Eat My Schwartz

by Geoff Schwartz

  Anyway, Deryk left UO after my second year to become an agent, and we hit it off. He’s a great guy—totally focused, creative, and supportive. After I signed, he arranged for me to go to Nashville and start training for the NFL combine, where collegiate players are evaluated for the draft. The dream of playing professional football finally seemed within my grasp.

  But I was worried—really worried. I had a major issue that I had been keeping secret. Something I would lie awake thinking about, wondering if it would hold me back, or even crush my dreams.

  Mitch

  Being a younger brother has a lot of advantages. One of those advantages was watching my older brother waste his first year of eligibility only playing 80 downs. So I went up to Cal fully expecting to be redshirted my first year.

  Even without knowing Geoff’s experience, I was destined to sit out the year; the entire class of linemen—and we had a really impressive recruiting class for the offensive line—was redshirted. For me, it was a great move. As I mentioned, I didn’t exactly come from a dominant high school program. Pali didn’t even have an offensive line coach, so I was a raw player. This isn’t false modesty here. I had never lifted weights because in baseball I was a pitcher and my dad didn’t want us lifting. So not only was I the weakest offensive lineman, I was probably the weakest guy on the whole team with the possible exception of the kickers.

  I went up to school the first week of July for the Summer Bridge program. It was designed for all students to get acclimated. But in retrospect, it might have been the biggest grind of my entire college career. We signed up for summer school, so all the freshmen football recruits would wake up at 8 a.m. and go work out. Then we’d go to class, which are intense because they cram fifteen weeks of material into six or eight weeks. Then we’d go back to the training facility for meetings. The evenings were spent coping with homework. We’d get sixty to eighty pages of reading per night, and we didn’t have any time to study during the day because we were doing football stuff. I have to say, that was kind of a trial by fire for me. In comparison, the regular season and all the following semesters felt easier than the one that was supposed to “help” me adjust to being a student athlete. I suppose it taught me a lesson or two, the key one being that the secret to summer school for anyone on the Cal football team is to only take one class in the early session, and then stop, because the second session overlaps with the start of preseason practice. And that is a deadly combination.

  Actually, I learned a lot that first year. I learned about weight training and increasing my strength. I also learned more about my position—how to move, what drills I should be working on to increase my mobility, how to improve my leverage, and just hand skills in general. Blocking, when you get down to it, is about physics. We apply force at different angles to an object, in my case a defensive end or a linebacker. It’s not exactly a science, but there are elements of combat, there are combinations of moves, and there are different methods to explore.

  The most fun part was just learning about football on a more sophisticated level. My high school team had a basic play-calling system. The college game was far more nuanced and intricate. I got to study all the different variables and possibilities and start factoring in situational strategy into our planning and preparation. For example, if your team is facing a third and long situation, what should we be expecting from the defense? Will they be blitzing? If so, from where? And how should we counter that, or exploit that behavior? The battle in the trenches may be physics, but the game itself is a bit of a chess match.

  These were things I just never appreciated. Looking at film for the first time was also an eye-opener. In high school I was lucky if someone filmed a game. In college they film everything: all the drills and all the scrimmage practices. The only thing they don’t film is you warming up and stretching. We studied everything we did, analyzing our sessions after each practice. Everything was new to me, and I appreciated it all. I felt like I was learning a new sport, getting smarter, and growing stronger.

  I’m lucky that I loved what I was doing, because being a student athlete is a grind. After the summer program, preseason practice starts. And that was my introduction to two-a-day workouts, which I’d avoided in high school. Two-a-days could be brutal, especially when you are in full pads. My offensive line coach used to say, “Take a nap between them, and then when you wake up it’s a fresh new day, you’re only doing one practice a day!” That was a little trick to make you look on the bright side, and I took it to heart.

  After that first practice in a two-a-day, you go straight in the cold tub. That’s the smart thing to do, because the cold reduces inflammation and helps your muscles recover faster. Then you have lunch and eat smart: carbs and protein and veggies to replace everything you’ve burned up. After that, you either take a nap or you just zone out and make sure to stay off your feet. It’s all about the recovery, which is the main issue with two-a-days. You have about four hours to ice, or alternate ice and heat, and eat and rest. You are just trying to recuperate for the next round.

  Then you come back, have meetings, and watch the film of the first practice. Then you get ready and practice again. It depends where you are in the training season, but sometimes the second practice is designed to be a total grind as the coaches are trying to increase your strength and stamina, so it really can test your physical and mental toughness.

  Practices, as it happens, come in three flavors: full pads, where you wear a helmet, shoulder pads, and knee pads; shells, which are helmets, shoulder pads, and shorts; and spiders, which are helmets and a half-inch layer of padding, sort of the interior lining of shoulder pads.

