Now I Play in Bigger Waters

November 14, 2022 — Atlanta Falcons Front Office, Flowery Branch, Georgia, USA

The Atlanta Falcons, backed to the edge of the TFM race, were shouldering a brutal burden: they had to lose all seven of their remaining games.

And yet even a total collapse, as things currently stood, gave them only a sliver of a chance at landing the No. 1 overall pick they craved.

So voices inside the building had begun arguing that the team needed to start thinking about C.J. Stroud or Bryce Young instead — but Terry Fontenot could not yet let go of that final thread of hope.

Week 11 was coming on Sunday. The Falcons' opponent: the Chicago Bears.

"After this week, we'll have to make a decision."

"…."

"The NFL draft isn't a lottery, sir. Either we start looking at another QB, or signing Geno is the best play."

From the moment Fontenot had taken sole responsibility for everything related to the tank, pushback whenever things drifted off-script was, to some degree, inevitable.

Everyone wants to be an NFL general manager. Which means someone, somewhere, has to wither.

The moment the ambitious plan he had shouldered at enormous risk began to unravel, Terry Fontenot might as well have been thrown bleeding into the Amazon.

Watching men who hoped their own ideas would be adopted as team strategy, Fontenot found himself quietly interrogating his own leadership.

"What was it I said?"

"Whew… Yes. You were right."

"The people who come at you smiling are the ones you should watch out for most."

"That one stings."

Sweeping a palm across his bald head, Fontenot turned to a veteran scout for counsel.

Phil Emery — a scout holding decision-making authority over a wide range of personnel matters — was set to walk away from football at the end of this year and return to an ordinary life.

This same Phil Emery had always doted on Terry Fontenot the way an uncle dotes on a nephew, and the two shared a deep bond.

"Don't be too discouraged."

"Shouldn't I be?"

"Ryan and Ruston both want what's best for this team — that much hasn't changed. It's only when you learn to embrace even men like them that you truly grow into a great general manager. That said, you do have to know when to keep your distance."

"Whew… It went sideways from the very start, didn't it."

"You did your best."

"…."

In his conversation with Phil Emery, Terry Fontenot could see it plainly: the Falcons were not going to be the winners of TFM.

Beyond the Chicago game that weekend, they still had the Week 13 trip to Pittsburgh and, after their bye, a Week 15 date with New Orleans.

They would need to drop all three just to have a shot once the scenarios were counted — but the faction opposed to him had latched onto Arthur Smith, doing everything that helped win games, and that was the problem.

Going by the trajectory so far, Atlanta was likely to finish the season in no-man's-land.

Six wins and eleven losses.

Or seven and ten.

If the season ended that way, a consensus would harden among the fans: "If only they'd gotten a real quarterback, they could have made the playoffs."

All the blame for the rash decision to tank would funnel straight down onto him — and no matter how firmly the owner stood behind him, once public opinion curdled like that, his future could not be guaranteed.

With the vision of a Falcons team walking alongside Dwayne Moi Stone — once so vivid — now receding into the distance, Fontenot stood at a fork in the road.

Losing on purpose in the NFL. It is every bit as difficult as winning.

November 19, 2022 — Kroger Field, Lexington, Kentucky, USA

For much the same reason as the Georgia–Florida game, plenty of NFL people had come out to the stadium again today.

Their target was William Donovan Levis.

It was Kentucky's quarterback they had come to see.

Through today, Will Levis was being slotted below C.J. Stroud and Bryce Young, and roughly level with — or a hair beneath — Anthony Richardson.

Originally treated as the "+1" of the Big 3+1, he had enjoyed a fisherman's windfall when Richardson exposed his limits against Georgia, his stock rising all on its own.

The media and NFL teams now called Will Levis "a quarterback with the makings of quality," rating his chances highly — he had the height and the shoulders to succeed.

Granted, his flaws were every bit as large, but had he declared for this year's draft, he would have gone inside the top ten.

Atlanta's scout Phil Emery, his identity hidden behind a hat, sunglasses, and a mask, settled quietly into a seat in the stands.

"…."

Since Monday's meeting, Terry Fontenot had taken vacation and gone unseen at the front office for three straight days.

He returned to work yesterday, called in everyone who had attended the Monday meeting, and made a declaration:

If Atlanta beat the Bears, the Falcons would officially be out of the TFM race.

From there, their 2023 offseason plan would be set according to draft order — which was exactly why Phil Emery had come to Kentucky to lay eyes on Will Levis.

