The Best American Sports Writing 2013

by Glenn Stout

  Seconds after the official NFL draft ends, a whole other nether-draft begins, one far more frenzied and dramatic than the one at Radio City. From 1967, the year the NFL instituted a joint draft with the more recently established American Football League, until 1976, the draft went 17 rounds, with about 450 players being selected. The current seven-round format totals about 250, leaving a vast countrywide bin of talented discards that general managers, coaches, and scouts start madly ferreting through, like a group of shoppers who have been granted a limited after-hours spree for bargain-basement gems.

  Not two minutes after Harnish’s selection that day, Pat’s phone rang. Ran Carthon was on the line. The Falcons wanted him.

  “The truth is,” said Dave Lee, Pat’s agent, a partner of PlayersRep based in Cleveland, “when you get toward the bottom of the draft, basically from the fifth to the seventh round, the talent level isn’t all that different from that of the undrafted free agents. Teams at that point are just looking for guys that fit their system, and it’s anybody’s guess whether you’ll get drafted or not. The Falcons wanted speedy linebackers. Pat shows a lot of speed. They said, ‘We think it’s a great opportunity.’ They went through the reasons. Obviously we said, ‘We’re getting other calls,’ so we could play a bit with the signing bonus, but it was pretty easy to jump on their offer.”

  A contract was soon faxed to the Schillers’ home, its terms at once bleak and beguiling. Up front, Pat would receive just a $1,000 signing bonus, along with per diem expenses of $155 during spring camp. Should he make it as far as preseason training camp beginning in late July, the payment would be the NFL Players Association’s stipulated $850 a week. The big money, big for a rookie at least, was all in the offing: the standard first-year salary of $390,000 he receives only if he makes and remains on the 53-man roster for the entire season. Should he be picked for the team’s eight-man practice squad instead, he would receive a salary of $5,700 a week, amounting to $96,900 over a 17-week season and more if the Falcons made the playoffs.

  Pat and Dave Lee were encouraged by the fact that the Falcons hadn’t picked any linebackers in the official draft. The team did, however, sign three other undrafted linebackers and a total of 23 undrafted free agents in all, the most of any team in the NFL. In the end, 623 undrafted free agents were signed in 2012 to the same basic contract that arrived at the Schillers’ home that evening. It all seems wildly prodigal. But not in terms of breaking owners’ bank accounts so much as players’ hearts. Two, maybe three, of the undrafted free agents annually signed by each NFL team will make the 53-man roster. Of the 23 undrafted players on the Falcons roster at the start of last season’s minicamp, one player made the roster.

  With a signed contract in hand that Saturday evening, my nephew descended the stairs to the family’s finished basement to use the fax machine in his father’s music studio. The Falcons ask that their players send such contracts back before midnight. It’s the undrafted free agent’s peculiar inversion of the Cinderella tale: having to rush to ensure the right to arrive at the NFL’s ball in a pumpkin.

  Six weeks later, his sculptured frame blurring in the gridiron- warble of a Georgia June sun, Pat was standing on the Atlanta Falcons’ practice field in Flowery Branch, learning the consequences of living his dream. Midway through the Falcons’ six weeks of spring-training sessions—each NFL team’s yearly padless orientation ritual—Pat had just got what all first-year players in the NFL most crave: a play, a “rep.” Reps for a rookie are but a few precious crumbs left after the daily scrums of the first and second teams—the “Ones” and “Twos.” It’s one of the crueler realities of the NFL’s strictly enforced hierarchy, a classic Catch-22: what you most need in order to make a team as a rookie, especially an undrafted one, are opportunities to show what you can do. You have little chance of getting those, however, precisely because you’re a rookie. There are so few chances, in fact, that when a rep does come your way, the tendency is to get a bit greedy, to overplay.

  Mike Nolan, a former defensive coordinator for the New York Giants, Jets, and five other NFL teams before being hired by Atlanta last winter, had just signaled for the “Threes,” with Pat at middle linebacker or “Mike,” to execute a “Dallas freeze,” a package featuring two blitzing linebackers. As one of the scheme’s designated blitzers, Pat shot toward the quarterback, then deftly swerved inside a blocking fullback to get at his target. Another head-turning display, although in this instance for entirely the wrong reasons. Coaches love speed. They love schemes even more, and in that one Pat was designated to be the “contain man.” His responsibility was to go outside the blocking back to prevent the play from developing wide.

