At This Rate, I'll Need Three Phones
Two hours earlier.
The 2018 LSU Elite Quarterback Camp had come to an end.
And yet.
"It's. Awesome."
….
LSU's coaches couldn't pull themselves out of the lingering afterglow.
They had no choice, really.
They were still replaying the footage, over and over — footage of Dwayne Moi Stone.
Awe kept spilling out of their mouths, one exclamation after another.
"Wow."
"Whoo-hohohoho."
Modern football demands a whole catalog of qualities from its quarterbacks. You have to be smarter than anyone else on the field. You need a wide field of vision even from inside a helmet. Beyond that: cold judgment and decisiveness. The nerve not to flinch when the defensive line comes charging at you. The improvisational wit to call an audible on the fly. And since the 2000s rolled around, they were expected to run the ball like a running back, too.
But.
There was one condition that towered over all the rest.
The shoulder.
A team gets exactly one forward pass per play. In football — a game that is, at its heart, a land-grab — the forward pass is the quarterback's personal weapon, the single move that can devour yards in one gulp. That's why the shoulder matters most of all.
"That was insane."
"How is that even possible? How?"
"Ed?"
….
Dwayne Moi Stone, the only 6-Star recruit of the 2020 class, had spent two days tearing LSU — literally, figuratively, every way you could mean it — to shreds at this camp.
Even on the first day, which had started out utterly ordinary, his passing ability stood in a different league from every other quarterback invited to the camp. The 73-yard bomb in particular left every witness gaping in disbelief.
Granted, this year's camp wasn't exactly stacked with QB prospects. But making Lance Legendre — a respectable 3-Star in his own right — look like a little kid out there? That was genuinely astonishing.
However.
The real show was today, day two.
The drill known as:
Free Offense Training.
It was the most primal way to measure a quarterback's ability, and it began with five receivers being assigned man-to-man defenders. The moment the signal sounded, all ten players exploded off the line — and the quarterback had to pick his offensive players out by helmet color alone, then deliver the pass within the allotted time.
Taking the snap at the 20-yard line, the starting point of the red zone, Moi completed all twenty of his passes and produced eight touchdowns. He advanced 127 of a maximum possible 160 yards — the furthest any quarterback had gone since LSU first held the camp in 1974.
It also blew past the six touchdowns and 109 yards Trevor Lawrence had reportedly posted at a Georgia camp the year before.
Ed Orgeron had been sitting in silence.
Suddenly, he spoke up.
"If we ran Joe Burrow through the same drill, what kind of numbers would he put up?"
"?"
"Burrow would do well, no doubt. He's a tremendous kid. But honestly? I don't see him topping this."
Reading the receiver's routes and stride length. The timing of the release. The velocity and arc of the ball in flight.
Not a single one of it was less than perfect.
And the player who had pulled it off was sixteen years old.
Ed Orgeron had never seen anything like it in his life.
"Did you say you swapped numbers with Justin?"
"Yes, sir. Justin mentioned it."
"Good. I'll need to sit down with Justin later."
With his resolve to recruit Moi hardening from 99.9% to a full 100%, Ed Orgeron intended to use every card he had.
And then.
Tom Herman, head coach of the Longhorns, was driving a cart across campus when his phone rang.
"So? How was he?"
—He was just… on another level, sir.
"Did you get it on video?"
—Yes… I checked it right away, but I shot it from inside my bag, so parts are cut off. Picture quality isn't great either.
"Doesn't matter. Send me the file."
…Um, the money's still happening like you promised, right?
"Of course. And the admission is a promise too."
The moment news broke that Moi would be attending LSU's Elite Camp, the Texas Longhorns had moved fast — combing the attendee list until they found a quarterback departing from Beaumont, just east of Houston. And they immediately dispatched someone with one profoundly illegal request: film Dwayne Moi Stone throughout the camp, send us the footage, and get paid according to its quality and length.
