I Beat the Odds (18 page)

 

 

I AM PROUD TO SAY that thanks to my tutors, my family, and a lot of hard work, my freshman year was a success. Despite the people who worried that I wouldn’t be able to deal with all of the pressures on my own, I had a pretty good season. My first game was on September 5 against the University of Memphis, playing right tackle. The next week, I started for the Rebels in our game against Vanderbilt, where we earned 400 total yards of offense (our highest of the season). When we played Alabama, we lost by three points, but the offensive line managed to not allow a single sack and I was awarded the Rebel Quarterback Club Trench Player of the Week Award. The very next game the offensive line didn’t allow any sacks, either. All in all, it was a rough season for Ole Miss, but it was clear that we were growing as a team. I loved that Collins was on the sidelines with the cheerleaders, rooting us on, and that my family—the Tuohys as well as sometimes one of my brothers or my mother, which was a nice surprise—would come to the games and yell for me, too. At the end of the 2005 season, I was named to the First Team SEC All-Freshman, First Team All-Quad Freshman Chrome Tackle Letius, and First Team Freshman All-America. It was a hard season, but exciting.

The next year, Steve Henderson started at Ole Miss, too. I had to laugh that I had followed him to Briarcrest and now he was following me to college. He played football his freshman year, and I was able to introduce him to all my friends on the team, which was something he had done our first year at Briarcrest. I liked that I was able to kind of look out for him and return the favor.

My sophomore year I was moved back to left tackle and started all twelve games. In our second week, after playing Missouri, I was named the Rebel Quarterback Club Trench Player of the Week and then won the award again later in the season after we played Alabama. I was named to the First Team All-SEC by the conference coaches. I also made the Chancellor’s List (which is what the Dean’s List for GPAs of 3.5 or above is called at Ole Miss) academically, which may have been my proudest moment of the entire year.

Junior year (the 2007 season) was a really good one for me. The offense racked up 534 yards, 229 rushing, against Mizzou. Against LSU, we totaled 466 yards, 201 rushing. My name was put forward as a possible winner of the Outland Trophy for the best interior lineman in the country, and I was named a Mid-Season All-American by
The Sporting News
. I didn’t allow a single sack against Georgia or Northwestern, and I won the Rebel Quarterback Club Trench Award after the Florida, Arkansas, and LSU games. By the end of the season, I was named to the First Team All-SEC both by the coaches and the AP. CollegeFootball-News. com named me the #2 Offensive Lineman in the conference and #7 overall player in the conference. A number of other lists placed me as a top pick, too.

It was such an exciting time for me, but as the season wrapped up, I started getting a little impatient to go. Even though I had strong statistics that season, 2007 was not a good season overall for Ole Miss, and since the coach’s job is always on the line when the team’s record slips, I knew big changes were coming. Coach Ed Orgeron left in November and Houston Nutt was soon lined up to take over after resigning from the University of Arkansas. I respected Coach Nutt a lot, but I started to think that maybe I should ride the momentum of a good junior year and enter the draft.

On January 14, 2008, I announced my intentions to go pro and skip my senior year. I had waited so long and worked so hard to get to the pros, and now that I was eligible, I felt I should jump on the chance to enter the draft. But after I announced my decision, I started having second thoughts. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that my life wasn’t just about football. The opportunity to go pro in a sport is absolutely amazing, but a football player’s career usually isn’t that long. I mean, think about what our bodies go through each week—that can wear you out quickly. In fact, I think the average professional career in the NFL is under five years. I plan to be in the league a lot longer than that, but you never know what injuries might end your playing days in a heartbeat. I realized that it was shortsighted of me to think I could just forget about finishing my degree in order to go play football. What was I going to do when it was time for me to hang up my cleats for good?

I decided that the only thing for me to do was to finish my education before entering the draft, so that’s what I did. I had come too far to quit so close to having everything I’d ever worked for—a pro career
and
an education. I took my name out of the ring and committed to returning for my senior year. And I’m so glad I stuck around. Not only did I make the Chancellor’s List again, but I also had a great senior football season under Coach Nutt. I got First Team All-American, First Team All-SEC, the Shug Jordan Award for the Southeast Offensive Lineman of the Year, the Colonel Earl “Red” Blaik Leadership-Scholarship Award, the 2008 Outland Trophy finalist, Conerly Trophy finalist, Lombardi Award semifinalist, and the SEC Jacobs Blocking Trophy. Plus, it was great getting to travel with my teammates, too, going all over the southeast and sometimes a little farther out to places like Texas for our Bowl game. I got to see more and do more than ever before.

All in all, it wasn’t too bad for a kid no one had any hopes for. I had accomplished more than anyone else in the world (other than me) ever expected I could—and even I was surprised sometimes! After that final game in red and blue, I knew that the time was right for me to move on to my professional career, and I was so glad I hadn’t stopped short. It’s never been about football, but about becoming the best and fullest person I could be. And to think that I went from the kid with a GPA in the basement to going to college on a football scholarship—I was thankful and humbled by how far I’d come in just a few years. I knew that miracles really do happen.

W
hen a college athlete gets ready to go pro, one of the first and most important things he or she does is to pick an agent. Not only does your agent help you to make promotional deals and help you to expand your public image, but more important, they handle things like contract negotiations and draft visibility, and they help you in walking through the crazy world of professional sports. They are also trained in how to handle legal stuff and money management. In short, they are incredibly important.

There are a lot of very good agents out there, but, unfortunately, there are some not-so-good ones, too. If you’ve ever seen the movie
Jerry Maguire
, you know that there are some agents who really care about their clients and there are some who are all about the money—just as there are some athletes who only play for a check. I didn’t want to be one of those players and I definitely didn’t want one of those agents representing me, so I worried a little about which agent I should hire.