  “Give me two good reasons,” Nolan’s voice boomed, “why you went inside.”

  Pat went slack beneath a bowed helmet, then shrugged.

  “That’s right!” Nolan replied. “Because there aren’t any!”

  Over dinner that evening at the nearby Legacy Lodge on Lake Lanier, where the Falcons were staying throughout spring camp, that play came up, just as it would, Pat assured me, at team meetings the following morning.

  “I heard ‘freeze,’” Pat said, “so I knew I was going to be one of the blitzers. I got that. But I treated it like a normal blitz, where you find any way you can to the quarterback. I didn’t realize I was the contain player. Unfortunately, in this league, you don’t get many chances, and that’s a blitz I’d only run maybe twice in the three weeks that I’ve been here. So you do all these things right and then you mess up the last one, and you’re getting yelled at. NFL coaches will tolerate physical mistakes but not mental ones.”

  Weeks earlier, when I first mentioned to Pat the possibility of my writing a story about his attempt to make the Falcons as an undrafted free agent, he was open to the idea. His time in NFL camp, however, had altered his outlook. He called me the night before I got on a plane to go down to Atlanta.

  “I think you might be wasting your time,” he said. “I mean you can still come down, but the story really can’t be about me anymore. I’m mostly just going to meetings and trying to learn the playbook. I’m kind of nobody around here.”

  He paused a moment.

  “Let’s see . . . how do I put this? You go from being one of the top players in college. Okay, not one of the top. If I were that, I would have been drafted. But I would say one of the top three to four hundred players. And then you come to the NFL and, well, I’ve never felt so bad at a sport I know I’m good at.”

  He still looked a bit beleaguered as we sat at the dinner table at Legacy Lodge. A pained twist of his torso and head roll elicited an inner ball-bearing rumble. I noted over the years the Hulk-like morphing of my nephew’s body toward the formidable adult frame that presently houses the same sensitive, soft-spoken kid. But at age 23, football’s ravages had him constantly making his own chiropractic adjustments. There was no thought, he said, of seeking out a trainer. Everything a rookie does in camp is documented, and visits to the training room leave the wrong impression.

  “We have an expression here,” he told me. “‘You don’t make the club in the tub.”’

  I had always followed Pat’s progress from afar, heard the hopeful murmurings about him “playing on Sundays.” And yet it was only now that I was getting a chance to really spend time with the guy. Watching his contortions that night, I started feeling guilty about my own delight in his achievements. I didn’t know whether to give him a pep talk or the suddenly more urgent-seeming advice, given the very slim odds of his realizing his dream, to get out while he was still intact, both in body and in mind.

  I thought of the conversation I recently had with his father about the constant threat of injury to his son, who had already overcome a badly shattered ankle in his freshman year of high school and a torn knee ligament at the start of his junior year at Northern Illinois.

  “I don’t think of the knees and hips,” Pat’s father told me. “They can replace those now. The thing I’m most worried about is
his brain. I’ve been reading a lot lately about concussions.”

  My nephew told me that night that he had his share of concussions over the years but said he was never forced to leave a game or miss part of a season because of one.

  “I’ve had it where I’ve been hit, and the lights go out,” he said. “You stand up, and it’s like, ‘Whew,’ and then you’re good. I’ve also had it two or three times where a play will be called and you have no idea what it is or what to do, and you’re just out there aimlessly wandering around the field. But it’s never been to the point where I wake up the next morning really sensitive to light or I’m getting sick from it.”

  Another torso twist and head roll.

  “You do get to this point,” he told me, “where you feel your body is telling you to chill out, take a break, but your mind stays on the prize. And part of that now is the paycheck. What gets me through coaches screaming at me and the way my body feels is the thought of that $390,000. I’ve talked to other guys here about it, like, ‘Is that okay to feel that way,’ and they’re like, ‘Oh, man, don’t even think twice about that.’”