On top of that, they dangled a guaranteed admission — scholarship included — to the University of Texas campus in the Permian Basin. That campus fielded an NCAA D2 football team, and that admission was how the informant would be compensated for the footage.
Once the call ended, Tom Herman steered the cart along for a few more yards, then dropped the disposable phone — voice modulator and all — into a trash can.
Then he brought the cart to a stop and pulled out his own phone.
"Nate. An email's about to land."
The Texas Longhorns currently had people on staff who handled this kind of business quietly, and for the next while they would be busy scrubbing every trace of it while keeping the informant from growing a conscience.
"Make sure he keeps his mouth shut."
—Leave it to us. We're professionals when it comes to that sort of thing.
"I'm counting on you. Then."
Click.
Tom Herman dropped the phone into the basket on the front of the cart, then looked up at the sky and smiled.
"Pretty sunset today."
Humming a little tune, he was already thinking about clocking out.
"Impressive."
The Texas Longhorns were hardly the only program that needed footage from LSU's Elite Camp.
Georgia wanted eyes on Dwayne Moi Stone as well, but instead of planting a spy and taking the risk, they'd gone with something far more direct and simple.
Every year, each university's camp was staffed with a small army of helpers to keep things running — and among them were ordinary university personnel from other schools. Georgia had quietly won over one of them.
She had direct access to the footage LSU was filming, and Georgia had received the file roughly thirty minutes earlier.
The price: fifty thousand dollars.
Out of Kirby Smart's own pocket.
It was a big number, sure. But the man's salary alone was $6.6 million this year — and with bonuses, it climbed past ten million. In other words, pocket change.
….
….
From the crowd gathered in Kirby Smart's living room, watching footage they had absolutely no business watching, came reactions nearly identical to the ones LSU's staff had been coughing up minutes ago.
"Unreal."
"We have to get him. We have to get him NOW."
"Was he throwing it away on purpose there?"
"Holy…"
Every time the boy crossed over to the mainland, he detonated another shockwave — then vanished back to Hawaii in a blink.
Dwayne Moi Stone's evaluation was climbing again today.
Rising without pause.
Toward a ceiling nobody could even guess at.
Riiing—
Riiing—
Riiing—
Riiing—
….
Haah—
I sat up in bed and fumbled for the phone beside me. 5:40 a.m. About time to get up anyway.
But.
Riiing—
Riiing—
Riiing—
Riiing—
Ever since an interview let slip that I woke up at 4:50, the other phone sitting by my pillow had been going absolutely insane.
Riiing—
Riiing—
Agh.
Whatever.
Once I was fully out of bed, I grabbed the bath basket sitting to one side and shuffled outside in my slippers.
"Hnnngh—"
Like I said, everything in Hawaii runs on an 8-to-16 clock, so by 4:30 or 5:00, most people were already up and about. Off in the distance, Tamati spotted me and waved. So I waved back and hollered:
"GOOD!! MORNING!!"
Phew—
Shouting like that really did wake the brain up.
Anyway, I headed for the washroom. A while back the school had talked about building me a new dorm, but since it'd be a white elephant the moment I graduated, I told them to skip it and just swap out the shower instead. Thanks to that, I ended up with a bathroom that had a toilet and a tub attached to it. Honestly? More than satisfied.
Shhhh—
Creak.
Yep. Nothing beats a cold shower in the morning.
I washed up, got dressed, and stepped back outside. The sky had turned fully blue at some point, and after drinking in lungfuls of the warm air, I headed back toward the dorm.
Tamati was cleaning near his place. Third year running now. He hadn't missed a single day. The man made gratitude feel like it would never be enough.
"I cleaned up out here last night, you know."
"Heh heh. Still. You're our school's hero — this much is only right."
"Hero, nothing. I'm just a football player."
"A hero, to me. By the way."
"?"
"Phones been going off like crazy in there, haven't they?"
"It's June 15th, after all."
"Heh. Gonna be a busy day for you."
"As long as they're not a pain in my neck, I'll count it a win."
Click.
