There are no words to describe the pain. Honestly, pain is part of the game. This was a whole other level.
The guys that were spotting me lifted the bar off my chest, and as quick as I could, I got the hell out of there.
I didn’t tell a soul what happened. Not the trainers, not the coaches, none of my buddies. Nobody. I was so embarrassed. I was ashamed, really.
A day later I was in such pain that my eyes teared up during practice. I’d never experienced anything close to this level of agony before. It was absolutely brutal. I had one of the trainers create a pad to put on my chest underneath my shoulder pads, so it was actually protecting me from the hard plastic of the pads. I needed it because when I got hit in the center of my chest, I could not breathe.
I’m pretty sure I must have cracked my sternum. It became bruised and swollen, which, I’m told, is often a telltale sign of a fracture, but maybe that’s an old wives’ tale. I sucked it up and, ironically, the game at Michigan was one of my best in college. I guess the adrenaline from playing in front of 109,733 helped. Our offense was just a machine that day, with our quarterback Dennis Dixon throwing for 292 yards and running for another 76. We won 39-7 and handed Michigan their worst defeat since 1968. Not that I’m bragging or anything.
As good as that victory felt, my chest was a mess. I couldn’t bench-press for about four months without severe pain. I’d still do weight training—squat lifts, dead lifts, curls, leg work, and everything else—but I avoided the bench and prayed my sternum was healing.
Why am I making a big deal about this? Because at the NFL combine—where draft-ready collegiate players showcase for the NFL—there are two drills that are viewed as enormously important when it comes to evaluating offensive linemen: the 40-yard dash and the bench press. The bench press test is to see how many 225-pound presses you can do in one minute. I had gritted and bluffed my way through the season, playing really well in spite of the pain. But there’s no bluffing at the combine; you are literally studied like a lab specimen.
Despite the worry I had about my injury and its impact on my draft status, that was the best campaign of my years in college. It also featured one of the funniest moments of my entire athletic life.
I’ve always been a fan of sports radio for the same reason I like political science—you can have interesting discussions and debates. It’s fun, it’s often entertaining, and I’m interested in hearing other people’s analysis, even when it’s a call-in show and I have no idea who the callers are. One of my favorite sports radio guys is Jim Rome, who used to be on ESPN, but is now on CBS Sports Radio. He’s very much a West Coast radio guy. He is probably best known for his rants—long, passionate soliloquies that are funny, entertaining, and opinionated, which is, of course, sports radio’s bread and butter.
He came to Oregon in 2007 when it looked like we were headed to the national championship game. First he interviewed Coach Bellotti. Then, after we beat USC, he had our quarterback Dennis Dixon and the running back Jonathan Stewart as guests. And Dennis and Jonathan did something classy during the interview—they got Rome to agree that if we beat ASU, he would have offensive linemen on the show. I really appreciated that. I mean, who ever interviews linemen? We don’t have much cachet.
Sure enough, the Ducks beats ASU—which moved us way up in the national polls to fourth or fifth—and Rome invited three linemen on the show. I was a huge Rome fan, so I went on with Max Unger and Jeff Kendall. It was a giant thrill for me, since I’d been listening to Rome for forever and had turned Jeff and Max into fans. Jeff was the one chosen to perform a rant and he was just amazing. He rose to the occasion with a wild six-minute diatribe that touched on every Ducks football issue imaginable—how many rival programs failed to recruit us, how our kick-ass spread offense was blowing teams away, our dynamic Ducks defense. Along the way he threw down a declaration: “We will play in a national title game,” and shared our motto, “Respect all, fear none.” But all of that was just a warm-up for this:
“Jim, we’re just a bunch of fat kids livin’ a dream!”
Of course, Max and I just cracked up, and so did Jim Rome, who loved the line so much he replayed it and quoted it on subsequent shows. We stayed on the program after the rant and were thrilled that listeners kept e-mailing about how Jeff had walked the walk and talked the talk.
