Eat My Schwartz

by Geoff Schwartz

  But I hung in there and watched and listened and started working with strength coaches to improve my conditioning and build muscle. Looking back, I’m glad Jake and I went up. Nowadays, all freshmen start earlier. They go up for transition programs. We were smart enough to figure that out ourselves.

  Plus, Jacob and I were eighteen-year-olds and in an awesome college town. It was the first time I was away from my parents, so I was into just having fun, going out, exploring the town, and being independent. Or semi-independent.

  There was one other attraction for going up early that summer. Baseball. About a two-hour drive away, just outside of Portland, was a team called the Aloha Knights, of the West Coast Collegiate Baseball League, which is a one of the top summer leagues for college players. It’s a wooden-bat league, so it’s serious about grooming players for the major leagues. In fact, by the 2013 season, at least twenty players from WCCBL had made it up to the major leagues, with dozens more in the minors. The Knights—they now play in Corvallis and are called the Corvallis Knights—were sponsored by Penny Knight, the wife of Nike CEO Phil Knight, and they invited me to play with them.

  It was a serious team and I was pumped to compete against top collegiate players. I ended up getting in one game, and it started like a fairy tale, with me nervously taking the mound and just zipping the ball in there. I got the first two batters out, and I thought, “Wow! I can do this!”

  Then it morphed into a nightmare. Three runs later, I got the third out, and that was it for my baseball career. My ERA, I’m disgusted to say, was 27.00.

  But you know what? The Knights won the summer league national championship that year. And Penny Knight actually gave me an NBC World Series ring, so it was a bit of a fairy tale after all.

  The luck continued—sort of—when preseason rolled around. For the initial practices they split offensive linemen into two groups: the older guys and the freshmen. But on the third day, they needed one more lineman to practice with the varsity. We drew straws and I won. So now I’m the inexperienced freshman playing with the established vets. I held my own that day, and from then on I would practice with the group of older guys who were getting ready to play the season, not with all the guys who were redshirting.

  The season started with me on the team, but not getting into any games. I probably didn’t help my standing on the depth chart when I approached my offensive line coach Neal Zoumboukos before the third game of the season and said, “Coach, I’m not getting in games, and Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, is on Saturday. So I’d like to take the day off.” Neal is a Greek Orthodox, and he understands the idea of different religions using different calendars, since his own faith follows the Julian calendar. The Jewish calendar operates on the lunar calendar, so our religious holidays fall on different days of the modern—or Gregorian—calendar every year. He seemed totally cool with it. But I heard back that other coaches asked if this was going to happen every year, which I thought was kind of surprising. I guess it just goes to show you how rare Jewish football players are.

  I finally got to play during our fifth game of the season, an offensive shoot-out against Washington State. They called my name, I went in, and it was exactly what you hear about: trial by fire. Honestly, I didn’t even get in my stance before the first play went off. I didn’t know what was going on! The second play was a bit better—I blocked the guy I was supposed to block. And in the third play, we actually scored a touchdown. I was pumped. This was exactly what I came to Oregon to do: to play, to battle and win my assignment, to drive the team downfield and win, which is exactly what we did that day, pulling out a 41-38 victory. As the season went on, things on the field got much easier.

  The pace of the game—the blistering, everything-exploding-at-once intensity—slowed down, as they say. It never actually slows down, though. You just get used to it.

  Notice I said I was “sort of” lucky to play with the veterans my freshman year? That’s because, knowing what I know now, I have to wonder what the coaching staff under Mike Bellotti was thinking by letting me play as a true freshman. The reality is I ended up playing in four games and about 80 downs my first year. Sure, it was a cool experience—it gave me a lot of confidence to be ranked high. But as a true freshman you want to get significant playing time, otherwise it makes more sense to redshirt, which is the term for having a scholarship player sit out a year without using his NCAA eligibility. While I suppose it is an honor to have been one of only three true freshmen offensive linemen over a twenty-five-year period at Oregon to actually play, looking back on it, I sacrificed a year of eligibility for a handful of mostly meaningless plays. Seriously, 80 downs is basically what you might play in a game. In fact, the next year, against Arizona State I was on the field for 100 plays!

