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Showing posts with label Sports Illustrated. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sports Illustrated. Show all posts
Julius Thomas Unique Path & Resolve Put Him Right on the Path of Being One of Peyton Manning's Most Dynamic Weapons & in the +NFL League Wide
Robert Beck/Sports Illustrated
Julius Thomas Jumped Through Hoops to Get Where He Is
The former Portland State basketball star nearly gave up on his new sport after yet more ankle problems last season, but patience has paid off in a big way—and now he’s become one of Peyton Manning’s most dangerous weapons
A year ago the Denver tight end thought about dropping his football experiment, cutting his losses and putting to use that business degree from Portland State—the one he earned on a basketball scholarship.
The Broncos were pushing—the way football teams do when legendary quarterbacks sign on for a career nightcap—to have each of their offensive pieces at Peyton Manning’s disposal.
Thomas was the promising project who played one year of college football after four years of basketball, impressing the Broncos organization on film and in interviews enough to get drafted in the fourth round in 2011.
For many reasons—reasons we’ll get to—that was a miracle in itself. But on the docket in the fall of 2012 was an early exit from football, because Thomas wanted to live the rest of his life with a functioning ankle rather than rush back from surgery the previous April.
After just one reception over his first two seasons, Julius Thomas—finally healthy—had 65 this year. (John W. McDonough/SI)
“He was getting frustrated because they were expecting too much from him coming off of surgery,” says his father, Greg, a high school principal and former college receiver. “They told him he wasn’t running full speed in one of the preseason games, and he called me and said ‘Dad, if this is what it takes, then maybe this isn’t for me. I’ve got to use these ankles for the rest of my life.’ ”
front office. A decision came: Shut him down, but not all the way. Rather than put him on injured reserve, Thomas was moved to the practice squad in October, so he could play scout team tight end and outside linebacker and catch up on all those football practices he missed out on because basketball coaches warned him against injury his whole life.
What did the Broncos get in return for a little bit of organizational patience? Just 65 catches and 12 touchdowns in 2013; a Pro Bowl tight end, seemingly out of thin air. Thomas is suddenly on the short list of basketball guys who found success after converting to football. There’s Antonio Gates, Jimmy Graham, and, at the moment, Thomas, a focal point of the league’s top passing offenses as it takes aim at San Diego in Sunday’s divisional playoff slate.
Did even he know it was coming?
“This was always the goal,” he says. “Everything hasn’t always been easy or clear-cut. All my life, I see an opportunity and it’s not clear-cut. How bad do you want it? I decided to see it through.”
* * *
Thomas played a school-record 121 games for Portland State’s hoops team—and faced Kansas in the 2008 NCAA tournament—then spent a fifth year of college as a tight end. (Jamie Squire/Getty Images :: Nick Doan/Icon SMI)
This football journey started at Pacific University in Stockton, Calif., in 1983. Greg Thomas likes to retell this story to Julius, as a way of reminding him of the fragile nature of his existence. There was a new offensive coordinator at Pacific, a skinny, dark-haired former safety at the university in his early 30s. Greg was one of the top returning wide receivers on the ’83 team, and one of the tallest in the country at 6-6. He got called into the new coordinator’s office one day during the spring before his final season.
“Pete Carroll brings me in and he says, ‘Greg, I’ve got an idea,’ and he’s bouncing all over the place, excited.”
Carroll: “You’re drawing a lot of double teams at split end. You’re huge. I’m gonna move you to H-Back. We’re gonna get you in motion, get some single coverage, move you all over the field, okay?”
Greg Thomas: “Ok, whatever.”
Watch out Chargers: In Week 10 Thomas had a career-high 74-yard catch-and-run for a score. (John W. McDonough/SI)
So Greg, who liked playing football but didn’t love it, moved to H-Back. That spring he was run-blocking in practice when two teammates rolled up on his leg, tearing his ACL and MCL. These were the last days of the flayed-open approach to knee surgeries, and Greg’s was botched. They went in before swelling subsided, and they put his knee in a cast. A career-ender.
He would graduate, and marry the girl he met at the Palladium Disco in San Francisco a few years earlier. Then came Julius in ’88.