One of the things I love about Jeff’s fat-kids line is that it is self-deprecatingly funny and honest; it skirts the line between intelligent trash talk and flat-out honesty. But I also like it because, at least for linemen, it’s filled with knowing irony. The world may look at us as huge, beefy guys—just a bunch of fat kids—but we know we are also strong, dedicated athletes who subject ourselves to grueling workouts for a game we all love. And when you can bench-press 400 pounds, or do 20 reps of 250 and run 40 yards in five seconds, it really helps you transcend any fat-kid stereotypes.
My mom thought the line was so great she made up T-shirts for the entire offensive line: Fat kids livin’ a dream. We were all happy to wear them.
In January of 2015, I went back on the Rome show and he not only remembered Jeff’s rant, but he had his producer dig it up and played a snippet. It’s still as funny—and as true—as ever.
* * *
I was majorly stressed about the combine and my weight lifting injury. Coming out of college, one of the questions about me was my strength, and some evaluations apparently said I didn’t play as strong as I should. You could look it up: he’s not very tough or physical on the field. I hoped that pumping out, say, 26 bench presses would help counteract concerns about physicality—especially since 23 presses is considered an acceptable number. But I had no idea how many I could do with my injury.
I flew down to Nashville to begin workouts and get ready for the combine. At the training facility there were about fifteen other guys on the same mission. The first thing they had us do was test our 40-yard dashes. My 40 was not bad for my size. I was happy. But then we went to bench-press, something I hadn’t done in just over four months.
I did three.
I was miserable. I talked to the trainers and to Deryk. As I said, the minimum goal for any offensive lineman in the combine is about 23 presses. Obviously you want to do more, but there are ways to interpret numbers so that 23 for one guy is the equivalent of 25 for someone else. How does that logic work?
Well, one thing they look at is arm length. If you have long arms, you are moving the weights farther than someone with short arms. So for a guy like me with a big wingspan, that would be noted. My 23 reps would involve more lifting than a guy with short arms doing the same amount.
But there was no way we could explain away a number like three.
Instantly the bench press became the main focus of my training. Everything I did was based on trying to get my strength up. I worked on keeping my elbows close to my body to relieve stress on the shoulder, I built up hand and arm strength. I worked the scapula—aka the shoulder blades—which take on so much of the stress during a press.
I tried to stay positive through the training sessions and vanquish the memory of the foolish, idiotic use of the suicide grip. I also thought a lot about whether the bench press was really a good tool for evaluating offensive linemen. My conclusion? Not really. The fact is that the bench only measures half of a lineman’s power, if that. Our legs, hips, and lower backs are just as important when it comes to exploding off the line of scrimmage and driving an opponent back. Sure, arm and shoulder strength are a huge piece of the package, but it seemed to me, and it still seems to me, that the bench press should not be the key metric for evaluating talent.
Of course, nobody at the combine was going to care about the theories of a twenty-one-year-old know-it-all who was clearly feeling defensive about his numbers. So I kept my mouth shut and told myself I was going to make it work, and I busted my butt. Slowly—too damn slowly for me—I improved. By the end of February, my strength had definitely come back and I could knock out about 18 presses in on
e go. Part of me was glad, the improvement made it clear to me that with more time, I could eventually put up a respectable number. But part of me was frustrated, because I was running out of time.
I wasn’t the only one frustrated, it turns out. In going back over my memories of the combine years, my dad told me something he had never mentioned to me before—that about ten days before the combine Deryk told him that Priority Sports was seriously thinking about keeping me out of the combine. “His fast twitch muscle isn’t where it needs to be, he’s sort of sluggish,” is how my dad remembers Deryk putting it. And my dad’s reaction was pretty forceful:
“I said, ‘Don’t you dare do that. After all his work coming back from his junior-year injury, you will wreck him. You want him to sit out a drill, fine. But do not pull him out of this thing. You’ll devastate him.’”