  Usually one of the two-a-day practices will be in full pads, with the other in shells. But for linemen, as long as you have shoulder pads on, you are going to be doing a lot of hitting. So a shells practice can be almost as exhausting as a full-pads workout, although, obviously, in shells no one is allowed to tackle. At Cal, full pads meant the offensive line could cut block—where you lead with your shoulder and try to cut a defender’s legs from under him. But not every team practices and cuts in full pads—it’s really up to the coach. I’m pretty sure no NFL teams allow cutting of any sort during practice. The only situation I could possibly imagine is in training camp during live reps doing short yardage or goal line. But in the NFL knees are sacred, and I can’t see any coach ever allowing you to cut your own teammates.

  Another aspect of practice I discovered was the tempo. If you are in full pads they specify the intensity of the practice. So when you play “thud” tempo, everything is at full speed, but you don’t actually tackle ball carriers. You just “wrap them up,” which means the defenders get in position and try to wrap the skill player with the ball up. But there’s no actual hitting.

  “Live” tempo is the real thing. There’s hitting and tackling, but you’ve got to be careful in practice. Causing an injury in a non-game situation is the ultimate sin at any level of the game.

  Playing Division 1 football is a year-round commitment. The first semester of the year runs through mid-December, unless you are lucky enough to play in a bowl game. The later the bowl game, the later you get to go home. So a lot of players don’t get to spend Christmas with their families. That was always a big thing with guys on the team, trying to figure out how they could get home during the holiday. Depending on scheduled games, college football teams work during big holidays. On Thanksgiving, we’d practice in the morning. If a bowl game was three days after Christmas, we’d have some limited practice sessions during the holiday. It’s a fact of life. Being Jewish, missing Christmas wasn’t a big deal to me, but I did miss Hanukah and latke-frying sessions with Geoff.

  After the season, players are only allowed to practice eight hours a week. So I’d just focus on fitness training for eight weeks until spring ball’s fifteen practices started. When that ended we’d all go back to working out and studying for finals. So the only time we’d really have off as a football player is from
about May 15 to Memorial Day. After that, it was back to voluntary workouts, which pretty much the entire team attended. And since I was there, and the scholarship program incentivizes you to take summer school—there’s a series of ten checks given out throughout the year to cover expenses during the regular school year, but for extra summer checks you need to be in class to get them—I signed up for a six-week class. After that, I’d take a little break where I just trained and chilled for three weeks.

  * * *

  I have a lot of great culinary memories when it comes to my time at Cal. The training table at school was a fantasy come true for a guy like me. And you have to remember, starting out as the team weakling, I had some serious muscle building going on, so I needed all the protein and carbs I could get. Every workout was a high-intensity calorie-burning, muscle-making jamboree for me. And the training tables offered two dishes of everything: chicken, beef, fish, noodles, rice, potatoes, veggies. It was heaven.

  One of the coolest things about playing at Cal—I’ve never really heard about this at other schools—was the weekly postgame tailgating party. Actually, they were all-game tailgating parties, but since the team was busy, you know, playing on the field, we’d swing by after we hit the showers. These tailgates were massive affairs engineered by the parents and relatives of the players. They all got together and rented a parking lot at the freshman football dorms. Families would show up and start cooking and booming music from their stereos. It was an international smorgasbord. We had a couple of Italian kickers and they’d cook Italian dishes. The families of Polynesian guys would cook pork dishes. There were a couple of games where some of the tailgaters didn’t even go in to California Memorial Stadium and watch a down. They just stayed outside and roasted meats.

  It was a cool event. Berkeley has always had a reputation as a hotbed of counterculture, but that kind of hippie-dippy living didn’t cross over into the football team too much. I guess you could say tailgating was the football team’s biggest communal moment. There would be tons of individual cookouts going on, but often the parents would set up a communal, 100-foot long makeshift table in the middle of the tailgate parking lot and everyone would put food out. It was like a giant upscale potluck for everyone.

  Celebrities would sometimes show up, too. My dad met Joe Montana once, and other 49ers would sometimes visit. I remember the marching band would come down, which was cool. They are a part of the total game day experience, and they work their butts off, too. It’s too bad that college bands get to watch our game and stoke up the crowd, but we never get to see their half-time show because we are in the locker room.

  All in all, the postgame tailgate was a great way for parents to meet the players, who are really their kid’s best friends. Plus, they get to meet other families and Golden Bear supporters. Some of the parents and boosters would meet up at away games, too. One couple, Rich and Gail Roll, who I think masterminded the Berkeley tailgates, had an RV for away games, and so I know my mom and dad used to meet up with them and tailgate at every single game out of their RV.

  Now that I’m in the NFL, I think about how rare that kind of bonding is between players and family and friends. In the pros, that level of interaction is almost completely nonexistent. Families usually just hang out in the lobby outside a locker room or in some designated room near the locker rooms and wait for players to leave the locker room one by one. Some teams provide refreshments, but for the groups waiting, everyone seems self-contained. There’s not nearly the same level of camaraderie and interaction.

