4th and Goal

by Monte Burke

  Joe just shakes his head. “I can’t stand this part of this game,” he says. Three days later, Joe hires Overton to work in the Nighthawks public relations department.

  When the team reassembles, Joe can see that Troy Smith, still the team’s best pure passer, has yet to master the offense. On the field, he is thinking too much. Andrus likens it to someone learning how to drive a stick-shift car. “You can see the pauses, the lurches, the hesitations,” he says.

  Joe is also eager to watch Jeff Wolfert, the placekicker, who had not had much action in the first game, with just one extra point kick. Wolfert had taken to his position a bit late in life. He was a star diver and soccer player in high school in Kansas. But he always wanted to try kicking in a football game. His senior year, he made the football team. In his first and only high school game, Wolfert broke his hip while kicking the ball off.

  Wolfert received a diving scholarship to the University of Missouri. His sophomore year, he walked onto the football team. He walked off a few years later as Missouri’s all-time point-scoring leader. He was especially known for his uncanny accuracy. During his collegiate career, Wolfert was a perfect 185 for 185 on point-after attempts, and he hit an impressive 75 percent of his field goal attempts. The only knock on him coming out of college was his leg strength. When he missed, it was usually from beyond 50 yards. After school, he had tryouts with the Bears, Chiefs, Falcons, and Jets. All of the teams loved his accuracy, but ended up signing kickers who could boom the ball.

  The UFL was a perfect place for a player like Wolfert. The league gave him a chance to show what he could do in a live game. After being turned down by the NFL, Wolfert signed with the Nighthawks in 2010. That season, he went 9 for 10 in field goal attempts and was, by far, the best kicker in the league. In 2011, after the NFL lockout, Wolfert was signed by the Browns. But making the team was a long shot: Cleveland already had Phil Dawson, one of the best kickers in the NFL.

  Joe and Mueller had desperately wanted Wolfert back. And a few days before the first game, they got their wish when he was cut by the Browns.

  Wolfert is what is known on a football team as a “specialist.” These players—kickers, long snappers, and holders—occupy a strange niche in the game. They are simultaneously a part of the team—they, too, wear helmets and pads—but they are also very much apart from it, especially during practice. While the offense and defense run team drills under the watchful eyes of the coaches, the specialists stand far away from the action, on the other side of the field, either jawing with each other, or endlessly working on snaps and holds, or stretching, or scuffing up slick new balls to their very particular likings. (The only differences between NFL and UFL balls is that the latter have black laces and the signature of Michael Huyghue instead of Roger Goodell.) The specialists get in for just a handful of plays during practice.

  To keep himself occupied during the practices, Wolfert challenges himself with a kicking game. When the team is on one side of the Kroc’s practice field, he sends the punter, Tom Mante, to stand behind the goal posts in the opposite end zone. Wolfert then sets himself up thirty yards away on the sideline, angled rather extremely—forty-five degrees and sometimes more—from the goalposts. Then he kicks three balls from the position, trying to split the uprights. He moves his position up and down the sideline to get different angles. He is amazingly good at these games. The idea behind doing them is to make a straight-on shot during a game “look” easier to his eye. Wolfert, switchblade thin with short, thick sandy-blond hair, is an avid golfer. The angled kicks make him feel like he is on the links. “I like to think of my leg as an eight-iron,” he says.

  Wolfert is not the only Nighthawk who appears sharp in practice. Masoli looks more comfortable, no longer sharing snaps with Crouch. This is his offense now, and though he is quiet, he’s become the leader. His receivers are finally making the catches they’re supposed to make. The offensive line is getting more accustomed to the wide splits.

  One reason that practice is sharper is the presence of Denny Marcin, a legendary football scout who now plies his trade for the New York Jets. Marcin, round and bald and wearing a thick gold chain around his neck, stalks the sidelines carrying a little black bag adorned with a Jets helmet. He watches every snap in practice and occasionally takes an assistant coach aside to talk to him in private, all the while scribbling notes on a legal pad. After practice, Marcin joins Olivadotti for lunch. Marcin is a former college defensive coordinator. The football-coaching fraternity is a relatively small one, so he and Olivadotti have known each other for thirty years. Marcin tells Olivadotti that he’s most interested in the Nighthawks’ rookies, like former UMass running back John Griffin (“How did thirty-two teams miss on that guy?” he asks).

