The top 100 FSU football players: No. 10 — wide receiver Ron Sellers

People see Sellers for the first time, standing around or warming up, and invariably they are confused. How could this guy be so good? For sure, with his long, skinny bowed legs and thin frame, he’s the most unlikely looking player on the field. Sellers can run 50 yards in 5.5 seconds, but always he looks as though at any moment his arms and legs will go flying off in entirely different directions. A Houston defensive back nicknamed him “Jingle Joints.”

“Somebody was asking me what makes you such a great receiver,” Billy Cox, FSU’s split end, was saying to Sellers the day before the Maryland game. “I told them it’s because you’re so much thinner than everybody else they play you careful.”

Sellers laughed. “It will take me two years to figure out what that means.”

”Well, maybe I should have said it’s because everybody is scared you’ll get behind them, and they play you scared. They stay way behind you, giving you all that room to catch the ball,” said Cox.

”I don’t know,” said Sellers. “I think I just lull people to sleep with my long stride. They don’t think I’m going as fast as I am, then pffft.”

“Jingle Joints should be judged by his cover,” Sports Illustrated, Sep. 1968

At 6-foot-4, 184 pounds, Ron Sellers seemed to be more suited for basketball. He was, in fact, All-State in the sport in high school, and felt that he might’ve opted to play the sport in college instead of football had he been a little bit less thin.

“But people kept telling me I was too light to play football; that I’d get killed,” he said to Sports Illustrated. “It made me mad and I decided I’d show everybody. And so when FSU offered me a football scholarship, I took it.”

He had an average start to his career in Tallahassee, if you want to consider 55 receptions and 874 receiving yards average. He was just No. 6 in the country in yards in 1966, his sophomore season, the lowest he’d rank over the course of his career.

Over three years, he averaged 7.1 catches a game, becoming an essential and terrifying part of Bill Peterson’s offensive attack. In 1967, he was a consensus All-American after leading the nation with 1,228 yards and registering 70 receptions. That season, he made two plays that made our top 100 countdown last season, one against Virginia Tech and the other a 38-yard score vs. Florida that gave FSU its first-ever win in Gainesville.

In 1968, his senior season, Sellers again earned All-American honors and again led the nation in receiving yards, this time with 1496 (for context, that would’ve made him second in the country in 2018.) One of his more impressive performances came against Wake Forest, when he put up 260 yards, five touchdowns and fourteen receptions (which, again, was part of last year’s top 100 countdown.)

Just to break it down cleanly, here’s where Sellers sits as far as all-time statistical leaders at Florida State —

Single-game touchdowns: No. 1 (5)

Single-game receptions: No. 1 (16), No. 2 (14, three times), No. 5 (13, three times)

Single-game yards: No. 1 (260), No. 2 (259), No. 5 (229), No. 6 (218), No. 8 (214)

Single-season touchdowns: No. 5 (12)

Single-season receptions: No. 2 (86, overtaken by Rashad Green’s 99 in 2014)

Single-season yards: No. 1 (1, 496), No. 6 (1,228)

Career touchdowns: No. 7 (23)

Career receptions: No. 2 (212, overtaken by Rashad Greene’s 270 in 2014)

Career yards: No. 2 (3,598, overtaken by Rashad Green’s 3,830 in 2014)

It’s a list that’s impressive just on its face alone, but then consider that these stats were put up before the complete takeover of aerial attacks, and that they were registered in just 30 games. With the wide receiver talent that’s come through Florida State, the all-world offenses that have taken the field at Doak Campbell Stadium, it’s almost incomprehensible that numbers put up 50 years ago are still amongst the best in school history.

But that’s just a testament to the legend of Jingle Joints.