The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (48 page)

Bob shaped my own football career. The summer of his sophomore year, appalled that I was still riding the bench as a wannabe fullback after my second season at Ossining High, he took matters into his own hands. Every day before dinner that summer, he put a helmet on my head, dragged me into the backyard, put me in the proper three-point guard stance, and had me charge on his count into his bare, upward-flailing forearm. We did this until my face bled. We did it until I learned to get my face mask into his chest faster than his forearm could get to my face. I never sat on the bench again. By the end of two varsity seasons with only one loss, individual all-league honors, and a late growth spurt that took me to six feet tall and 205 pounds, the college recruiters came calling. Mostly smaller schools like Bates, Colby, and Colgate. Lehigh treated me to a New York Giants game. Brown had me up to Providence one weekend to meet with coaches and party all night with some players in their dorm.

Still, I knew I wasn't going any farther with football. Even on game days, I always felt that I had one foot outside the experience. During pregame psyche drills with my friend, Mike Chernick—a standout fullback and middle linebacker who went on to play at Yale—the two of us would be on the sidelines, pounding on each other's shoulder pads, growling. Occasionally I looked up and saw the wild whites of his eyes and thought,
He really means this
.

Pat Schiller really and wholly means it; he is all in. He flies around a football field overturning ball carriers with full-bore, joyous immersion.

“I enjoy hitting,” Pat told me as we pulled into the lot of the ProForce training facility in an industrial park on Batavia's flat, barren outskirts. “Especially when you stop someone short on third or fourth down and you look up and the crowd's going nuts and you're like: ‘I did that. Me. You're welcome.' That's cool. People always ask me, ‘Do you change when you get on the field?' Before a game starts, I have my routine, I listen to my music, and I walk out and look up at the crowd and I . . . I'm getting goose bumps right now talking about it. It's crazy. My body is filled with emotions I can't even describe. I come out of my body, and I'm like, ‘I'm going to kill somebody.' I become this lunatic. And even when I start to come back down after the first few plays, I'm still a different person. You know, a savage. But when I first come out, it's like a drug, I'm literally trembling, almost crying. I have so much emotion.”

For the next three hours that morning, ProForce's founder and head trainer, Chris Browning, a defensive end and linebacker who starred at Batavia High School and Western Michigan University, had my nephew and his workout partner, Pat Brown, an undrafted free agent from the University of Central Florida who played offensive tackle for the Minnesota Vikings in 2011, gasping for breath in the 90-degree, midsummer heat. This was their daily, self-imposed “off-weeks” regimen, designed with Browning, to get them in the best shape possible for the start of preseason camp now only a few weeks away.

Pulling thick steamship lines, they each took turns dragging a half-ton weighted sled atop which sat a screaming Browning, back and forth across ProForce's hollowed-out industrial warehouse space. They repeatedly flipped an enormous tractor tire. They did position-specific agility drills tethered to wall-mounted resistance bands. Pat occasionally slipped out a side door to be sick and then bounded back inside to start anew.

Sitting afterward with the two Pats and Browning in his office, I realized I had before me the entire spectrum of the undrafted free-agent experience. Browning got eight phone calls from NFL teams on the last Saturday morning of the 2002 draft. Four days later the Bears invited him to rookie camp, but he failed to make the team. The following season he was invited to try out with the New Orleans Saints and again failed to make the squad. He ended up playing Arena Football for the Chicago Rush, New Orleans Voodoo, and Columbus Destroyers.

“Arena was very big then,” he said. “Guys could get a shot at the pros. For a lineman like me, you could make $60,000 to $80,000 a year. You didn't have to mess with all the ups and downs of the NFL.”

No one knows those up and downs better than Pat Brown. Signed by the Carolina Panthers after the close of the 2009 draft, he was released, picked up, and released again five times from 2009 to 2010.

“I lived in hotels the first two seasons,” he recalled. “It can be a bit of a shot to your ego. Getting told multiple times on multiple teams that you're not good enough. Some guys can handle it. Some guys can't. You just have to love it, because it's mostly out of your hands.”

Brown just completed his first full season with the Vikings, and had playing time in 16 games. I asked him if he was finally feeling a sense of security.