“I was pretty damn wild, so there’s no telling if things would have gone the same way if I went to the NFL,” Greg says. “I like to tell Julius, if it wasn’t for Pete Carroll you wouldn’t even be born.”
Thomas had 12 touchdowns this season and was one of five Broncos to catch at least 60 passes. (Robert Beck/SI)
Greg raised his son a Raiders fan, and three generations of Thomas men attended home games together. Thomas grew to love football, and while his father encouraged him to play in high school in Lodi, Calif., a basketball coach always got the swing vote. Greg even promised he would reach out to Carroll, by then at USC, and lobby for a football scholarship if Thomas would just play his senior season of football. Thomas declined.
“I let people talk me out of playing in high school and probably shouldn’t have,” Thomas says. “It was always like, why would you risk injury when you can get a basketball scholarship?”
Portland State and Boise State offered basketball rides, and Thomas chose the Oregon school. It wound up being the perfect spot for reasons he couldn’t foresee: When his four years were up and he was on track to play basketball overseas, his desire for one shot at football coincided with a coaching change at PSU. The previous coach ran a run-and-shoot offense and didn’t previously recruit tight ends. If Thomas could learn the new coach’s offense he could play immediately. Enter first-year tight ends coach Steve Cooper.
“He came out to the workout and he looked like a basketball guy playing football,” Cooper says. “He asked questions, and the next day he was better. We go into the film room and he doesn’t have any clue what anything is, and then the next day the information is retained. That’s how it went for nine months. Julius is just a sponge.”
Thomas spent the summer before his fifth year of college and the entire fall semester in the football office, hanging with Cooper, watching film, learning how to critique himself.
“I had already graduated so I had nothing else to do,” he says. “It was like, I have this ability, I have to take this chance at the NFL. The time with coach Cooper was really invaluable.”
On the field, everything was new, right down to how to catch a football. On the first day of catching passes, his hands were too far apart and at least one ball went caroming off his face. He knew nothing of blocking footwork, or route-running. For the guy who set a Portland State record for basketball games played (121), it was humbling.
“You go from being a senior captain, understanding your job, then going to play football and you have to learn everything,” Thomas says. “Our coach was like, ‘You’ve got to get leverage on that guy,’ and I’m like ‘What do you mean, ‘get leverage’?’”
The Broncos took note of his 453 receiving yards and first team All-Big Sky Conference selection in one season and shipped tight ends coach Clancy Barone to Portland for an extended stay. Thomas and Barone watched film side-by-side until Barone was satisfied in Thomas’s football knowledge. The former Chargers and Falcons coach realized Thomas was a “football rat,” going back to those days spent tossing around a football in the shadow of the Oakland Coliseum.
“When you’re with him you start to develop that big-picture view,” Thomas says of Manning. “You start thinking about everything happening around you.”
For the rest of the article: click on the link here to be directed to Sports Illustrated's "MMQB" feature:and the remaining article.
This story appears in the Dec. 23, 2013, issue of Sports Illustrated. Buy the digital version of the magazine here.
All the apple-cheeked babies, captured for eternity in Creamsicle onesies three sizes too big, are nearly grown. They are high school valedictorians and college athletes, Eagle Scouts and black belts, yearbook editors and engineering majors. They are in the National Honor Society. They lead Bible study. They raise money for cancer research. They lifeguard in the summer. They work part-time at Cracker Barrel. One directs short films. One blew the trumpet in a high school band at President Barack Obama's second inaugural parade. One earned a marketing award for helping develop a project to sell reusable popcorn containers at football games. One is a linebacker and a defensive end recruited by half the SEC, one is a three handicap, one runs a 5K in 18:20, and one hit an unforgettable grand slam in the ninth. One became the first girl in an all-male wrestling club, as well as the first deaf member of that club. She then captured the state championship in her weight class. Most hail from Tennessee, but you can find them as far away as lacrosse fields on Long Island. Some know each other. They were born in the same hospitals, attended the same schools, played on the same teams. Beyond that, they don't have much in common -- besides, of course, their first name.
