DrTran
11-24-2006, 11:54 AM
http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=2674227
Let's burrow down inside the game, shall we? Past the crust and the mantle, through the outer core, all the way down to the inner core, where a quarterback can calmly sort through the cacophony at the line, or toss a cursory glance at his best receiver and change everything. Let's turn ourselves into human drill bits and make the idea of going inside the huddle seem as quaint and distant as watching the game from a passing blimp.
Philip Rivers is a good young Southern boy who's been an inner-core, head-for-the-game football guy since he was 6, when he started hanging around the high school team that his father coached in Decatur, Ala. He's been anticipating blitzes and making sight adjustments for as long as he can remember.
You want to know how deep Rivers can take you? Ask him about the barely controlled chaos of the wildest six seconds in sports -- the three seconds before the snap, the three seconds after -- and listen to his voice rise and his words accelerate. That's what happened as he described the hectic ticks leading up to LaDainian Tomlinson's 41-yard touchdown run that propelled the Chargers to a 32-25 win over the Browns on Nov. 5: "The defense jumped into a different look and Nick [center Nick Hardwick] is hollering, 'Solid! Here! Here! Here!' I hear Dielman [guard Kris Dielman] going, 'AB! AB!' This is all happening while I'm saying, 'Blue 85! Blue 85!' And then Dielman said something else and I said, 'Hut!' and the ball got snapped and boom-boom-boom-boom. Touchdown."
Rivers, standing in the Chargers' locker room three days after that game, throws his hands in the air. It's happening all over again for him. You can't help but think, Damn! This guy loves his work.
The past two years, as Rivers waited his turn behind Drew Brees, there was no outlet for that emotion. Instead, he invented ways to be involved. Standing on the sideline in his ball cap, one of his pastimes--and when you throw 30 passes in two years, passing time is all you've got--was to count Bolts helmets on kickoffs. Nobody asked him, and in the NFL they usually have 11 in place, but the poor kid was just so bored that he didn't know what else to do. (It should also be noted that at no time during his two-year apprenticeship did the Chargers fail to have 11 guys on the field during a kick.)
But now that he's playing, and excelling, Rivers is like a spring unsprung, showing a rare blend of efficiency, intelligence and openmouthed exuberance. His performance in a remarkable 21-point, second-half comeback over the Bengals on Nov. 12 -- 24 of 36 for 338 yards, 3 TDs and no picks--was just the most public example of his stunning emergence.
Less publicly, Rivers is studying defenses like a crazed physicist. He's hollering in the huddle and changing plays at the line and playing golf with his receivers. He's a football player again, down to his own ferrous core. It's all part of the plan that started last spring, after Brees signed with the Saints and Rivers had to curtail his eagerness by holding himself to one all-encompassing instruction: Be yourself. "He has played so much in his mind as well as the field," dad Steve Rivers says. "I think back to when he was 6 years old in the backyard, by himself, talking and setting up cones. He didn't know it, but he was preparing himself for this."
Here's another story about the education of an NFL quarterback. During the Friday practice before the Chargers' game against Cleveland, Rivers dropped back, gave a token fake to his right, then threw a nine-yard stop pattern to receiver Eric Parker. But before the ball got to Parker, it was picked by the safety, who'd been cheating up; in a game, it most likely would have been returned for a touchdown.
Later, just before that Sunday's game, Rivers reviewed the call sheet for the first 25 plays as scripted by offensive coordinator Cam Cameron. There it was, that same play, slated for the first series. And so, on the third play of the game, the call came in to run the stop pattern to Parker. Rivers walked to the line and saw the safety creep up a little, exactly what he'd seen at that Friday practice. But this time he knew where the safety would go. He took the snap, faked right and hit Parker on the numbers for 10 yards and a first down.
Afterward, Rivers joked with Cameron, "You liked how I ran that so much you put it in the game?"
Cameron nodded and said, "That's how I knew it would work."
Let's burrow down inside the game, shall we? Past the crust and the mantle, through the outer core, all the way down to the inner core, where a quarterback can calmly sort through the cacophony at the line, or toss a cursory glance at his best receiver and change everything. Let's turn ourselves into human drill bits and make the idea of going inside the huddle seem as quaint and distant as watching the game from a passing blimp.
Philip Rivers is a good young Southern boy who's been an inner-core, head-for-the-game football guy since he was 6, when he started hanging around the high school team that his father coached in Decatur, Ala. He's been anticipating blitzes and making sight adjustments for as long as he can remember.
You want to know how deep Rivers can take you? Ask him about the barely controlled chaos of the wildest six seconds in sports -- the three seconds before the snap, the three seconds after -- and listen to his voice rise and his words accelerate. That's what happened as he described the hectic ticks leading up to LaDainian Tomlinson's 41-yard touchdown run that propelled the Chargers to a 32-25 win over the Browns on Nov. 5: "The defense jumped into a different look and Nick [center Nick Hardwick] is hollering, 'Solid! Here! Here! Here!' I hear Dielman [guard Kris Dielman] going, 'AB! AB!' This is all happening while I'm saying, 'Blue 85! Blue 85!' And then Dielman said something else and I said, 'Hut!' and the ball got snapped and boom-boom-boom-boom. Touchdown."
Rivers, standing in the Chargers' locker room three days after that game, throws his hands in the air. It's happening all over again for him. You can't help but think, Damn! This guy loves his work.
The past two years, as Rivers waited his turn behind Drew Brees, there was no outlet for that emotion. Instead, he invented ways to be involved. Standing on the sideline in his ball cap, one of his pastimes--and when you throw 30 passes in two years, passing time is all you've got--was to count Bolts helmets on kickoffs. Nobody asked him, and in the NFL they usually have 11 in place, but the poor kid was just so bored that he didn't know what else to do. (It should also be noted that at no time during his two-year apprenticeship did the Chargers fail to have 11 guys on the field during a kick.)
But now that he's playing, and excelling, Rivers is like a spring unsprung, showing a rare blend of efficiency, intelligence and openmouthed exuberance. His performance in a remarkable 21-point, second-half comeback over the Bengals on Nov. 12 -- 24 of 36 for 338 yards, 3 TDs and no picks--was just the most public example of his stunning emergence.
Less publicly, Rivers is studying defenses like a crazed physicist. He's hollering in the huddle and changing plays at the line and playing golf with his receivers. He's a football player again, down to his own ferrous core. It's all part of the plan that started last spring, after Brees signed with the Saints and Rivers had to curtail his eagerness by holding himself to one all-encompassing instruction: Be yourself. "He has played so much in his mind as well as the field," dad Steve Rivers says. "I think back to when he was 6 years old in the backyard, by himself, talking and setting up cones. He didn't know it, but he was preparing himself for this."
Here's another story about the education of an NFL quarterback. During the Friday practice before the Chargers' game against Cleveland, Rivers dropped back, gave a token fake to his right, then threw a nine-yard stop pattern to receiver Eric Parker. But before the ball got to Parker, it was picked by the safety, who'd been cheating up; in a game, it most likely would have been returned for a touchdown.
Later, just before that Sunday's game, Rivers reviewed the call sheet for the first 25 plays as scripted by offensive coordinator Cam Cameron. There it was, that same play, slated for the first series. And so, on the third play of the game, the call came in to run the stop pattern to Parker. Rivers walked to the line and saw the safety creep up a little, exactly what he'd seen at that Friday practice. But this time he knew where the safety would go. He took the snap, faked right and hit Parker on the numbers for 10 yards and a first down.
Afterward, Rivers joked with Cameron, "You liked how I ran that so much you put it in the game?"
Cameron nodded and said, "That's how I knew it would work."