I stepped inside with the door swinging wide behind me, kicked off my shoes, and walked to the bed. For the record: people in Hawaii don't wear shoes indoors. That's a mainland habit. We like things clean.
Riiing—
"Ha…."
Oh my god. There were 323 messages. It wasn't even 6:00 a.m. yet.
I opened the app and skimmed through — every single one was a scholarship pitch. Just hurling offers at the wall and seeing what stuck, apparently. Then again, that was the standard play.
"First, silence mode…"
I switched my usual phone to silent, stuffed it carelessly into my bag, and set the phone I'd activated just a week ago down on the desk. Then I pulled out the chair and sat.
What do I do in the morning? This and that, mostly. A typical day of mine looks like this:
4:50 AM — Wake up
5:30 – 7:30 AM — Schoolwork or playbooks
8:00 AM – 2:30 PM — School
3:00 – 5:00 PM — Training
5:20 – 6:20 PM — Quarterback meeting
7:00 – 9:00 PM — Personal time
Personal time was mostly spent with the Muscle Men, or at home repeating the morning's routine all over again. Come 9:00 I'd try to sleep, and when sleep wouldn't come, I'd sit back down at the desk a little longer.
Every now and then the linemen would throw out lines like "I'm on the football team, I don't gotta study" — and there are moments I genuinely envy them.
Of course, ninety percent of the kids who talk like that end up sweating their D1 eligibility over their grades and wind up getting lectured by me instead. And whenever they tried to give me grief for studying too much, they'd usually go quiet pretty fast.
Because my GPA was kind of ridiculous.
From freshman year to now: 3.8 / 4.0 / 3.9 / 3.7.
For reference, to qualify for D1, you need a four-year high school average of 2.3 or better.
BAM BAM BAM!
"!"
Geez. Scared the hell out of me.
Exactly one human being knocked like that.
"Mo-ii! It's me! Marcus!"
Click.
"Fuck, Marcus. I told you to knock like a normal person, didn't I?"
"I'm hungry. Got anything like a chocolate bar?"
"…Haah — come in."
Marcus had been working seriously hard lately. Training, yes — but eating, too. Some people find gaining weight genuinely difficult, and Marcus was one of them. Over the past month he'd packed on fifteen pounds (about 6.8 kg), finally building a frame that could hold down the center position.
"Trash goes in the trash can. Got it?"
"Juice?"
"Where'd I leave it? The fridge."
"Kik kik kik. You were gonna share anyway."
"Screw off."
"Not like you paid for it."
"The school buys it FOR me to eat, genius."
Naturally, I'd asked for plenty of extras thanks to Marcus — call it a perk I'd been enjoying since freshman year. Unlimited snacks. Unlimited drinks. Only my fellow freshmen knew about it, so everyone else just assumed I was loaded.
By Hawaii standards, mind you.
Oh, and.
Sol-Jay had transferred to the mainland back in April. Staying at Kahuku meant staring at the backup QB job forever, so he'd chosen the mainland to chase his D1 shot. Thankfully, a school called St. John's in Washington D.C. liked what they saw of him, and he was slated to start at quarterback there this year.
Losing a friend hurt. But cheering him on was the right move.
Which meant this year, a new transfer quarterback had arrived.
Namely:
"Moi!"
"Ah — dammit."
"Your stalker fan's baaack."
"Shut it."
"Kik kik kik."
This guy.
Tiger Adolpho.
How do I put this. A sophomore absolutely overflowing with loose screws.
"Check it out, check it out! I shaved my left eyebrow!"
"Fuck! Half of it's just GONE?"
"Scary, right? Doesn't my face look intimidating now?"
"Tiger, please. Why does that even matter?"
"You gotta dominate with your face! Like the Hulk! RAAAGH!!"
….
Look, in a certain light you could read the screw-looseness as passion. The problem was how relentlessly annoying he was about it. He'd spent thirty minutes in front of a mirror making bizarre faces, claiming he was "copying my expressions." A couple of days ago, he'd materialized late at night clutching a bath basket and declaring "Let's bathe together!" He'd even introduced me to his girlfriend with the words "This is my role model!" — and then, a few days later, she dumped him.