  Everything has worked out very well for me, but it hasn’t been easy. Sometimes I wonder how much better I would have been, how much stronger I would have become, and how those improvements might have affected my NFL draft stock if I had redshirted.

  And I’m not the only one who wonders about it. After that first season was over, my offensive line coach Zoomer—Neal Zoumboukos—apologized about not redshirting me. In fact, he still apologizes to me every time I see him.

  One last thing about redshirting: These days, college teams are filled with true freshmen linemen on the roster. That’s because of two things. The first is that more high schools are running college offensives and have incorporated college-like weight programs, so kids come in with more training and the linemen come in stronger and ready to go. The second is that it’s a lot cheaper to keep a student athlete around for four years instead of five. I’m sure there are programs that have done the math on this. Redshirting six offensive linemen every year must cost teams hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition and room and board.

  The only other issue I had with my coaches was this perception that I lacked aggression. They would get on me and tell me to be more aggressive. To hit harder, to want it more. This rap against me was hard to shake. You can go online and read pre-draft scouting reports, and there it is on cbssports.com: “Lacks an internal fire and isn’t an aggressive player.” I really don’t know where this came from, this idea that I’m not as fiery or fierce as the other guys. Personally, I always thought it was BS. Sure, I’m from L.A. and I’m pretty laid-back and calm. And, yes, it is true that when we were kids, our parents were concerned that, because of our size and strength, Mitch and I might clobber our friends in a playful scuffle. So they taught us to exercise extreme patience and care to avoid fighting. I actually remember my mom and dad telling me that I had to act older than I was because I looked much older. All of that is true. Still, when it comes time to play, I’m out there fighting and battling 110 percent. And when it comes to practice, I’m out there drilling my butt off.

  I can’t help thinking that my stutter might have played into this bogus impression that I was passive on the field. Stuttering, after all, can come off as timid, which is the opposite of aggressive, right? You aren’t rushing out words, you’re not being verbally decisive, because, for whatever reason, you can’t. The words just get stuck. But that’s not because you lack aggression or desire. The fact is, I can actually remember plenty of times when I was afraid to speak up because I was afraid to stutter. So I wonder if coaches interpreted this as a lack of physical aggression and desire. I think there’s a good chance that this came across during the recruiting process or the early practices with the Ducks. There were times I kept my mouth shut, and times I appeared hesitant or meek because the words didn’t just pour out. I wish I had realized all this back then, but it’s good to look back and understand where this might have come from.

  Why did I stutter? Nobody really knows what causes it. Apparently up to 5 percent of children stutter at some point in their life. Most grow out of it. For the ones who don’t, there are basically three schools of thought about what causes this disability. The first is neurological, that is, the brains of stutterers are di
fferent when it comes to speech. The second is that it’s a learned behavior that sort of snowballs. If a child learning to talk stumbles and is admonished or criticized or punished, that response may breed more anxiety. The third theory is that stuttering is a psychological problem that can be treated with therapy.

  I don’t know what the underlying reason was for my stutter. But, as I mentioned earlier, it pretty much completely disappeared during my sophomore year. I’m sure amateur psychologists out there will note that that was the year I became a starter for the Ducks. Maybe that’s what cured me. Who knows?

  * * *

  Other than the redshirting issue, I loved my time at Eugene and playing for the Ducks. College is a once-in-a-lifetime event for anyone lucky enough to go. Now that I’m married and have a son, it’s fun to look back on that time. I cherish the independence, the freedom, and the support. It’s really a laboratory for transitioning to adulthood. I was always a responsible kid in high school, but college is the first place where I got to be a somewhat independent person, managing my time, my work, and my freedom.