So everyone was tense. And of course, being frustrated and stressed going into the combine is exactly what you don’t want to be. That’s because the weeklong event is a study in physiological and psychological warfare. Maybe those terms are a little harsh, but my point is that NFL teams want to see how you’re going to handle the stress of a three-day job interview that also requires you to perform physically at the highest level, usually with very little sleep. The entire schedule is set up to mess with your equilibrium. They purposely save most of the workouts for the end of the process because that’s when you’re the most stressed out and tired. During my combine, they sent all of the offensive linemen to do a quad test on a Cybex machine as soon as we arrived. That was before we had checked in and dropped off our bags. The first two days they wake you up early to do your medical, take your mental tests, and meet with teams. At 4 a.m. or 5 a.m. on the second day, they wake you up for a drug test. Then you have six or seven hours of medical exams. Then, later that day, you have to participate in the “meat market.” You take off your shirt and walk up on stage in front of every single scout and coach in the NFL and weigh in. There are about three hundred people looking at your body and silently taking notes. It’s pretty weird.
And why do they run it this way? Teams want to see how you handle the pressure. And by pressure, I’m talking about not just the game day stress or the physical stress, but all the additional crap that life brings: family emergencies, sick children who keep you up all night, girl trouble, peer pressure from your old friends to live large. All of that. Teams aren’t just looking for a physical upside, they’re also looking for a player who can be consistent and stay focused at all times. A true pro.
I had only one private interview during the combine. It was with the Seattle Seahawks. Naturally I was nervous. To me it was the equivalent of a big date with the most awesome girl in the universe. I wanted to impress the hell out of them. Instead, they impressed the hell out of me. During the interview, head coach Mike Holmgren pulled up one of my game clips from Oregon. It was a game against a lesser team and he said, “It doesn’t look like you’re trying as hard here.”
He was absolutely right. It wasn’t as if I was getting beat, but I wasn’t going 100 percent. It was right there on the tape: me, not being aggressive. Maybe that was the play that had scouts saying I wasn’t that physical. I couldn’t say anything except, “You’re right.” I didn’t think they would notice stuff like that, but even if you’re a lower-round pick, they have guys who are watching all your clips. They remember your college games better than you do. It was a hell of a lesson.
* * *
At the combine, Deryk and I put our heads together. There was no way we wanted to deliver a subpar performance. Even though I could do 18 presses, which, if you add it up, is about 4050 total pounds of lifting, it just wasn’t a strong number in comparison to other linemen. We strategized about me skipping the bench press drill. Would this hurt my draft ranking? Would people wonder about my strength? There was no way to get inside the heads of the GMs and scouts who were evaluating me. Teams are going to take whatever information they get and use it the way they want to use it. A guy might have bad numbers in the combine, but if he has amazing tape, a team might ignore his numbers, or vice versa. My tape was pretty good, and except for the bench press issue, I expected to perform well in the other combine drills.
It turned out I was right. I did a 5.36 in the 40-yard dash and a 1.8 in the 10-yard dash and 4.79 in the 20-yard shuttle. All respectable for a man of my size and weight. My vertical leap and broad jump weren’t exactly off the charts, but those are not premium offensive line skills either. What’s a great result? Well, Joe Thomas, the perennial pro-bowler who was picked third overall in the 2007 draft and plays with Mitch on the Browns, ran the 40 in 4.92 and the 10-yard in 1.75. My shuttle was slightly faster than his 4.88, but Joe clearly had a monster combine.
In the end, when it came time for the bench press session, Deryk and I decided to skip the drill.
It was a risky move.
Very risky, as it turned out.
* * *
One thing I love about Deryk and the team at Priority Sports—even if they considered keeping me out of the combine—is there is never BS with them. There was no sweet talk about how I could go in the first or second round. There was no blowing smoke. They are realists, and so am I. As draft day approached, Deryk and other agents at Priority Sports talked with scouts and GMs, looked over previous drafts, and compared my combine and Pro Day numbers against other linemen expected to be in the draft. Based on their assessments, I was the tenth to fifteenth highest-rated tackle in the draft, which meant I was potentially a fourth- to-six-round pick. I was cool with that. Sure, everyone dreams of getting a big fat contract, but that was obviously a dream too far for me. Just getting the opportunity to compete at the next level would be a dream come true for me.