If they could land Levis or Anthony Richardson in the second round, Atlanta would sign a bridge quarterback in free agency and buy time for the young prospect to grow.

The first-round pick would then go toward shoring up the thin arsenal.

Normally scouting of this kind is done from the front office over a TV feed rather than on-site — but Phil Emery had come here to confirm something the eye cannot see.

The thing the younger generation dismisses as a relic of a bygone era.

But something that, without question, exists.

Before long, both teams took the field. Emery's eyes had gone to Will Levis first, then drifted across to the Georgia sideline.

Unlike Kentucky, whose players had scattered to their individual routines, Georgia's players had gathered around one man — the man some of them called the HTC, the Hawaiian Tribal Chief.

Shoulders splayed wide. A thick torso, and forearms to match.

Phil Emery nodded.

'He really is different.'

Through a veteran scout's eyes, Dwayne Moi Stone felt like a player with 'that something' even at a single glance.

Kentucky's run defense had been shining since the first quarter, so today we ground the game out entirely through the air.

We sent the running backs on jet sweeps or lined them up mainly at halfback, worked Brock and Darnell — both tight ends — hard, and worried more about tempo than yardage.

It would probably be our shortest average gain per pass all season, but what mattered was whether the result was good.

I knew the record was on the line, and the instant AD crossed the goal line, I brought up the hands I'd already thrown skyward, formed a fifty, and let my voice rip.

"FIFTY!!!"

Peter swept in and hoisted me clean off the ground, and I jogged back to the bench through a gauntlet of O-linemen's celebrations.

Even with the win all but decided, the running lanes drying up had visibly slowed our scoring pace.

"How about giving the Wing Man a try?"

"Did you get shot in the head?"

"Just putting it out there."

With the team rolling the way it was, and next year being my draft year, the coaches had scrapped the tactic that turned me into a lead blocker.

Truthfully I wasn't fond of running that much this year anyway, and since I was already managing myself to dodge injuries, it cost me nothing worse than a few light lectures.

Anyway.

This year's anemic running game came from a sheer drop in the quality of the running backs themselves, so Coach had been pouring attention into Daijun's development lately.

It mattered because next year I wouldn't be here — and persuading Carson Beck, who had left the team, to come back to Georgia sprang from the very same concern.

Either way, Carson's a QB who can run.

Gunner, you'd better work even harder.

"Ooh! That one's gotta hurt."

"His reads are way too slow."

"Yeah?"

"Yup."

"Well, if you say so, it must be true."

"That's not it — I'm telling you it is."

"Aren't you special."

Oh, absolutely.

Special as they come.

As the score made plain, Kentucky had nothing going today outside of that run defense.

The offense, especially.

The performance of Kentucky's O-line looked about league-average, but with the quarterback crumbling alone in the pocket, nothing resembling a proper drive was materializing.

It was all too easy to see.

How rattled he was.

Maybe it was because he'd been sacked by Nolan and Javon early on, but a quarterback being afraid of taking a hit is itself the problem.

I'd felt it last year, and I still can't figure out how the guy gets rated a good quarterback.

Because of his arm?

And the rest of it?

NFL defenses are a different dimension from the college level — with judgment like that, the man would throw three or more interceptions every single game.

What a waste of the hardware.

"Oh!"

"LET'S GO--!!!"

Even now Will Levis had sailed a pass to an absurd spot, and Javon Bullard snatched it out of the air like lightning and sprinted untouched to the endzone — his first collegiate touchdown.

Pick Six.

The safety back in the first quarter had come from the very same sin: a window he could still have thrown through, missed.

A quarterback of remarkably poor quality.

That would be my evaluation.

"J-BULL!!!"

Hoisting a buzzing Javon Bullard high as he came bounding back to the bench, I nailed down the eleventh win of our season.

November 20, 2022 — Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

An emptied stadium.

Terry Fontenot was looking down on it from somewhere high above the field.

"…."

Roughly ninety minutes earlier, Atlanta had beaten the Chicago Bears and picked up its fourth win of the season.

And here was the interesting part: every single one of Atlanta's eighteen points had been produced by the kicker, Younghoe Koo.

That included three field goals from beyond forty-five yards, and on the finest day of his career, Koo became a hero among the players — voted MVP after the game.

And on precisely such a day, Atlanta's media and the social feeds of the fans who cheered for the Falcons burned white-hot.

