That night at El Torito, the gathering was smaller than my high school graduation party, but it might have been more moving. Hanging out with twenty of my close family members and friends made for a wonderful evening. The drinks were flowing and so was the good cheer. Best of all, my grandfather Norman—my dad’s dad and the guy who helped instill a love of sports in all of us—was there as well. Even though Mitch was still up at school, we had three generations of sports-crazy Schwartzes whooping it up that day. I think everyone was so worried about me getting passed over that, in the end, being a final-round pick seemed like a real victory.
It sure felt that way to me.
Mitch
My transition from college to the NFL was a lot different than Geoff’s. Once again I benefited from his experience. As he learned new techniques and training methods, he would share them with me, usually over the phone. As he messed up—like with his devastating bench press accident—I knew exactly what not to do. I definitely cut down on suicide grips, I can tell you that! When it came to selecting an agent, my dad and I talked to a bunch of guys who were wooing me. But Deryk had really been on the level with Geoff, and I’d heard about how hard he worked making sure Geoff had options when the draft didn’t go as planned. So that was a pretty easy choice, and a smart one. It sure made doing this book together easier.
Even though we are brothers, and we share a lot of the same interests, evaluating our football careers is not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison. That’s because I played my first two years of high school ball, while Geoff mostly sat or played some JV during his. I also benefited from a redshirt year in college. Geoff didn’t. So in terms of the sheer amount of hours spent training and playing and practicing, I had accrued a lot more experience than Geoff had at the same pre-draft point in his career.
It is always an interesting question: what is the secret to success? Why is it that more brothers don’t make it in professional sports if they have similar backgrounds? I’ve read that often younger siblings benefit from having older siblings who play sports, which makes a lot of sense; they are more inundated with a sport at the earliest possible age. Is it about nurture or nature? The author Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers has written that it takes 10,000 hours to become great at something. Actually, I’m not sure I agree, especially when it comes to athletics. Some guys just have superior genetics. Hey, look at me: I inherited size. I couldn’t ever be a successful lineman if I was 5'10" and 170 pounds. No chance. I haven’t added up all the hours I’ve spent training, but I’m sure both Geoff and I were way behind most other Division 1 players when we started. Let’s say in college we spent two hours a day training or practicing for three hundred days a year—that’s a lowball number. After four years, we’ve hit 2,400 hours. And me? I had five years at college, so right there, that’s six hundred hours more than Geoff.
At any rate, by the time I started training for the NFL combine in January of 2012, my agent told me I was pinging pretty loud on the radar of a bunch of NFL teams.
I went down to Nashville and trained with a guy named Kurt Hester—the same guy who worked with Geoff—along with about fifteen other guys. It was unlike any other training I’d ever done. The training was more like track and field work than football.
What I remember most, and what Geoff and I both laugh about and scratch our heads over, is the 40-yard dash. The 40 is a big deal at the combine, which is a little odd, because unless they ran track in high school or college, most players have zero experience with the intricate science of sprinting. They’ve never learned a starting stance. They have no idea how to “fire out” and explode into the sprint. They don’t examine the mechanics of their stride, or how their arms should move.
So it’s an entirely new experience for players. We had to study and learn form and technique, which was cool. As an athlete interested in biomechanics and moving efficiently, I found it all pretty interesting.
But here’s the irony about the 40-yard dash: you train intensely for a month and a half—sprinting, sprinting, and sprinting again—because you are told it is an important metric. And yet if you are a linemen, you will never run a timed 40-yard dash again for the rest of your life.
I’m serious. I don’t do drills with skill position players, but as far as I know, there is nobody with a stopwatch timing sprints during preseason training. At least not for offensive linemen. So it seems odd that the 40-yard dash is treated like a sacred, all-important statistic. I can see it being important for skill position players and defensive players, but for the offensive line, other drills make a lot more sense to me. The short shuttle, for instance, which requires you to go five yards to your right, ten yards to your left, and five yards back, would seem like a far more valuable way to gauge a lineman’s ability, since that drill is about moving and changing direction, which mimics some of what you do in a game.
My 40-yard sprints during an actual game have been few and far between. Linemen are more likely to have to run that far after an interception or fumble recovery than they are during a successful offensive play. And if you are relying on an offensive lineman to win a footrace, your team is in big trouble.
Maybe I’m discounting all these drills and metrics a little because, to be honest, my combine numbers were underwhelming. The fact is I’m better at actually playing the game than I am at working out. So I did 23 bench presses at 225 pounds, which is standard. I ran a 5.38 in the 40-yard dash, which was slow, and 4.87 in the shuttle. My vertical leap was passable for a big guy at 26.5 inches, not that I’ll ever have to actually jump straight up in the air, except maybe to catch a deflected pass. But my broad jump was awful.
The test I apparently, allegedly, supposedly excelled on was the Wonderlic Cognitive Ability Test, a standardized test they give all the players. The Wonderlic consists of fifty questions to be answered in twelve minutes and is designed to evaluate aptitude for learning and problem solving ability. To me, it seemed like a lot of basic math and logic questions with a few others that seemed designed to test my ability at focusing on little details, such as spotting the differences between phrases that might seem identical at first look, but aren’t.