  The reason Marcin likes rookies: they’re a lot cheaper than the veterans who are hoping to get back into the NFL. Minimum rookie pay in the NFL for 2011 is $375,000. Add just two years of NFL service, and that shoots up to $525,000. NFL vets on the Nighthawks like Schweigert, Dvoracek, and Colclough, with their many years in the league, would have to be paid close to $700,000 were they to sign with an NFL team. NFL vets in the UFL have a much tougher road to the big league than do the rookies. The brutal truth in the NFL is that teams will sign rookies with slightly less skill to fill out the bottoms of their rosters in order to create more room for the bigger paychecks commanded by their marquee starters.

  Getting back to the NFL, most of the players know, is doable, but it’s a long shot. Perhaps that’s why thirty of the fifty-one Nighthawks players come to Joe’s first installment of “Life after Football.” Many of the vets are in attendance—Schweigert, Dvoracek, Shockley, Hill, and Clarett—but so are some of the rookies, whose NFL dreams may be more realistic. The safety Mike O’Connell is here. So is Mante, the Yalie who spurned an internship offer from a consulting firm to play in the UFL.

  Joe talks to them about the first step in finding a career outside of football: figuring out what you want to do. To do that, he stresses the Platonic maxim: “Know thyself.”

  “You have to know your own strengths and weaknesses. It will help you find a career. It will help you better handle yourself under pressure,” Joe says. He leans back in his chair. He is very comfortable in this setting, with the pressures of football momentarily in the background.

  Some players furiously scribble notes. Others use their iPhones to record Joe. George Foster, the left tackle, asks Joe what he thinks about getting graduate degrees. Foster wants to go into broadcasting someday. Joe’s view, perhaps unsurprising given his own background, is that real-life experience almost always trumps education. “You’ve gotta get your ass in there and do it,” he says. The meeting goes on for two hours.

  Walking out, offensive guard Damion Cook turns to a teammate and says: “I’ve never actually had a coach who gave a crap about that stuff.”

  Though Interstate 80, one of the nation’s great east-west rivers of asphalt, connects Sacramento to Omaha, the Nighthawks take to the air for travel. After consulting with the players, Joe decides that the only rule on travel attire is that everyone must wear a collared shirt. The players’ styles vary wildly. Rookies like Masoli wear untucked short-sleeved polos and baggy pants. NFL vets, with more experience on professional team road trips and, presumably, more money, get spruced up. Smith wears a silk shirt. Eric Green, a cornerback who played with the Cardinals for four years, wears a three-piece gray suit. Nearly all of the players have oversized headphones, either on their ears or hanging around their necks. One player’s assertive cologne wafts through the cabin of the plane.

  Many of the players sleep through the entire flight. Some of them play a card game called Bourré (pronounced “boo-ray”), which is somewhat similar to spades, and is very popular among American professional athletes. Because the losing player has to match whatever money is in the pot, it’s also an easy and fast way to part with a lot of money. “I’ve seen people lose their entire game check on one flight,” says Robert Hunt, the
assistant offensive line coach who played in the NFL. A Bourré dispute is supposedly the reason that NBA star Gilbert Arenas brought two guns to his team’s locker room in a 2009 incident.

  But on this flight to Sacramento, no serious blood is drawn. Maybe the small paycheck in the UFL has made players more cautious.

  An hour before kickoff, it’s still sunny and hot, eighty degrees in the early California evening. Joe huddles with the officials, trying to gently exert some influence, then passes the time before the game reading Crash of the Titans, a book about the precipitous fall of his old firm, Merrill Lynch.

  Bill Hambrecht, the UFL’s primary owner, is in attendance. Carrying a clear plastic cup of ice water that drips with condensation, he works the VIP tent that’s set up behind one end zone in the stadium, which is normally home to Sacramento State. He’s a tall man, casually dressed in a short-sleeved oxford shirt and, despite the heat, a pair of corduroy pants. He greets everyone he sees with a congenial, grandfatherly smile.

  Paul Pelosi, owner of the Sacramento franchise, is nowhere to be seen.