To a man, they declared they could not understand the general manager's direction, dissecting every choice and judgment from the offseason through tonight and condemning each one, point by point, as a mistake.

Terry Fontenot knew.

Knew that they were right.

This had been a team that sprinted toward a single goal — TFM — and nothing else, so with that goal failed, whatever happened in the games remaining, the season was already a failing grade.

The lights of the emptied Mercedes-Benz Stadium winked out one by one, and there in the darkened bowl, Fontenot could not hold back the sigh that kept leaking out of him.

"Whew—"

Everything had looked perfect.

All of it — the future that began the moment a quarterback out of UGA joined the Falcons with the first overall pick.

And this protagonist was rated the greatest talent in the history of the sport, with a unique Korean-Samoan bloodline and a charm that had people calling his marketability the best ever.

Atlanta was home to the fourth-largest Korean community in America, and with Younghoe Koo already on the roster, the marketing windfall for the team would have been beyond measure.

Already he dreaded receiving the report the week after next and confirming that the number of jerseys sold had fallen.

For the past few months, the Falcons had stood alone at the top of the league in sales of unmarked jerseys.

But now Dwayne Moi Stone was effectively out of reach, and Atlanta, having fallen out of the TFM race, found itself having to sketch an entirely new future.

Yet no future he could imagine looked beautiful.

Not the way it had when PLAN A was complete.

"We failed. Again."

The word AGAIN that slipped from Fontenot's lips felt lonelier than it ever had.

Atlanta's painful night was still in progress.

November 21, 2022 — Butts-Mehre Heritage Hall, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA

For quite a while now, NFL experts had been arguing, with rare consistency, that the quarterback's version of the Combine needed to change.

The reasoning: the current Combine program demands virtues entirely unlike those of any other position, and yet measures very little of what actually makes a quarterback good.

So the NFL had steadily introduced a separate system for evaluating quarterbacks, and in practice, we ran a few extra tests compared to everyone else.

Another evergreen debate was the usefulness of the bench press itself — and even among people in the game, opinions split down the middle.

Which is why I simply…

"Hngh!"

…picked up the dumbbells.

"LET'S GO!!"

"COME ON!!"

Since enrolling at Georgia, I'd been posting my weight training videos to social media on the regular.

The purpose, of course, was publicity — and I was well aware that NFL people were lurking on every single one I uploaded.

"Whoo— whoo—"

Once I'd settled my breathing and locked in my core, I moved my arms lightly and started the press.

Peter, who had appointed himself my counter, called out the numbers in fives, and my teammates chimed in on the beat like they were riding a rhythm.

"10!!"

"20!!"

"Hoo-h! Hoo-h!"

The higher the count climbed, the louder my teammates' feverish roars grew, and at forty the cheers detonated until my ears rang.

45.

46.

47.

I could probably have ground out a few more if I'd forced it, but the instant I felt that faint ache settle into my shoulders, I let the dumbbells drop.

"FUCK!! YOU, CRAZY!!!"

I dropped the weights and sat up off the bench, and my teammates closed in around me, grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me side to side while calling out whatever nickname struck their fancy.

HTC. Or THE KING.

The heat of it carried through the entire session, and after morning training wrapped, I ran into Coach Scott Sinclair at the dining hall.

"You pressed 240 pounds of dumbbell forty-seven times?"

"That was 120 a hand."

"Whew— All the same, don't do that again."

"I wasn't planning to. I'm done with that."

"Good to hear."

After Coach Sinclair, worried I'd hurt myself, left, I settled into my seat and checked the reaction to the video I'd just posted.

What was it — five minutes since I'd uploaded?

220,000 likes already.

The comments were nothing but disbelief.

Which was fair enough.

The all-time Combine record for a quarterback on the bench press was the 26 reps Jason Boltus put up in 2009.

That is identical to the all-time record for wide receivers at 225 pounds — and the 47 I'd lifted today blew past even the linemen's marks.

When I post a video like this, the DMs from girls usually come pouring in — and sure enough, dozens had arrived today.

Yeah, no. As if.

I'm going to be swimming in bigger waters from now on, you see?

Lightly brushing the DMs aside, I flipped the phone face-down onto the table and gave my full attention to the food in front of me.

Carbohydrates and fiber.

And more protein still.

Tuesday morning weight training never fails to make me feel the reward of wringing my body dry.

Appetite's great today.

It had been a ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠fresh, clear morning from the very first hour.