I never got my results for the test, but it has been reported in a lot of places that I scored a 35. Some people make a big deal of this number, since the average score is 21 for NFL players. But when you think that Ryan Fitzpatrick, the Harvard-graduated journeyman QB who has played for about six teams, most recently the Jets, scored a 48, my score doesn’t seem that off the charts.
Fortunately my college coach Jeff Tedford had some nice things to say about me, so even if I bombed the Wonderlic, any team interested in me would have known that I have some functional gray matter. “He’s as smart as any linemen we’ve ever had here, any player for that matter that we’ve ever had here. For him to comprehend what he’s doing like he’s doing it and not make any mental mistakes, there are very few if any. He’s a very intelligent guy.”
That’s always nice to hear from a coach.
There are plenty of other evaluations that happen during the combine. There are informal interviews, and if a team is really interested they’ll request a formal interview in their hotel suite. There are a series of medical exams where you strip and the medical experts from each team can poke and prod your body. That might be the weirdest experience in the combine. Sure, the entire process is designed to let teams evaluate your athletic ability, but sitting on an examination table six different times so that reps from all thirty-two teams can see you, well, there’s an element of being an exhibit or part of a cattle call. Like livestock traders looking at steer, teams want to see what we are made of, how big and healthy we are, and if we are worth the investment.
Maybe I was a great interview, or maybe teams really love that Wonderlic, or maybe, as Geoff says, I had great game tape, but a number of teams expressed serious interest in me. Looking back on it, I also think my 51-game streak of starting at Cal probably helped my reputation as well. I only missed one play during tha
t streak, and it was because one of my cleats came off. There’s a saying that durability is more important than ability. And there is certainly some truth to that. You may have explosive talent, but if your body breaks down too frequently—and I think the NBA’s often-injured star Derrick Rose is a painful example of this—then it’s hard to help your team. If you’re healthy and you’re on the field, you can be productive. If you’re injured and on the sidelines, there’s only so much you can do.
After the combine, a number of teams approached us. The Cleveland Browns, the Atlanta Falcons, and the Kansas City Chiefs all sent their offensive line coaches out to Cal to conduct private workouts with me. They also flew me in to see the facilities and meet with other coaches. And I flew into Pittsburgh to meet with them. According to Deryk and Geoff, these were great signs that I was being considered as an early round pick. Teams generally don’t fly in guys they view as candidates for the later rounds.
They broke the draft into three days in 2012. Although some published reports predicted I might go in the second round, Deryk and I kept our expectations low. I would have been happy to be a third rounder. And after what happened to Geoff, I wasn’t counting on anything.
But there was very little drama. The second night of the draft began with the second-round picks, and we didn’t have to wait long. The phone rang right after the second pick of the night. According to my dad, who was sitting in the room with my uncle and his family and the Weinsteins, I broke out in a big smile during the call and everyone knew exactly what was happening.
I hung up the phone and said, “That was Cleveland. They’re going to take me with the fifth pick of the second round.” I’m sure I tried to be low-key—that is sort of my style—as I said it. But as everyone started cheering and hugging, I was ecstatic and totally relieved. There was none of the agony that Geoff went through. I got lucky. I was drafted higher than expected, the thirty-seventh pick overall.
The next night we went out to dinner at one of my favorite restaurants, a Brazilian all-you-can-eat place, with about fourteen people. Geoff was there and it was a great feeling, knowing we were both going be in the league, doing something we loved. When the bill came—and it must have been a pretty hefty tab—my dad grabbed it.
“No. Let me get this,” Geoff said, reaching for his wallet and discovering, in a classic move, that his pockets were empty. “Oh, man. I left my wallet at home.”
Everyone cracked up. We’d all heard this before. Not that Geoff isn’t generous; he’s totally giving. He always wants to have people over and feed them. But our uncle has been known to lovingly refer to Geoff as “Alan Harper”—the “fiscally conservative” character played by Jon Cryer in Two and a Half Men.
So my dad paid. I remember thinking, “Man, I’m about to sign a serious contract. Next time I can be the one to pay. How cool is that?”
6
LEARNING THE ROPES
Geoff
It’s no secret rookies have steep learning curves. Mine started from the moment the Panthers drafted me. I had no idea where the team was located. Honestly, I thought they played in Raleigh. I didn’t know Charlotte existed. I remember going to look it up about an hour after I got drafted.
The next things I learned were lessons about money and the NFL.
The salary structure for rookies is pretty much set in stone as far as base salary goes. It’s all laid out in the collective bargaining agreement and is based on your place in the draft. The only wiggle room is around your signing bonus.
When negotiations were over, I remember Deryk calling me and saying, “I got you an extra two.”
“That’s great,” I said. “An extra two grand is fantastic. It will totally come in handy.”
“No,” Deryk said, “two hundred.”