  I knew that when he was a sophomore at Northern Illinois and still living at home, he witnessed firsthand the effects of the recent financial meltdown. His father told me that late in 2007 and into the first two months of 2008, he was still receiving a number of job bids, and his bank repeatedly asked him if he needed a higher line of credit. By March, though, clients weren’t able to pay him. He turned to the bank for the higher credit line, but by then the bank was drastically reducing his credit: cards with a $50,000 limit were cut to $2,000. By the fall of 2008, work had completely dried up, and Pat had no other choice but to close his business. To pay off his debts, he got whatever he could for his bulldozers, backhoes, and trucks at unrestricted auctions, $200,000 machines going for as little as $50,000. He was soon getting up at 4:00 A.M. to drive backhoes at distant work sites.

  “It’s tough seeing your dad break down,” Pat told me when I brought up the subject at dinner that night. “His name was now coming off the building he owned. Everything he’d worked for was gone. Everything you’ve seen in our house, all the nice stuff. That’s an illusion. He can’t really afford it anymore. He keeps it going for us. I remember thinking when everything was coming apart for him, okay, I’ve got to help in some way. What am I good at that could also pay decent money? Well, I knew the answer to that one.”

  Being an undrafted free agent in the NFL is an extended exercise in ego abnegation. You’re not only stripped of your college number; you’re exiled from the NFL’s mandated numerical bracket for your given position. Linebackers on all final team rosters must bear a number in either the 50s or 90s. Pat, for now, was given 45. As for his fellow undrafted competitors, Max Gruder, a linebacker from the University of Pittsburgh, wore 46; Rico Council, a middle linebacker from Tennessee State, 43; and Jerrell Harris, an outside linebacker for last year’s champions, Alabama, 49. Some days in practice, Pat wore 40 and then was switched back to 45. Coaches and fellow players, meanwhile, were constantly confusing Pat with a third-year safety, Shann Schillinger, whose seniority naturally merited his getting dibs on the nickname “Schill,” thus saddling my nephew with—for obscure reasons—“Patty Melt.”

  Nolan kept calling Pat “Gruder” through much of minicamp. In a practice roundup in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution one morning, my nephew—whom I watched the previous day grunt, sweat, and double over with the rest of the squad—was listed as absent. After he made five tackles in the Falcons’ second preseason game against the Cincinnati Bengals later in August—finally turning coaches’ heads for the right reasons—the team statistician, apparently confused by the presence of two number 45s on the roster that night, credited Pat with none.

  “Well,” Pat told me on the phone later, “at least they can’t erase my film. Can they?”

  After one workout that spring, all the undrafted linebackers were headed back to the locker room with an extra helmet in hand bearing numbers in the 50s.

  “Yep,” Gruder said, smiling. “We’re also the vets’ helmet lackeys.”

  And water boys. At team meetings each morning, before taking their seats in the very front row—the better for the coach’s eviscerating explications of rookie screwups—the 40s brigade takes water and Gatorade to the veterans. The Falcons’ linebacker coach, Glenn Pires, told a story one morning from his days coaching for the Arizona Cardinals. The vets sat up front at the Cardinals’ team meetings, the rookies in the far back. Pires said a longtime veteran linebacker there had only to hold up a hand: one finger meant water, two Gatorade, three a cup of coffee.

  Of course, getting things for vets is standard rookie boot-camp stuff. Getting any time with one of them is the real challenge. At practices each day, the Threes are forever pacing the sidelines, craning their heads to at least get mental images of the plays being run by the Ones and Twos. They sidle up to them afterward with questions. It’s as though rookies are kept penned in a mental cage of the playbook schemes they’ve been studying from the start of camp. You can almost hear the whirring of all the Xs, Os, arrows, and bent-Ts inside their helmets, like so many gnats they would love to have swatted away with one good hit.

  “They give you all this information,” Jerrell Harris told me after one practice. “But without the actual reps, if you don’t pick things up off the mental, then you’re just out there flying around.”