A number of my teammates were looking at going pro (a total of nine Ole Miss players ended up signing with NFL teams that year), and lot of my friends decided to hire one particular agent who had a reputation for being a very ethical guy, who had several high-profile football players as his clients. This was an emotional decision for me because Sean and Leigh Anne had a longtime friend in Memphis, Jimmy Sexton, who is also a great, ethical agent with a lot of high-profile clients. (And conveniently, his office is located less than three miles from the Tuohys’ house).

It was important to me that the decision be my own, though, and I was glad that my family understood that. In the end, I decided to sign with the agent many of my close friends chose. They were very positive people in my life and I wanted to stick with them. It was important to me that we all share something that would keep us connected and supported even as we went our separate ways after the draft.

Unfortunately, it soon became clear to me that even though the agency was really solid, it just wasn’t the right match for me. In order to get ready for the NFL Combine in February, before the draft in the spring, agents send their players to workout facilities to do some intense preparation. I was sent to a facility in Texas run by Michael Johnson, the four-time Olympic gold medalist in sprinting. It was an amazing training center, and Johnson is obviously an incredibly talented athlete. The thing is, for my field position and body type, I didn’t need to work on my sprints as much as I did my strength. I felt like I was being turned into a different kind of player.

However, I did pretty well at the NFL Scouting Combine. It was a great experience going to Lucas Oil Stadium, though being in Indianapolis in February made me really happy I had chosen a college in a much warmer and less snowy place.

The Combine is kind of like an audition for professional teams to check out the players who are eligible for the NFL draft. It’s an invitation-only event, and all the athletes go through a number of tests so the coaches can see their skills, both physical and mental, in action. Included is the Wonderlic Test, a fifty-question test that you have to complete in twelve minutes to help the coaches look at your problem-solving skills. Athletes also have fifteen-minute interviews with interested teams, drug screening, and (as you can imagine) lots of physical tests. You get clocked for the 40-yard dash, 20-yard shuttle, 60-yard shuttle, and 3-cone drill. You’re tested on how many 225-pound reps you can bench press, you’re measured for both vertical jump and broad jump, and you’re evaluated on drills that are specific to your position. Plus, you have your body measured and examined for injuries, and even your joint movement is evaluated. You get looked at and considered in every possible way so that the NFL teams can have the best sense of who you are, what you can do, and whether you have the potential to improve.

I did okay but knew I could have performed better than I did. I thought about it and prayed about the whole situation a lot, and I finally decided that maybe I needed to change agents after all. As much as I respected the agent I’d hired, and as much as I loved my friends from Ole Miss who were doing well with their training, I realized that I needed to be with someone who could better work with my style of play. I also felt I needed someone who knew me well enough to understand my unusual story. I was concerned that many coaches or scouts who’d read
The Blind Side
were forming opinions about me before they got to know me. The book presented me as a slow learner instead of someone who had just never had much solid instruction. I wanted to correct that view of things.

So I had the uncomfortable conversation with my agent and then signed with Jimmy Sexton instead. I finally realized that his history with my family, as well as his location in Memphis and understanding of the city, were really valuable to me. I went to train in Nashville, at D1 Sports Training. There we concentrated on weight training and heavy lifting, and in less than a month I was already much stronger than I’d been. March 26, 2009, was Ole Miss’s pro day, and I was on fire. This is basically a team’s last chance to scope out the players they might want to draft, and the scouts all said they were excited about what they saw from me that day. I knew that I was at the top of the list for tackles for a lot of teams.

I did learn a lesson from that whole experience: If you make the wrong decision, it’s never too late to make the right one.

Learning is part of growing up. It was important to me to make my own choice, and I’m blessed that my family loved me enough to support me in my first choice and then again support me when I realized I needed to make a change.

 

 

DRAFT DAY WAS LIKE A DREAM for me. In the weeks leading up to it, I was so nervous and so excited at the same time. After the Combine, most experts were saying I’d go in the top twenty; after Ole Miss’s pro day, a lot of them were saying I’d be a top-ten pick. I was so ready to get to New York and see how it would all play out.

Then a few things happened that threatened to cloud the experience.

First, a few draft watchers speculated that I might not play with enough passion and drive now that I had been taken in by a stable, wealthy family. They said that might affect how hard I would work because there was no longer the motivation to get out of the ghetto. I just rolled my eyes at those remarks. I had been a part of the Tuohy family since before I started college, and it definitely hadn’t watered down my work ethic then. It was ridiculous to say it might happen now.

I also started to hear some whispers that despite my work to show that it wasn’t true, some coaches were still worried after reading
The Blind Side
that I was not smart enough to learn the playbook. That really upset me because I knew I would prove them wrong if they just gave me a chance. I wanted to show everyone my Chancellor’s List letters or have them quiz me on the Ole Miss playbook, which I knew backward, forward, and upside down. Just because I’d had a rough time moving from one inner-city school to another didn’t mean that I wasn’t bright. I finally realized that the only way I could prove those fears wrong would be to get out there on the field when my time came, and show those coaches how quickly I could learn—and what they had missed out on.

The third thing that happened, though, stung most of all. A few weeks before draft day, ESPN draft analyst Todd McShay said that I had “character issues” and listed me as one of the three “riskiest picks” in the upcoming draft. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t understand what he could have possibly meant. Just a few months earlier, in December, McShay wrote about me on ESPN.com , saying: “While he possesses the physical tools to warrant top-15 consideration, it will be interesting to see if he slips to the bottom half of the first round—or beyond—because of concerns regarding his work ethic, motor and overall toughness.” I didn’t understand how he could drop me from the top fifteen to being one of the “riskiest,” and then to say that I had character issues. I had always worked so hard to live responsibly and train harder than anyone else.