  Being a student athlete is a particularly intense collegiate experience. It’s fun, but it is focused. The four other linemen I came in with—I know we started as a group of six, but the five-star recruit eventually transferred out—all turned into terrific friends. We—Jeff Kendall, Mark Lewis, Jake, and Max Unger, who has gone on to great things with the Seattle Seahawks and the New Orleans Saints—all stay in touch and see one another whenever we can, going to one another’s weddings, getting away for trips to Vegas. I should also include my defensive line buddy Dave Faaeteete, who I roomed with for years. We just have a blast whenever we get together. It stands to reason we would, since we spent huge amounts of time together, sharing hundreds of hours training, eating, hanging out and, ultimately, functioning as this super-efficient five-headed battalion specifically honed to go out and pummel other guys. We had pride in our accomplishments, individually and together, and we still do.

  One of the things my offensive line teammates and I would do during the season was go to this out-of-the-way pizza joint in Eugene after every home game. We’d hit the showers and then go join our families, if they were in town for the games. The pizza was never that good, but the beer and pies were cheap. And anyway, it wasn’t about the meal, really. It was a great way for us to celebrate, meet the families of our friends, and also have our parents make connections. My mom and dad are very social people, and I know they loved connecting with other supporters during all the hours when they were waiting for games to start.

  The workload for a student athlete is extremely time-consuming. I remember seeing people on nice days just hanging out, relaxing outside the Erb Memorial student union, and thinking, “Man, I always have to be somewhere.” The NCAA has rules about limiting the amount of time a student can practice, but it’s hard to track. For instance, we were allowed to practice twenty hours each week during the season, but a game counted for three hours. But if you factor in the pregame meetings, and the warm-ups, and the travel to and from games, you are talking about a lot more than three hours. It’s the same issue with training sessions—you have to ice down and shower, which can take an hour every day, but that’s off the clock.

  One of the perks of playing football was the food that was available to us. The massive spreads laid out at practice facilities are known as training tables, and they are the lifeblood of a football team. I ate so much during college, it was nuts. A lot of my eating was due to youthful ignorance; I thought I was working out so much and getting so much stronger that I could eat anything. So I did. I’m a rice maniac, and I would have bowls and bowls of the stuff, along with steak, chicken dishes, fish, whatever was on the table. And there was always food on the table.

  My first year I weighed 355 pounds at one point, although by the end of the season I was down to 330. My sophomore year I was 370, which was insane for my 6'6" frame. Not that it stopped me from playing—I started all 12 games at right tackle, gave up 3 sacks the entire year, and during our big rivalry game against Oregon State I was named co-offensive player of the week. I had made major contributions to the tenth-ranked team in the nation. But I knew I was still too heavy to improve my quickness. So I began a career-long battle to maintain my weight. It’s a war that I’ve fought now for many years. At certain points I’ve even traveled with a scale to make sure extra weight wasn’t creeping up on me. I don’t do that anymore, because over the last four years I’ve finally fully understood how my body metabolizes food and how to properly manage my diet. But back at Oregon I didn’t really know how to lose weight in a focused manner, and being a self-conscious kid, I didn’t ask the trainers for advice, either. The winter of my sophomore year, I’d go to school, go to practice, and lift weights. Then I’d come home and do extra cardio at the gym in my apartment building, eat something, and hit the books. Studying is pretty much limited to nights when you are a student athlete. There’s not a lot of time to get to the library during the day when you are at the practice facility from two to eight o’clock while the season is in full swing.

  Eventually, I got my weight down to 345 for my junior year, which turned out to be a smart move because during the middle of preseason camp, my lower back started killing me. I had a herniated disc and I’m sure the excess weight would not have helped my mobility. There’s never a good time to have a herniated disc, but junior year is when NFL scouts start seriously tracking most linemen. So I sucked it up and played injured for the entire season, missing only one game. We led the Pac-10 in rushing offense for the first time since 1955. But I have to admit, it wasn’t a standout year for me. I had surgery on the disc immediately after the season ended. After a few weeks of rest, I began rehabbing my back. I didn’t work out with the team during spring practice; I just focused on my conditioning and getting the muscle strength and flexibility back.