Hard to blame her, honestly. He kept her standing right there while he talked about nothing but me.
"Training doesn't start until the afternoon, so why is everyone swarming me from sunrise and yapping my ear off?! I've told you — leave me ALONE!"
SLAM!
In the process of shoving Marcus out of the house, I booted Tiger out the door too.
Finally.
Peace and quiet…
Bzzzt—
Bzzzt—
Nope. Not a chance.
The phone on the table started ringing, and when I checked the screen, I let out a long, deep sigh at the area code floating there.
Seriously. How. HOW did they get this number?
205.
Alabama uses four area codes, and 205 is the one for Tuscaloosa — home of the University of Alabama. Marveling at the Alabama people who had somehow tracked down a number I'd activated a week ago, I found myself actually wanting to pick up — if only to give them a standing ovation.
It wouldn't be Nick Saban, obviously.
One of the recruiters, then?
Or some school administrator.
"Hello?"
—Hi there! I hope I'm not interrupting your morning?
"No, not at all. Though — who is this, exactly?"
—Oh, I'm Sally Jones! I'm with Alabama's admissions office, and I'd love to formally introduce our scholarship system—
At this rate, I'm going to need three phones.
It was one of those moments where I genuinely, sincerely thought exactly that.
By the time the morning was over, I'd heard from a grand total of sixty-three NCAA D1 programs about their scholarship offerings.
Nine universities had called the new number directly, each one offering, with a smile in their voice, to carve out one of their precious few full-ride scholarship slots just for me.
For reference:
NCAA D1 FBS schools hand out 85 scholarships every year. D1 FCS programs get a smaller allotment of 63. Each university decides how to deploy that budget, and most scale it back to 85 to create headroom for full scholarships. In that setup, even a player released from the football team keeps his scholarship guaranteed — though unless he retires due to injury, he forfeits the remainder and transfers to another school.
Simply put: it's a gesture of good faith.
"Damn — those people ALL came out here to watch you?"
"Seems like it."
"Fuck. It's finally starting to feel real."
"It wasn't real before?"
"I mean, it was always just news articles and stuff."
The universities that came recruiting for me in the past had shown up 99.9% of the time on game days, and any contact went through my parents. Penn State people did come last year — but that was under the pretext of visiting Coach. Same alumni network, after all.
But starting today, they were welcome at practice.
Plenty of high school coaches lock recruiters out, whining that they disrupt training. Our coach was not one of them.
His shoulders were practically puffing up. He absolutely could not contain himself.
"Coach is the only one having the time of his life."
"Look at the college guys bowing and scraping."
"Look at him right now. Look."
Recruiters work overtime to get chummy with anyone who might influence a player even slightly — because you never know who might sabotage the recruiting effort, or when, or how. And high school head coaches sit squarely at the top of the list of people recruiters need to keep happy.
Right now the coach was showing us nothing but his back — but I'd bet my entire net worth the corners of his mouth were turned up to the sky.
"Glad we came out here, huh."
"Huh?"
Just as Marcus and I were watching the coach, Julius Buelow sidled up next to us. He'd played offensive tackle at Kapolei through last semester, then transferred to our Kahuku to chase a college shot. His position: left tackle.
My bodyguard numero uno.
"Train hard enough, and the college eyes find you eventually. Right?"
"Exactly."
"Anyway — look forward to working with you."
"Same here."
Coach Gavin Travis finished his conversations with the college people during warm-ups and came walking our way. He called me to the front, then started things off with a battle cry.
Excuse me? You weren't doing that a second ago, sir?
"Hands together, everyone—!"
….
"Focus up—! Stay healthy—! This year, what we're after is the top spot in Hawaii, same as always! One, two, three!"
"RED RAIDERS!!"
A satisfied smile bloomed across the coach's face.
Watching him, I shook my head side to side.
Honestly.
Some people just really need an audience.