  In college you are more than a team, you are family. You train together, play together, study together, and live together. You also suffer together. In the off-season we would have 6:30 a.m. workouts, which is a brutal reality for your average college student. I meet people who claim they got through college never taking a class before 11 a.m., but we’d be up at 5:30 a.m. to make sure we were ready to go. Every Friday, my offensive line buddies would go to this Italian place and eat ridiculous amounts of food. Breakfast burritos, pancakes, waffles, corned beef hash, breakfast meats, the works. It was an off-season tradition, which helped cure the pain of waking up so damn early.

  Some people compare football to religion for the devotion fans have for their teams. Well, for football players, as in religion, shared meals are a major bonding ritual.

  * * *

  With the exception of my junior year, my career at Cal was kind of storybook. After my redshirt year, I cracked the first team lineup in 2008, started all 13 games, and won the team award for the Most Improved Lineman. We finished with a 9–4 record and beat Miami in the Emerald Bowl.

  I ended up starting all 51 games Cal played during my four years of eligibility. That was one game shy of the school record, which I would have tied, most probably, if we had received a bowl game bid my junior year. But unfortunately, that was Cal’s first losing season (5–7) under Head Coach Jeff Tedford. That wasn’t the only down side to the year. Late in the season, my lower back started hurting and I was sent for an MRI, which showed a herniated disc. I’m not sure if it was the exact same disc that Geoff injured during his junior year, but man, that was one thing I didn’t want to have in common with my brother. I played through the injury, which didn’t really impact my performance. And then, just like Geoff, I had back surgery in early January.

  The first couple of weeks I was basically just lying down in bed. Walking is good exercise after back surgery. The things doctors and therapists tell you to avoid are bending, lifting, and turning—the BLT of back surgery.

  * * *

  During my senior year I lived with two kickers, Bryan Anger, Cal’s awesome punter who got drafted in the third round by the Jacksonville Jaguars—one of highest draft picks ever for a punter—and Giorgio Tavecchio, our place kicker, who’s been bouncing around the league, from training camp to training camp, but unfortunately hasn’t made a roster. It was a really great year. Giorgio was born in Milan and is an adventurous chef. There are not that many people I know—especially in college—who wanted to make work-intensive food like gnocchi, but Giorgio was up for it, and we made everything from scratch. He also talked me through a bunch of great Italian meals. I guess that was about as wild and crazy as I got in college. I was focused on the NFL. I even got a hold of some NFL tape of the best offensive linemen and spent a bunch of time studying the tape, looking for tricks of the trade.

  I finished school with a degree in American Studies as well as Pac-10 all-academic honors. I was listed high on most of the preseason scouting reports as an NFL-caliber player. And I won the Brick Muller Award for Cal’s Most Valuable Offensive Lineman for the third year in a row. I’m proud to report we finished the season with a winning record, although we muffed the Holiday Bowl, losing 21-10 to Texas.

  When I think about the level of talent on Cal, I can’t believe we didn’t dominate more games. We had five guys drafted by the NFL my senior year besides myself: linebacker Mychal Kendricks, my roommate Bryan, receiver Marvin Jones, safety D. J. Campbell, and defensive end Trevor Guyton. That was more draftees than any other team in our division of the Pac-12 that year. Yet we always seemed to have more NFL talent than we had college success, which is hard to explain. The coaches were obviously doing something right to train us and send us off to have successful NFL careers. But the total team game fell short for some reason that I just cannot explain. I guess there are plenty of teams in college with this kind of unfulfilled potential. You see it in the NCAA March Madness tournament, over and over again. Remember 2015 and how Kentucky, the team stocked with four first-round NBA draft picks (and two second-rounders), couldn’t beat a Wisconsin team with two guys who went in the first round? It’s one of the mysteries of sports: how teamwork, smarts, luck, and timing can all conspire to beat raw physical talent.

  As they say: on any given Sunday …

  SECOND DOWN

  5

  THE CHOSEN ONES: GETTING DRAFTED

  Geoff

  I’m about to tell a
really embarrassing story. How embarrassing? It’s something I’ve only shared with two people in the world: my brother and my agent. I don’t think I ever even told my dad, who has been so incredibly supportive. I just couldn’t bring myself to tell him.

  This is not one of those “Ha-ha! My fly was open on national TV” jackass-type stories. No, it’s about how I almost screwed up my entire career.

  I bet you can’t wait.

  In the second week of the season during my senior year at Oregon, we were getting ready for a huge game with Michigan. (And I mean huge. They don’t call the stadium in Ann Arbor the Big House for nothing; 100,000 people wound up stuffing themselves into the stands. It was insane.) I was doing my usual weight training. My wrists were bothering me, which is not great if you are working with free weights, obviously, because you have to grip barbells and wrists bear a lot of the stress. So I was bench-pressing with 225 pounds on the bar, which was a standard weight for me. I decided to lift using something called the suicide grip.

  There’s a very good reason it’s called the suicide grip—you don’t wrap your thumbs around the bar, you keep them underneath the bar. That means the bar can slip off your hands and onto your chest, or neck, or even head.

  And that is exactly what happened to me. My hands were sweaty and in the middle of a lift, the barbell slipped and landed on my sternum.