That year the NFL draft was a two-day affair; rounds one and two were picked on the first day, and then third to seventh rounds were chosen the following day. The advice I got from everyone ranged from “Don’t watch the draft” to “bury your head in the sand” to “go to the movies” to “whatever you do, make sure you don’t watch the draft.”
And I took that to heart. I went to a buddy’s baseball game on the first day. But when I got home, I talked to Deryk and found out that seven offensive tackles—an unheard of number—were taken in the first round. I said, “Sweet!”
We both figured I would probably move up in the rounds.
When day two of the draft rolled around, I threw everyone’s advice out the window. I felt like, “I’m gonna watch the draft, because I’m going to get drafted higher than we thought.” And I sat down on the couch at 6 a.m. to watch the proceedings in New York. When the third round finished, my name was not called.
Then the fourth round went by. My name was still not called.
At this point I started to get frustrated for a couple of reasons. I saw guys drafted ahead of me that I knew, in my bones, I was better than. That hurt. Also, the phone was not ringing at all, which was another bad sign. Normally, a player who is about to get picked get calls beforehand. Scouts call to see if the player is getting interest from other teams, or to make sure they have the right phone number, or to give him a heads-up that they are going to take him and to be on standby. But my phone was silent.
By this time my dad and uncle were watching with me and we were all kind of shell-shocked. I actually think my dad, who later called it the most grueling day of his life, was taking it harder than I was. He and my mom had planned a dinner celebration for family and friends at—where else?—El Torito up the block. I could see he was worried about that. I went outside and shot baskets with my uncle to try to take my mind off things. I can’t lie, it was hard. I wondered if all this was the result of my stupid bench press accident and a fractured sternum that nobody knew about. I couldn’t believe it.
Finally, just before the start of the fifth round, I got a call. It was the Carolina Panthers offensive line coach Dave Magazu, and he said the Panthers wanted to draft me, coming up in the fifth round. I let out a sigh of relief.
But guess what? That turned out to be a wasted breath, because the fifth round came and went, and I was still on the board. So now I was beyond frustrated. I was in such a foul mood, I said, “Dad, cancel the party. I’m not in the mood. I can’t celebrate being an undrafted free agent.”
In the sixth round I started getting more phone calls, and so did Deryk. People were expressing interest. But some of the calls weren’t about drafting me, they were about recruiting me to sign on as an undrafted free agent. The only upside about those kinds of calls were that a player sometimes has the ability to choose the team he goes to, so he can land on a team where they need more help. That’s the theory, anyway, and Deryk basically started working out a deal in principle to go to one specific team.
Then Carolina called again. “How do you feel about being drafted?” said the coach, John Fox.
“At this point, I don’t even care,” I said. It was a 100 percent in-the-moment honest answer. I felt totally humiliated. I was completely over the process. And I guess I was sort of preparing myself for becoming a free agent.
“Well, we drafted you.”
All my disappointment, sadness, anger, and frustration vanished in a heartbeat. I might have been the 241st pick, eleven spots from the last guy, but I was going to the NFL! I’d get a contract and a signing bonus! The living room was filled with high-fives, hugs, and laughter. People started calling and e-mailing, and before I knew it, the party my dad had canceled was back on.
I had done it. The stupid bench press accident hadn’t completely ruined my career. I can’t tell you how relieved I was. Looking back, I can almost laugh about it now. But there were moments that day when I thought, man, one stupid training accident and I’ve screwed up my whole career. The whole dream, all my hard work, could have been wiped out. I’m sure the injury and my decision not to bench-press hurt my draft stock. It had to have.
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