“Never,” he said. “Never. I'm always looking over my shoulder. You don't relax until you get that five-year, $25 million deal and so much money guaranteed. Then you know you're an investment.”

Undrafted free agents are forever asking themselves how long they'll stick it out; how long they'll continue to work out and wait by the phone, forestalling a real job. When I asked Rico Council, he didn't hesitate: “As long as it takes, man. Football is what I know. I'm going to be in it one way or another. I'd rather it be as a player.” Max Gruder told me that he would figure it out as he went, that he had a lot of other interests to pursue when he was done with football. Pat said he would probably give himself a full year of not getting anywhere and not hearing from anybody and then move on.

“I'd finish my degree in education,” he said. “I still have to do a semester of student teaching. But I'll also not commit to anything serious for a while. I could end up playing in Canada. I'd do that.”

All of those in the tribe of the undrafted can cite the inspiring precedents for persistence; the well-known NFL Cinderella-man tales they repeat to themselves like soothing bedtime stories. Kurt Warner quarterbacked for the Iowa Barnstormers in the Arena Football League and stocked groceries before his meteoric rise. James Harrison of the Pittsburgh Steelers was cut four times and did a stint with the Rhein Fire of NFL Europe before becoming a four-time Pro Bowl linebacker and, according to a poll last year of his fellow NFL players, the most feared man in football. Chase Blackburn was back home in Marysville, Ohio, at week 12 of last season, about to take a job as a middle-school math teacher, when he got the call from the New York Giants. He ended up making the key interception of a fourth-quarter Tom Brady pass that set up the Giants' game-winning drive in last year's Super Bowl victory over the New England Patriots.

“I've been telling your nephew, he may bounce around three or four times before he finds a home,” Browning told me. “That's tough, but, hey, he's young. Have fun. So few people get this experience. And don't get too logical about it. He could get cut because of salary considerations. Some other guy's agent might have a better relationship with the team. But then what if someone like Lofa goes down. Pat beats out the other undrafted free-agent linebackers and guess what, that boy is dressing.”

Later that evening, my last night in Geneva, Pat and I stopped into a few of the local haunts along his hometown's historic main street (a location for the period film
Road to Perdition
). Wherever I went with “Mayor Schiller,” as one friend called him, drinks materialized and tabs disappeared. Owners, managers, friends, and friends of friends all stopped by to ask how Pat was doing and to wish him well.

“It's weird,” he said to me during a rare lull. “For some reason I'm cool because I'm able to play a game. And they don't realize how hard and cutthroat it is now. They'll say things like, ‘Hey, worst-case scenario, you'll be on the practice squad.' And I'm thinking,
Are you kidding? That would be unbelievable
. But these people are really counting on me, and I feel a lot of pressure to not let them down. That's a big part of what drives me. And I like being the interesting guy, you know? I want to be talked about and turn heads when I walk into a place. Who doesn't? It sounds so egotistic, but it's what it is. And to think this is all going to be done one day, probably sooner than later, and I'll have to face reality. Have a nine-to-five job, not be Mr. Interesting anymore, and never have the rush that I get before games. That's scary to me.”

 

A week before Pat was scheduled to return to Flowery Branch for the five weeks of preseason camp, he received a text message from Lofa. He had torn a pectoral muscle while lifting weights. Less than a week later, the Falcons released Tatupu and signed Mike Peterson, 36, a 13-year veteran who wasn't re-signed by the Falcons at the end of last season after three years at linebacker. My nephew's stock as a middle linebacker, Lofa's intended role, had suddenly soared even as his heart sank.

“People keep texting or talking to me about what a big break Lofa's injury is,” Pat told me. “But they don't get it. This was the one guy I could really talk to about stuff. Plus, you just hate seeing anybody go down, especially someone that you were getting to know and feel closer to. But that's the NFL. Injury is the number-one thing on a player's mind.”

Two weeks later, in early August, I was watching Pat from the sidelines at the Flowery Branch facility as Keith Armstrong, the special-teams coordinator, closed a practice with a kickoff-coverage drill. Special teams, it is constantly stressed at NFL camp, are about the only place for rookies to get reps in preseason games and “make good film.” One or two eye-catching plays can be enough to prompt a phone call from a team looking to fill roster holes constantly being opened by injury.

