane chuckles about the old pickup truck from high school that King drove back then.

“It wasn’t a sexy truck by any means,” he said, “but it got the job done for him.”

And Chryst recalls giving King a hard time about his college number.

“He wore No. 90 at Virginia Tech,” he said. “Who the hell is a tight end and wears No. 90?”

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King wore No. 87 before switching to No. 47 with the Panthers. Carolina picked him in the fifth round of the 2006 draft. He and Delhomme shared an agent in Rick Smith. Delhomme received a message from Smith telling him that Carolina drafted “a true throwback” in King.

“He was always in there and watching film, and naturally, I was kind of always in there,” Delhomme said. “You could tell he was an old soul.”

They hit it off, and the same happened with others, most notably Beane, who was the Panthers’ director of football operations at that time.

“He just was a regular guy,” Beane said. “He could hang with the players. He was just as comfortable hanging with the staff and the equipment guys and trainers. He would ask questions to scouts.”

Four of those Panthers scouts are now league executives, including Beane, Giants GM Joe Schoen, Titans vice president of player personnel Ryan Cowden and Seahawks vice president of player personnel Trent Kirchner. King picked all of their brains.

Chryst recalled King having “a voracious appetite” for watching film, a rare trait for any player, let alone a young one. King wouldn’t just watch the cut-ups provided but entire games from start to finish. Delhomme called him “a football junkie.”

“He would challenge you to work,” Chryst said. “He would want to know the game, not just like a quarterback but like a savant almost.”

On the field, King paid his dues trying to block defensive end Julius Peppers in practice, even though that meant being thrown around at times. King spent five seasons with the Panthers before playing two with the Cardinals. In his NFL career, King appeared in 108 games and made 156 catches for 1,323 yards and 12 touchdowns.

“Players loved him because he was tough as hell,” Beane said, “and he showed up and he did anything and everything you wanted him to.”

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King danced, too. In 2007, Christian Fauria joined the team for his 13th and final season in the NFL. Fauria celebrated his touchdowns often — you can find them on YouTube — and King imitated him.

During one training camp practice, King beat linebacker James Anderson for a touchdown during a red-zone drill. King spiked the ball and danced like Fauria would.

“Instead of getting offended by it, the defense just started to laugh,” Chryst said.

King danced during the regular season, too.

“There was a great joy that he played with,” Chryst said, “and it rubbed off on his teammates.”

And others who worked for the Panthers. It didn’t matter which department they worked in. King’s “accident” was captured by cameras and eventually placed on a mug as a gag gift by one of the Panthers’ equipment staff members for a Secret Santa gift exchange.

“I gave the guys a good story out of it anyway,” King said.

“He’s kept that ability to be relatable,” Chryst said.

King remembered everything about the play. He ran a seam route. Against Cover 2, he took it up the middle between the safeties. Against a single-high safety, the route stuck with the seam. The Saints had two high safeties and King ran down the middle. Carr’s pass was high.

“Dave kind of lofted it out there,” King said, “and Roman Harper, I mean, just knocked the s— out of me. Literally.”

Seeing “Jeff King” on the Bears’ list of front-office executives didn’t register at first for GM Ryan Poles. It took being in Halas Hall for the past to return: his time at Boston College overlapped with King’s at Virginia Tech.

“He was just one of these big, rugged, gritty tight ends that always made a bunch of plays against us and went on to play in the league for a while,” Poles said.

Then came the Bears’ first free-agency meetings under Poles. There are group conversations, and Poles wants to hear from everyone.

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“He just really blew me away,” Poles said.

It was King’s evaluations combined with his presence. It was how he spoke.

King joined the Bears as a scouting intern during training camp in 2015, the team’s first year with former GM Ryan Pace and coach John Fox. One of the first jobs he had was helping Matt Sheldon, the Bears’ former director of analytics and football research, with projects.

In a way, the Bears tested King. He was a couple of years removed from his own playing career. This was different. The scouting life wasn’t for everyone: the hours, the low pay, the time on the road. Fox, though, remained fond of him. Pace and Delhomme also knew each other from Delhomme’s stint as the Saints’ backup quarterback when Pace was an operations/scouting assistant.

“I remember calling him and saying, ‘Hey, Ryan, I don’t know if you’d have anything for this guy. But it would be cool of you to give him an opportunity. I don’t think you will regret it,’” Delhomme said. “He’s a grunt in every sense of the word. And that’s a compliment.”

It took the Bears less than a year to realize that King might be a scouting star in the making. The Bears started to consider themselves fortunate that King’s wife, Katie, went to Barrington (Ill.) High School. Katie, a decorated volleyball player at Virginia Tech, and King have three daughters.

“He is a family man in every sense of the word and someone who’s just a sports nut,” said Delhomme, who remains very close to King. “He’s very content and happy in life and not afraid to work hard.”

In 2016, Pace promoted King to pro scout. He developed a reputation for finishing evaluations on players that would take others a full day to complete in a few hours. The level of detail and depth remained, though. In 2019, King became the Bears’ director of pro scouting. Bears coaches found him to be a good resource because he could provide a player’s perspective. The Bears also encouraged their players to meet with King if they had questions. It helped that King had recently played in the league.

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In 2022, Poles named King co-director of player personnel, along with Trey Koziol. King oversees the pro scouting and free agency, but he’s also involved in draft evaluations.