  Jerry Glanville, the erstwhile coach of the erstwhile UFL Hartford franchise, is on the field. He’s doing color commentary for the local broadcast of the game. He’s in his signature all-black outfit, and at his waist he’s wearing a belt buckle the size of a flounder. As Glanville works the field—shaking hands, smiling, offering various opinions—a five-foot-tall Filipino man who’s dressed in a smart gray suit follows him. The man is described as Glanville’s “helper.”

  “This is ‘Dynamite,’” says Glanville upon introducing the Filipino man. Dynamite smiles.

  Denzel Washington, father of the Sacramento running back John David Washington, settles into his folding chair on the Mountain Lions’ sideline. He keeps autograph and photo seekers at bay by constantly talking into a phone pressed to his ear.

  On the first play from scrimmage, John David Washington squirts through a hole on the right side of Omaha’s defensive line. A few steps later, he jukes a linebacker with a head-fake. Then it’s nothing but an open field of artificial turf.

  As John David scampers down the field, Denzel, who had been sitting in the VIP area looking like the essence of nonchalant cool—long legs crossed in front of him, arms splayed across the backs of the two chairs adjoining his own, low-effort smile on his lips—leaps to his feet and maniacally pumps his fists, looking every bit like the Herman Boone character he portrayed in the movie Remember the Titans. His son, a short and stocky back who had played at Morehouse College and who had once signed with the St. Louis Rams, is here for another shot at the NFL. More runs like this one will help his cause. He’s finally tackled forty-five yards later, on Omaha’s 22-yard line.

  The Nighthawks, unfortunately, have picked up right where they left off in the first game against Virginia. They started the game with a mental mistake on special teams—a fifteen-yard “unsportsmanlike conduct” penalty on the opening kickoff when Curtis Johnson got into a fight with a Mountain Lions player. This occurs after Joe had just warned his team that Sacramento was known for dirty play, and that two men fighting each other while wearing helmets and pads was flat-out silly. (“The only way to hurt someone wearing pads is to kick him in the shins, and how’s that gonna look?” he had asked the team.)

  Then came the defensive lapse that resulted in Washington’s huge run and fired up the Sacramento crowd of close to twenty thousand.

  But Olivadotti’s defense, as it will all season, clamps down when backed up against its own end zone. They force three straight incomplete passes. Dennis Green brings on his kicking team for a thirty-nine-yard field goal attempt. The kick sails wide. The Nighthawks players jump up off their bench and pump their fists in the air. Denzel calmly sits back down.

  After the missed field goal, the game doesn’t settle down like it seems it should. It gets more manic. On Sacramento’s second possession, Colburn throws a deep wobbly pass down the sideline that’s intercepted by Colclough, who returns the ball to the Mountain Lions 44-yard line. Three plays later, Masoli overthrows his receiver and gives the ball right back. Three plays after that, Colburn is sacked and fumbles. Schweigert recovers the ball right where the whole deal started—the Sacramento 44.

  But on this drive, the Nighthawks cash in. Masoli moves the team down to the Mountain Lions 6-yard line. Then it’s fourth and one. “Let’s go for it,” Joe says into his headset. It’s a bold call this early in the game. Shaud Williams gets the carry, and makes the first down, but then fumbles the ball. A Nighthawks player recovers it at the 1. Then Williams punches it in.

  After a successful Sacramento field goal, Omaha running back John Griffin—the player that Marcin the scout had liked above all others—fumbles the ball deep in Nighthawks territory. Colburn cashes in with a touchdown throw and suddenly the Nighthawks are in a hole.

  As the first half winds down, Omaha drives to the Sacramento 36. The offense gets stuck there, and soon it’s fourth down. A field goal from here would be a very long fifty-four-yarder. Joe turns to Wolfert on the sideline. “Can you make it, Jeff?”

  Wolfert, the man who has been shunned by five NFL teams because of his supposedly weak leg, never hesitates. He runs out onto the field and kicks the ball through the goalposts. It’s a new UFL record.

  The Omaha locker room is buzzing at halftime. Though it’s 10–​10, the Nighthawks seem very much in charge of the game. Turnovers are the only reason Sacramento is hanging around in this game.

