Fulltext match() against() returning empty set
I found the solution.  Thanks Anyways 

See https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/fulltext-natural-language.html:

The search result is empty because the “search word” is present in at least 50% of the row entries, and so is effectively treated as a stopword.

my solution was to add more db entries so that the search term is less than 50% of the of the rows values.