  I also spent some time finishing my classes. One of the things about being committed to the team is that you spend most of the summer working out. I used my summers to take four-week courses and fulfill the school’s math requirements. That meant by the end of my junior year, I had taken enough courses to graduate, which was something I’m proud of. My buddies who redshirted had a whole extra year to complete their coursework. The NCAA tracks the graduation success rate of students who graduate in six years or less. I had done it in three years, with only my political science thesis to deliver in the fall of my senior year.

  How did I wind up studying poli-sci? Originally, I had planned to study history, but at the end of my freshman year I took an environmental history course that really wasn’t much fun. It was a lot of reading and the professor turned me off to the whole history track. I decided to focus on political science partly so I could apply some of my history credits toward it, but mostly because I found I enjoyed the more theoretical aspects of it. It’s not as cut-and-dried as history is; you get to voice your own theories and opinions, and you get to debate, which is something I really liked.

  * * *

  Going into my senior year, I was feeling good about my future. My back had healed. My schoolwork was done. And agents were calling, which was amazing to me. For years since high school, I knew I might have the size to make it as a pro, but I was never sure if I would be viewed as having the skills that were required. Now, it was looking like I had a real shot at getting drafted for the NFL. I asked my dad, who as a business consultant was far more savvy than I was about the negotiation process, to vet the agents that approached me. He talked to three or four and gave me his feedback.

  The other great thing about my senior year was that we had a great new offensive coordinator who shook things up a bit. You’ve probably heard of him by now, but before Chip Kelly went on to become an NFL head coach, most recently of the San Francisco 49ers, and before he became the Ducks head coach in 2009, he was the mastermind who had turned his teams at the University of New Hampshire into offensive juggernauts that averaged over 400 yards a game.
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br />   I have to admit when Coach Kelly first got to Oregon, a lot of us were skeptical about his résumé and his ability because New Hampshire didn’t play in a top-tier football conference. So when he came in and talked this big game about his no-huddle and the type of attitude and offensive plays we were going to run, we were all pretty damn excited to do something different, but we didn’t know if it was going to work for us. Then we started practicing and we saw it in action, and we became believers pretty quick.

  One thing that struck me about Coach Kelly’s time as offensive coordinator was his confidence level. I had never been around a coach—at least not in college—who was as positive as he was. He had a way of getting us fired up and confident, and I think that confidence helped us play really fast.

  The turnaround was dramatic. Coming off of a 7–6 season, we finished the year with a 9–4 record and were ranked twenty-third in AP’s national poll. Our QB Dennis Dixon put up numbers that made him a Heisman Trophy contender (he finished fifth in the voting). Our running back Jonathan Stewart had some monster games, churning out more than 250 yards per game twice, including our final game—a 56-21 thumping of South Florida on New Year’s Eve in the Sun Bowl.

  Toward the end of that season, we were actually on track to play Louisiana State University in the BCS Championship game. But Dennis got hurt and our ranking plummeted. I will always believe we were good enough to beat LSU. Seven or eight Ducks on our offense made it to the NFL, plus another handful on defense. No Oregon team can say that, even all these years later.

  Although we didn’t make it to the championship, the Sun Bowl blowout was a great way to end the year and my collegiate career. Most of my buddies would be staying on for one more year, but I was done. I was free to hire an agent, and the day after the Sun Bowl, I signed with Deryk Gilmore of Priority Sports. I’d known Deryk for about five years; he ran the recruiting program for Oregon when I was a high school senior, and I knew he was a smart, creative guy. One year he created a comic book and would send out a page a week to all the recruits. It was a slick, full-color production, but it was too innovative for the NCAA. They saw the pitches and banned full-color solicitations, I think on the grounds that not every program could afford them.