  I always heard that rookies are overwhelmed at first by the speed of the game at the pro level. But everyone I asked about this had the same response.

  “It’s not the speed,” the third-year linebacker Robert James told me. “It only seems like the game is a lot faster because you’re always trying to figure out what you’re doing and where you’re supposed to be. Once I began to learn the defenses, the game slowed down for me.”

  Much of the learning in the NFL begins with unlearning. In college, Pat told me, coaches stressed never crossover running with your feet so that you can keep your depth and be available to make a play. In the pros they tell you to crossover run.

  “It’s no longer ‘keep your depth.’” Pat said. “In the NFL, everything is downhill right now. Get to the ball as fast as you can. Those things you perfected to a T in college are no good here.”

  For Pat and the other free-agent linebackers, what made the NFL learning curve especially steep was the lack of extra time on the side with coaches.

  “You don’t get the patient schooling of college here,” Bart Scott, a Pro Bowl linebacker now with the New York Jets, who started out as an undrafted free agent, told me by phone. “It’s mostly on you to find ways to figure it out. To be mature. To be a man.”

  I asked Scott what advice he would give Pat.

  “Get with a vet and track him,” he said. “Everything he does. Learn it. Copy it. Then try to outdo it.”

  The one veteran Pat said he had begun to bond with was the three-time Pro Bowl linebacker Lofa Tatupu. The Falcons had just signed Tatupu, the 29-year-old former Seattle Seahawk, to a two-year, $3.6 million contract to shore up the Mike position after losing their star middle linebacker, Curtis Lofton, to free agency.

  “We’ve been out to dinner a few times,” Pat said. “A movie. He’s so generous. Doesn’t let me pay for anything. We were shooting pool here the other night, and somehow we got to talking about my highlight tape. We went up to my room to watch, and he’s like, ‘Hey, you got speed, man.’ Then he told me: ‘Look, you’re a rookie. You can’t control what you can’t control. I’ve seen lots of guys who should have made it get cut. The only thing you can control is what you do when you go in there.’”

  At the Lodge one evening a few days before the close of spring camp, Tatupu stopped by our table, dwarfing it with his mesalike shoulders. His injured hamstring, he told Pat, was going to keep him out of tomorrow’s practice, and Akeem Dent, the Falcons’ current starting middle linebacker, would be away as well, tending to some personal business at home.


  “You’re getting lots of reps with the Ones tomorrow, rook,” Tatupu said, heading off to his room. “Better study your playbook tonight.”

  It had been maddeningly difficult to get any indication of how Pat was doing outside of the occasional tongue lashings in practice. I had an agreement with both Pat and the Falcons’ communications coordinator, Brian Cearns, that I wouldn’t tell Mike Smith, the head coach, or any of the other coaches that I was Pat’s uncle or ask them specific questions about his performance. I knew my share of football coaches in the past and could well imagine the guff Pat might get if word got around camp that the no-name undrafted rookie had a reporter uncle following him.

  When I asked Pat for his own assessment of his play, he just shrugged.

  “It’s hard to get a good measure,” he said. “You don’t hear anything about the good stuff. That’s just the way it is here.”

  At the following practice, Pat got the promised reps with the Ones. It was always easy to tell when just the Threes were on the field. You couldn’t hear anything. Everybody was unsure of what they were doing, and so nobody talked. Now the vets were giving Pat his checks, he was chattering back to them, and, with the doors to his mind’s playbook-cage flung open, he was looking again like the guy in his own highlight reel; briefly playing in that realm of informed thoughtlessness that had turned scouts’ heads in the first place.

  Driving his gray pickup back home in Geneva during a break a few weeks after the close of minicamp, Pat popped in a CD. He wanted me to hear the motivational music he listens to before games or personal workout sessions like the one we were driving to that July morning at the ProForce training facility in Batavia, the adjacent town. He still had another couple of weeks off before the start of padded, preseason camp at the end of July. But on the verge of his first and perhaps only crack at the NFL, he had no intention of relaxing. He reached over and ramped up the volume, his pickup trembling now as soaring chords and tribal chants swirled above the same slow, propulsive backbeat.