I was the eleventh-to-last pick of the draft. My signing bonus was $42,600. That’s better than a poke in the eye, but it’s a far cry from the million-dollar deals that the guys in the first two rounds get. So the lesson I learned was that if I was ever going to make some serious NFL money, I’d have to become a starter and earn a big payday on my second contract or sign as a free agent somewhere.
Rookies drafted in the late rounds don’t get a lot of money and we don’t get a lot of time to shine in the spotlight, either. But that may have turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Before I got to the NFL, I figured there would be a lot of dog-eat-dog competition in training camp, with new guys fighting to take jobs and veterans fighting just as hard to keep them. But from my first days at camp, which were held at Wofford College in South Carolina, I didn’t feel any negativity or nastiness from the veterans. They were totally cool with me. I suppose the fact that I was a seventh-round draft pick had a lot to do with it. Maybe the offensive line guys were nicer to me than they would have been if I had been a first-round draft pick. Or maybe they just knew that as a seventh rounder I had almost zero chance of making the squad, never mind actually winning a starting position.
Whatever the reason, they were a great group of linemen, and they definitely didn’t abuse us rookies. Hazing in the NFL varies from team to team. I’ve heard of some coaches that wouldn’t stand for any of it, while others see it as a good-natured rite of passage and a way to keep things loose. In Carolina, hazing, if you could even call it that, was mild—it was pretty much limited to singing in the dining hall and catering to veterans’ food and drink whims—providing drinks, candy, chips, and whatever junk food the veterans wanted. And I had to pick up the check for a few meals.
Most of the singing happens in that dining hall, and I lived in total fear of being asked to sing. I was still a shy kid. And although I no longer stuttered like I used to, it was still a concern of mine. There were times during training camp I would get my food and go back and eat in my room to avoid any chance of getting called to sing.
All of which is to say the guys on the team were more mentors than evil rabble-rousers. Especially offensive tackle Jordan Gross and starting center Ryan Kalil. I learned a lot about being a pro from them. A lot of different things go into being a professional football player. You need to know how to prepare each week, both mentally and physically. You need to know how to watch film properly, and what tendencies to look for. You need to know how to take care of your body and how to balance things—how to work hard and also have fun at the same time. It’s a long season, you can’t be serious every moment of the day. You got to have some fun.
Jordan and Ryan were just awesome guys, and they have continued to have fun right up to the end of their time together. When Jordan announced his retirement in 2014, ending an eleven-year run with the Panthers, Ryan showed up with an improvised barbershop quartet and sang a lineman-centric version of “Happy Trails” at the press conference.
Happy trails to you, my aging, departing friend,
Happy trails to you, I can’t believe it’s the end,
No more cares about the spin or speed or bullrush, just try and not get fat while in retirement,
Happy trails to you, you’ll be missed on third and 10.
That’s called keeping it loose.
* * *
With the new collective bargaining agreement of 2011 one of the tried and true traditions of training camp vanished. I’m talking about two-a-day practices. I experienced them at Oregon, and when I first arrived at Carolina we had them, too, alternating between two-a-day and one-a-day practices, with no days off.
There are certain things you get used to in football. I’m now very disciplined about my food intake. I’m completely comfortable with weight training. I can watch tape for hours as if it’s a film festival. But there was no getting used to two-a-days.
As much as it hurts to say, I actually believe that two-a-days were valuable practice tools. You are pushed to your limit. And the offensive line gets to refine the intricate ballet that starts with every hike, which is absolutely crucial. But two-a-days were brutal. At its most intense, a team’s offensive and defensive linemen are throwing punches, grabbin
g, cutting, and generally knocking the crap out of one another for about four hours a day. That is a huge amount of hitting, over and over again. And even though practices are held in the morning and late afternoon, the weather was usually scorching in August. Offensive linemen all complain about being in pads every day at training camp, but doing that twice a day sends an intensely physical sport off the charts. It’s a physical and mental grind like few others. At the end of that morning session you have to ice down, eat, and try to recover, because chances are the afternoon session is going to be harder.
These days, the league has done away with two-a-days. My brother has never experienced them in the NFL. As much as I sometimes hated being in pads and doing two-a-days, I can look back on them as a necessary evil. I think now that we have less padded practices, the line play is not always going to as refined. It’s like anything else. If you don’t practice as much, you are just not going to be as good.
I held my own that first camp, but eventually I was cut and assigned to the practice squad. That means I trained as if I was going to play—going to every practice, doing all the lifts and training, acting as the scout team, and basically running the same drills as the starters—but I never dressed for a game or traveled with the team to away games. I stayed home and watched on TV.
It was hard at first. I remember thinking my first camp was pretty good and I told myself that I should have made the roster. But looking back on it, I was being overconfident. I needed another year to get stronger and smarter and become more of an NFL pro. I also needed to work on basics. In college, I played in a two-point stance, so learning to play from a three-point stance took me a little bit of time. I also needed to increase my strength to make sure my punches—where you get your hands into the defender and throw them off-balance—packed the necessary wallop. Plus, my sternum wasn’t 100 percent healed that first year. Getting hit in the right—or maybe I should say, wrong—spot would unleash major agony.
Eat My Schwartz Page 7