On Armstrong's signal, one waterfall of would-be tacklers after another was unleashed—the Ones, followed by the Twos: swift, downfield flows soon met at staggered, eerily soundless intervals by pad-wielding blockers. A consequence of the heightened concern about concussions in the NFL is that even fully padded practices have become largely clashless choreography, like ballet without the music: that singular symphony of crashing bodies we cringingly thrill to on game days.

All through camp, Nolan stressed being offensive on defense. The simple 11-on-11 math of football inherently favors the offense. It has a “12th man” in the form of a play only its players know. What Nolan wants from his defensive unit is to find ways to “change the math.” Players, especially linebackers, are expected to “shock and shed”: engage their respective blockers and then throw them off on the way to the ball. To stay within their defensive scheme and yet be fast and supple enough to invent ways to be offensive and make a play.

Pat seemed to be ever balanced on that edge between his natural speed and the confines of the scheme. When the Threes' rotation came up in the kickoff-coverage drill that day, he was repeatedly the first one down the field. His swiftness, however, would soon send him flying past his scheme's scripted pas de deux with a notably tardy counterpart. Seeing that his man wasn't there, Pat just blew by and got directly to the ball carrier.

“Schiller?” Armstrong fumed in his deep, drill-sergeantese. “Schiller, you're killing me!”

 

The only time I could get with Pat now was quick snatches of conversation along the sidelines after practice. Preseason camp days started at dawn and didn't wind up until 10:00
P.M
.: days of meetings, meals, practices, more meetings, and then bed, all confined to the Flowery Branch facility. But as a sweat-drenched number 45 headed toward the team locker room after kickoff-coverage drills that day, he gave me a knowing wink and smile as he passed.

Two days later, just hours before the Falcons' first preseason game against the Baltimore Ravens, Pat exuded the same sense of inner assuredness, one that he, too, seemed surprised by. “It's crazy,” he told me in the lobby of the team's downtown Atlanta hotel. “We play tonight, but I'm not worried. I feel calm. The key thing the coaches are looking for is how fast we play with the right technique. If they see that your footwork is wrong or that you're at all hesitant, that sends up red flags. That's trouble. When you do things fast, it means you're confident.”

From the Georgia Dome press box that night, I watched the Blond Tiger II pace the sidelines, still looking for some way out of his mind's playbook cage. It wasn't until midway into the third quarter that he took the field. Not on special teams, but as the Atlanta Falcons' middle linebacker. On his first play in an NFL game, a run off-tackle, he flew through the offense and brought the runner down at the line of scrimmage: speed and scheme melding at last.

He tallied four tackles for the night. In the postgame locker room, he and his fellow undrafted linebackers, Max Gruder, Rico Council, and Jerrell Harris, were all wide-eyed from the adrenaline rush of finally having their first taste of NFL action. As he dressed, Pat handed me his cell phone to read the pregame text he received from Lofa: “Tear it up tonight!”

The last three weeks of preseason whirled by in a maddening vortex of Sphinx-like silence from the coaching staff about the makeup of the final roster and increasingly rampant speculation by everyone else. My younger brother, Joe, was sending me so many emails with the latest blog predictions that I finally had to repeat to him Pat's admonition to me way back in minicamp, when I kept citing blog posts picking him as the most likely to make team.

“Ignore that stuff,” he said. “It's not really based on anything.”

By the night of the Falcons' final preseason game against the Jacksonville Jaguars on August 30, the original 90-man roster had been cut to 75. Gruder was the only linebacker released. The final cuts down to the 53-man roster would be made by noon the next day.

The math of making an NFL roster seems straightforward. There are 40 or so players who are Ones and Twos on offense and defense. Then there is a punter, at least one kicker, a long snapper, and often a third-string quarterback. This leaves just a handful of positions available. The Falcons' starting linebackers were set: Akeem Dent would be the starting middle linebacker with Mike Peterson as his backup. Sean Weatherspoon and Stephen Nicholas would play on either side. For the other two backup linebacker spots (if the Falcons decided to go with six), Spencer Adkins, a three-year veteran from the University of Miami, and Robert James, an undrafted free agent from Arizona State who spent the last two seasons on the practice squad, seemed favorites. It would be up to the three remaining undrafted free-agent linebackers to find some way to change that math.