  One of Olivadotti’s favorite coaching maxims is that there really is no such thing as the “halftime adjustments” that the TV talking heads love to prattle on about. Ten minutes is simply not enough time to overhaul a game plan. But there occasionally is a halftime adjustment that goes beyond the X’s and O’s.

  Joe gathers the team just before they retake the field. The room goes silent. “Guys, let’s keep this thing going. Let’s keep up the tempo.” He is yelling now, his red face in a scowl. “And let’s just jam the ball down their goddamn throats!”

  The players erupt. Their coach, so measured and cool throughout their entire time together, has let loose.

  The Nighthawks get the ball and quickly drive down the field. Wolfert is now called on to attempt a fifty-six-yarder. He nails it, breaking his own record, which had been set in the first half. The Mountain Lions eventually respond with a long drive that begins the fourth quarter and ends in a touchdown run by Washington. Wolfert responds with another “no problem” field goal from forty-two yards. Omaha is down by one, 17–16.

  But Sacramento keeps coming. Colburn hits his tight end for a touchdown, making it 23–16 in favor of the Mountain Lions. An extra point will put them up eight points, meaning the Nighthawks would need a touchdown and a two-point conversion to tie. But Colclough blocks the extra point attempt. Omaha is down by just seven points.

  Then Masoli throws another interception. But Colburn gives it right back, a replay of the first quarter’s give-and-take between the quarterbacks. It takes Masoli one minute to drive the team forty yards for the tying score. Omaha’s offense, despite the turnovers, seems to be finally working as originally planned. They are fast. And they are exhausting Dennis Green’s defense.

  The game is tied at 23. But it is far from over.

  On the next possession, Colburn avoids three would-be Omaha tacklers, then heaves the ball fifty yards downfield. The ball nestles over the shoulder and into the hands of his receiver, who runs to the end zone. It’s exactly the type of broken play that had worried Olivadotti, who will say later that this game “took years off of my life. Years I can’t afford to give.”

  It’s 30–23, Sacramento.

  But the Nighthawks strike quickly again, taking all of two minutes to drive sixty-five yards for the tying touchdown. This seems to be one of those games in which the team that has the ball last will win.

  When people think of American football, they think about bodies—running, jumping, hitting. It is quite obviously one of the most phys
ically demanding games on the planet. But it is also, contrary to conventional wisdom, one of the most mentally challenging. Each week, football players spend hours in classrooms—and additional hours in their spare time—learning plays. Basketball, ice hockey, and soccer players have, at most, just a handful of plays to digest. Baseball players must memorize their managers’ and coaches’ quirky hand signals. But no major American sport approaches football when it comes to use of the mind.

  Football is much more than just a physical and mental test, however. Perhaps above all, the game is governed by emotion. “It’s such an emotional game because it’s so combative,” says Olivadotti. “No one wants to look like a coward out there.” Every play at the line of scrimmage is a battle of willpower, which is, at its essence, the ability to control one’s emotions—and to exert that control over someone else.

  These emotions are felt individually. But they can become collective. A touchdown can spark a euphoric, team-wide high. A turnover can sink everyone into a depressive low. And sometimes a perceived bad call from a referee can stir the emotions into a volatile mass that bursts forth in an explosion.

  With five minutes left in the game, Sacramento has the ball on their own 26. Two Washington runs net eight yards. On third and two, Colburn drops back to pass. Omaha defensive lineman Kevin Basped bull-rushes his opposing offensive lineman, winning the battle of wills. He reaches Colburn, then wraps him into a bear hug. The duo is face mask to face mask, locked in an embrace. Basped falls on Colburn. The sack seems almost gentle. It’s a loss of eight yards, and the Mountain Lions will be forced to punt and give the ball back to the Nighthawks humming offense.

  But there is a flag. The referee has determined that Basped’s sack has resulted in a helmet-to-helmet “roughing the passer” penalty. Joe goes apoplectic on the sideline, ripping off his headset. The players jump up and down, heaping slurs and curses on the ref. The ball is placed on the 50-yard line with 2:15 to play, giving Sacramento new life. But the call, instead of devastating the Nighthawks, has suddenly bonded them together.