Roland dropped back and saw his primary receiver was covered. Instead of going to his next read, he focused on his third read, threw into coverage and was intercepted. Coach Trent came up and pointed to the primary receiver.
“Did you give this enough time?”
“I saw he was covered, so I went through my read progression,” Roland said.
Coach Trent looked at Coach Simon who shrugged. He grabbed the playbook and showed it to Roland.
“Tell me where your next read is?” Coach Trent asked.
Roland pointed to the correct receiver.
“But,” he began.
“Roland, you’re an extremely talented kid. You have great stature and you’re a good athlete. I think everyone would agree you have a ton of arm talent. A very mechanically sound and a brilliant guy. The hype around you is totally justified. But I think you outthink the room sometimes.
“You need to be more like David: dumb and happy,” Coach Trent said with a grin.
“If you were to ask my friends, they would tell you the correct terminology is ‘stupid boy,’” I shot back.
“I’m going to honest with you. You were one of our top five guys coming into camp. David was the last one picked. After seeing the two of you in action over the last 24 hours, your positions might be reversed. You want to know why?”
Nope. Roland really didn’t want to know, but Coach Trent wasn’t letting him off easy.
“David is showing he has what it takes to make it at the next level. It will not be uncommon for you to have to learn several different offenses when you play college ball. All it takes is a change at offensive coordinator. We intentionally made this offense difficult and confusing to see if you could adapt. Roland, I know you can do this. I know you need to intellectually wrap that big brain of yours around what we’re doing here, but frankly we don’t have the time.”
“But, Coach, some of these plays are just stupid.”
“I agree that on the surface, that might be true, but every one of these plays works if you give it a chance. Now isn’t the time to break the plays down and question them. Now is the time to show you can run them,” Coach Trent said.
“Run the next play,” Coach Simon told Roland.
It wasn’t his day. He hit a wide open cornerback. I groaned, seeing the disappointment in his eyes. He’d done it again. He thought his arm could squeeze the ball in, and he’d been wrong.
“Your eyes need to be on the outside receiver and see if he wins. If he doesn’t, move to ...” Coach Simon paused, waiting for Roland, who looked confused. “This is a pure progression play. I know you can see that guy was open. But when it’s third and eight, and they don’t give you the easy out, you need to do it the hard way. Make your reads in order, and the timing will be so much better. Now run it again.”
Roland was not having a good day. He ran the play three more times and threw interceptions each time. I could see the defenders were cheating because they knew what the play was. Finally, they felt pity for him and sent me in.
I did my drop and saw my primary was covered. I did my read progression and the defenders had the other reads covered as well. I dumped the ball off to the checkdown receiver, your last-resort receiver. Bo had a big smile on his face. He knew my instinct was to do what Roland had done.
“No fair, he cheated,” Roland complained.
“No, he made the right play. It’s better to have to punt on fourth and eight than it is to throw an interception. Let’s change it up. It’s fourth and eight and we’re under two minutes. Do it again, David,” Coach Trent ordered.
This time, when I dropped back, the coverage was even tighter on my primary and secondary receivers. As soon as I looked off my secondary and started towards my next progression, I saw that the defensive back went to help. That was all the break in their coverage that I needed. I hit my guy in stride and he was gone. Roland had a big smile on his face and high-fived me. I raced downfield and chest-bumped my receiver.
Roland went next. He pumped his arm at his primary receiver and the defender bit hard. His receiver cut upfield. Roland let his excitement get the better of him and overthrew a sure score. I strolled up behind him.
“At least it wasn’t intercepted,” I teased.
Roland found out I had better escape skills than he had pursuit. He vowed retribution at some future date. Bring it on!
Tuesday July 7
OUR MORNING CLASSROOM time was with a sports psychologist. He spent the first half of the class talking about how confidence can be learned. He had this whole discussion about “Approach versus Avoidance.” It was very similar to Tami’s “wanter versus doer” talk. Once we were past that part of his class, it got a lot more interesting.
“Bear with me, and imagine for a moment the little voice inside your head that urges you to go harder, farther, and to not give up.”
He let us think about that for a moment before continuing.
“You’re on a journey right now. The outcome is not within your control. If you attend to the outcome, if you attend to the things that aren’t under your control, you’re going to find yourself losing your own sense of power. On this journey, what you do get to determine is your own experience in it. In the center of this is your ability to trust all your preparation and all of your training that has gone into this moment. The idea is, can you trust yourself enough to stand in this moment with conviction?”
It was a very “new age” approach to something I tried to live by. Worry about the things you can control. If I worried about what was outside my control, like if I would become one of the Elite 11, I would just become frustrated. All I could do was prepare and then trust in myself to perform.
They were all very big on the concept of competing with yourself and ignoring what everyone else was doing. While good advice, it was hard not to try to compare how you were doing against everyone else. This was a competition, after all.
TODAY I WAS WORKING with Wes Hunt. Watching him work reminded me of Ridge Townsend. He was going to make a hell of a quarterback at Alabama. I was of two minds as to whether I’d attend Alabama or not. First, if Wes got a year under his belt learning the Alabama system, he was going to be hard to beat out. Second, I wasn’t afraid of competition. While Wes was from the Ridge school of quarterbacking—conservative surgical strikes which moved the chains—I was more of a high-risk, high-reward quarterback.
I would predict Alabama’s offensive coordinator was going to be moving to a head coaching job in the near future. If he left the year I came in, then Wes and I would be on equal footing. I’d be willing to go head-to-head with him in that case.
The one fly in the ointment was there were only so many top quarterbacks who could make it to the NFL. It would be a shame if we ended up derailing one of our chances to make it to the top level of football. I had no doubt that if either one of us got the edge, we wouldn’t give up our starting job. Of course, I was getting ahead of myself. Having Wes in front of me brought out the competitive monster from within. There were other things in my life besides football, but deep inside I wanted to be the best!
Neither Wes nor I said much to each other during drills. You could feel the intensity build as practice went on. ESPNU was in our faces, too. All the parents and friends of the quarterbacks were able to watch us from the sidelines. They seemed to all want to split time between watching their sons and then coming to watch us. People realized they were watching the number 1 quarterbacks in the junior and senior classes go head-to-head.