It is an unusual name, or at least it used to be. According to the Social Security Administration, which started tracking the popularity of names in 1960, Peyton had never cracked the top 100 in Tennessee. But in 1994 the state's flagship university welcomed a freshman quarterback from New Orleans named after his uncle Peyton, a Mississippi farmer who grew cotton and soybeans, raised cattle and loved sports. When Peyton Manning enrolled at Tennessee, he took an orientation seminar with freshman football players, overseen by associate athletic director Carmen Tegano. The players were instructed to take notes. Afterward, Tegano collected their spiral notebooks and perused what they wrote. Manning had filled 30 pages. That night, Tegano told his wife, "If God is willing and I live long enough, I'll either work for that kid or I'll vote for him." A year later Manning directed Tennessee to its first win against Alabama in 10 years, and roughly 10 months after that Southern hospitals noted the first outbreak of Peytons. Call them Bama Boomers. "It was an epidemic," says Manning's older brother, Cooper, who was forced to quit football at Ole Miss because of a spinal injury. From 1996 through '98, a total of 68 Peytons were born at the University of Tennessee Medical Center alone, compared with 10 the decade before. By 1997, according to babynames.com, Peyton was the 51st-most-popular- newborn boy name in the state.
Families showed up to Volunteers practices, orange-clad infants in tow, and thrust them into Manning's reluctant arms for photos. "What am I supposed to say?" he asked his father, Archie, the iconic Ole Miss quarterback. "I don't know," his dad replied. "I only had dogs and cats named after me." Twins in Knoxville were named Peyton and Manning. A boy outside Nashville was named Peyton Cooper as a reminder that "there's nothing guaranteed in life." Doctors in Kentucky lobbied a woman in labor to call her son Tim, after Wildcats quarterback Tim Couch. "It will be a much more prosperous name," they told her. "He'll be so much more successful." They grudgingly delivered yet another Peyton. The unorthodox spelling caused confusion. Dr. Tara Burnette, a neonatologist at the UT Medical Center, once saw payton written on a note card attached to a baby's incubator in the NICU. "You misspelled the name," she told the nurse on duty. "No, the nurse insisted. "The mom spelled it for us." Burnette shook her head. "That baby is a Peyton," she said. Twenty-four hours later, the card had been changed.
There is no more personal display of fan devotion than naming one's progeny after an athlete, but the gesture carries inordinate risk, especially when the player is only a sophomore in college. Who knows what controversy lies ahead? Names become synonymous with scandals. Think of the Lances and McGwires running around. You can always buy a new jersey or hang a new Fathead, but rewriting a birth certificate is more difficult. "Sure, he could have been a dud," says Kim Dukes. "But I kind of knew, deep down inside, that he'd be special." Dukes was diagnosed with Hodgkins lymphoma as a sophomore in Knoxville, underwent chemotherapy, and was informed by doctors that the treatment had left her incapable of bearing children. She had Peyton Dukes anyway. "He's not a quarterback -- he's not even a football player," Kim says. "But we raised him to be a good, honest person, and that's the most important thing he shares with his namesake."
Though Uncle Peyton died a bachelor, his name will live forever. Archie remembers reading an article, in the early 2000s, in an education newspaper about a first-grade teacher with nine Peytons in her class. In 2007 the Knoxville News-Sentinel put out a query for Peytons and received more than 160 responses. "You hope your children are going to do great things no matter what you name them," says Dana Lara. "Going into it, you do think maybe this will give them a leg up by association." Peyton Lara is now a senior at West High and an aspiring nuclear engineer with a 4.46 grade point average.
A name doesn't ensure anything. Peyton Dukes cares more about arts than sports. Peyton Prowse's favorite player is Manning's younger brother, Giants quarterback Eli. Elaina Peyton Engel took her 5.0 GPA at Hereford (Md.) High to Alabama. "C'mon, Dad," she said. "Even Peyton Manning didn't go where his father wanted." But commitment is a thread -- whether orange or crimson -- that links the Peytons. "To have the name of someone who has accomplished so much," says Peyton Robinette, a biology major with a black belt in taekwondo who is attending Tennessee on the prestigious Volunteer Scholarship, "means I can be special."
Sportsman of the Year: Peyton ManningSource: SI
Sports Illustrated's 2013 Sportsman of the Year is Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning.