Poles sees a bit of himself in King. Poles learned from different GMs in Kansas City. King now has the same opportunity with the Bears. As Poles would describe it, it’s a “This is who I am” approach. It’s a genuine way to do things.

“That was exactly my approach when I went through the different regime changes in Kansas City,” Poles said.

Similar to Poles, King draws from his varied influences. Former Pulaski coach Joel Hicks, a Hall of Fame coach in Virginia, was meticulous about the field and cared about the players’ pregame meals. Beamer used starters on special teams to routinely produce the best units in college football. Greenberg maintained a consistent level of intensity and energy, which became expected of players, especially off the bench.

Playing with Delhomme cemented beliefs about the quarterback position. But seeing how Delhomme and tight end Kris Mangum, who played 10 seasons with the Panthers, carried themselves in the locker room mattered. King mentions them in the same conversation as Beamer and Hicks.

“It’s about how you approach every day,” King said.

They became models for him. But King is eager to expand on all who were for him.

With Beane, King saw “how the sausage was made” with the Panthers’ team operations, he said. Kirchner was from the Ron Wolf scouting tree where traits, draft capital and other scouting nuances are prioritized. Cowden was “the typical road scout” who was “never on the fence” about players. Schoen was a mixture of all of them but also learned under Bill Parcells in Miami. Former Panthers GM Marty Hurney worked well with agents.

Fox’s personality endeared him to players, but he always demanded physicality and toughness from them. That carried over with the Bears, where King said he enjoyed the grind of earning Pace’s trust through his own hard work and time spent on evaluations.

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It’s how Pace rose through the ranks in New Orleans and how King did the same in Lake Forest. Those who worked with King saw a scout who wanted to learn more. A respect and friendship with former Bears defensive coordinator Vic Fangio developed because of it.

“I went to him with, “What does this do to you?’ or ‘What players give you issues?’” King said. “We didn’t talk deep X’s and O’s, but I just respected his mind so much that I would go to him with a lot of things and ask him a lot of questions. He was just really, really good with me.”

Trust is earned in those meetings between advance scouts and coaches.

With Fangio, you better put in the work.

“You knew that you couldn’t come in there with just blanket statements,” King said. “You better come in with facts. He would ask a lot of questions. And, if he didn’t agree with you, he’d let you know. So I just learned a lot of football from him.”

With his background, King spearheaded the Bears’ search for basketball players who could make the switch to football under Pace. His input and expertise changed how the Bears perceived certain athletic traits.

That influence persists, whether it’s connecting Poles and assistant GM Ian Cunningham with NBA executives he knows when they’re in town or simply forwarding an article about what basketball coaches look for when they scout. The goal is to remain ahead of the times.

“Him and I, like, we geek out on that stuff all the time,” Poles said. “It’s one of the things you have in common, which is awesome.”

King had just over a week to get ready for his only college basketball season. The Hokies’ football season ended with a 16-13 loss to third-ranked Auburn in the Sugar Bowl on Jan. 3 in New Orleans. King played his first game for Greenberg on Jan. 12.

“I said you can’t have one foot in and one foot out in this thing,” Greenberg said. “If you want to do it, let’s do it. And once he was with us that first day, he was all in, man, in every aspect of the program.”

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King hit the treadmill and never really stopped. He was all in. Getting cut and bloodied against N.C. State turned into a joke for Greenberg but fired up King. Greenberg said his experience and toughness meant something. King played tough in the paint, picked teammates up off the floor and became a resource in the locker room.

“He had the respect of every single person who he crossed on that campus,” Greenberg said.

The Hokies needed King much like the Bears would years later. King doesn’t like talking about that or himself. Others, though, are happy to do it. His interaction with Krzyzewski is one he’ll never forget, but it was Delhomme who brought it up first. Not King.

“I know that meant the world to him,” Delhomme said.

During Day 3 of the 2022 draft, the Bills and Bears made a trade. The Bills moved up 20 spots to No. 148 for receiver Khalil Shakir. The Bears got No. 168 and selected offensive tackle Braxton Jones, as well as No. 203, which became running back Trestan Ebner.

It started with a text message to King. The Bills wanted Shakir; the Bears wanted more picks. Poles gave a thumbs-up. One of those picks became the Bears’ starting left tackle.

“He’s a great asset,” Beane said of King. “The Bears are lucky to have him. I know that and I’m excited for him when he gets his chance to be a GM.”

Former Bears colleagues and Poles believe the same. So do King’s former coaches and teammates. Similar to Cunningham, the Bears have a GM in the making in King.

“I’m going to be very honest. He could probably be a GM right now,” Delhomme said. “But I think he’s doing it the right way. I truly believe he’s just gathering as much information as possible and just trying to learn the ins and outs.”

Don’t expect King to talk about his personal goals. He’s got a team to help Poles rebuild.

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Greenberg knows what’s happening at Halas Hall, though. It’s what he wanted for his basketball team.

“What do you need in that position? Incredible, insatiable work ethic,” Greenberg said. “The ability to connect with people, the ability to look at things from all sides, the prism of all sides. The ability to make in a lot of ways judgment on: who would fit in our locker room? How competitive is this person? Is he someone we can count on? All the traits that made Jeff who he is translate to what he’s doing now.”

(Top photo: Chicago Bears)