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How college football's latest superstar wound up playing for Louisville

LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Practice Field Three is on the back portion of the Louisville football facility footprint, a place far from any curious eyes, the fences covered in tarps.

It was here in August 2015, shrouded from public view, that Bobby Petrino first saw, and believed.

“Just the way he could snap his wrist and the ball would come flying out of his hand,” Petrino said Monday, sounding like he could still picture it.

The wrist snap belonged to Lamar Jackson – then a raw freshman, now a leading Heisman Trophy candidate. For Petrino, this was one of those pulse-quickening moments that a coach who has spent much of his adult life building quarterbacks lives for. He had recruited Jackson out of South Florida with the belief that he had a special talent – getting in early and holding off much of the Southeastern Conference to sign him – but here was proof that the kid might be even better than anticipated.

They knew he was fast – crazy fast for a quarterback. They’d seen the high school tape, watched him play in person, heard the testimonials from lead recruiter Lamar Thomas and Boynton Beach High School coach Rick Swain. But that release when he passed the ball – that was something best appreciated while standing a few feet away.

That was when a great football irony revealed itself: Petrino was finally going to coach Michael Vick after all. At the place he left with the intent of coaching Vick in the first place.

In 2007, Petrino was the new coach of the Atlanta Falcons – having left Louisville after four wildly successful seasons – and his quarterback was supposed to be Vick. But before the season started, Vick pleaded guilty to federal charges associated with his involvement in a dog-fighting ring. Vick never played another snap for the Falcons, and a quarterback-poor team stumbled to a 3-10 record before Petrino abruptly quit and returned to college at Arkansas that December.

Fast-forward eight years, through a lot of personal and professional turmoil, and Petrino was back at Louisville. And the star signee of his second recruiting class back was Jackson, whose childhood hero was none other than Michael Vick.

“Go all the way back to my first year playing, in 2004,” Jackson said. “I just loved how fast he was, and he could throw, too.”

Louisville's Lamar Jackson has 13 TDs and over 1,000 yards in just two games this season. (Getty)
Louisville’s Lamar Jackson has 13 TDs and over 1,000 yards in just two games this season. (Getty)

Playing pee-wee football for the Pompano Eagles, Jackson set about becoming that quarterback. When he arrived as a transfer at Boynton Beach High his sophomore year, Swain left him alone for a while to work on academics – but it didn’t take long before his players began creating the legend of Lamar, passing along stories of the new guy’s athleticism.

Once Swain got him in pads, he learned that the stories were not exaggerated. This was the kind of guy who would one day hurdle defenders on national television.

“Athletically, I knew he was special,” he said. “I just knew. I said, ‘Whoever gets this guy is going to have a lot of fun coaching him.’ He can make a coach look pretty darn good.

“He just really admired the mobility and athleticism Vick had. I think that had a lot to do with how much he enjoyed running the option for us.”

The 60-something Swain, who also was the Boynton Beach athletic director, formed a bond with his new quarterback. Swain would drive him home when Lamar stayed late after practice to watch film. Lamar would drop by Swain’s office at lunch, grabbing snacks that could be found in abundance.

Lamar and teammates would also crash the office at the end of the day, between sixth-period P.E. and the start of practice. Swain called the group “The Posse.” There were a lot of laughs and a lot of smack talk.

Eventually The Posse – which included Chauncey Mason, son of De La Soul hip-hop artist Vincent Mason and younger brother of former NFL running back Tre Mason – taught Swain the Nae Nae. Then they challenged him to do it on the sideline every time Mason scored.

Mason and Boynton Beach scored plenty. Swain danced. And recruiters flocked to see the quarterback nobody could catch.

But Louisville had an inside edge. Lamar Thomas had played for Swain in high school, and the former Miami Hurricane and NFL receiver got his start in coaching as an assistant to him. Thomas said he wanted to coach in college, so Swain took him to the National Football Coaches Association convention and he hooked on at FCS Hampton.

From there, Thomas got a job with Petrino in his one-year rehab stint of sorts, at Western Kentucky. Then he moved on to Louisville with Petrino, and South Florida was one of his recruiting areas.

Thomas was one of the first to lock on Jackson. Many others followed: Clemson, Auburn, Miami and Nebraska prominently among them. Jackson committed to Louisville in August 2014 but still took two other visits, to Mississippi State and Florida.

Florida might have been able to flip Jackson, but when it fired Will Muschamp and the assistant who was recruiting Jackson, Kurt Roper, it hurt the Gators. New coach Jim McElwain tried to get back in – and even though Jackson showed up for school on national signing day with a Florida backpack, it was all for show. He signed with Louisville, believing Petrino was the best man for the job of molding him into an NFL quarterback.

“I wanted to be a great quarterback,” Jackson said. “Coach Petrino could do that. That’s why I wanted to come here.”

Despite his physical skills, the learning curve was steep. Jackson played in a fairly simple offense at Boynton Beach – though not as simple as some recent stories have made it out to be.

“He damn sure had a playbook,” Swain said. “But we taught it in such a way that we didn’t give copies to the kids to take home. Lamar would come into my office and read the playbook, then we went out on the field and just signaled in everything.

“We didn’t just turn him loose. Though we were happy to see him when he was loose.”

Jackson’s freshman year at Louisville was basically drinking the Petrino offense through a firehose. He was too talented not to play right away – Jackson’s first pass of his college career was an interception out of a gadget formation – but that didn’t mean it was going to be easy.

Swain remembers Jackson calling him and saying he “felt like a chicken with his head cut off.” He was relying on athleticism and little more while trying desperately to get the game to slow down.

By the end of the 2015 season, it started to happen. Jackson had been in and out of the Louisville lineup, sharing time with more experienced quarterbacks, but in the regular-season finale against Kentucky the big reveal began.

After falling behind 24-7 in an emotionally charged rivalry game, Jackson led a blistering comeback for a 38-24 victory. In the process he ran for a career-high 186 yards and passed for 130 more, accounting for three touchdowns. People started paying attention.

A month later, in the Music City Bowl, the hype escalated. Jackson shredded Texas A&M for 226 rushing yards and 227 passing, doing everything in a 27-21 Louisville win.

Petrino had seen enough to know that the 2016 offense belonged to Jackson. He named him a captain as a true sophomore, and urged Jackson to sharpen the small but vital elements of quarterback play. Starting from the literal ground up.

“He just needed to work on footwork,” Petrino said. “A lot of times it’s the ability to get the timing right with what depths our receivers are going to be, and where my footwork is so I can be accurate in throwing the football.

“I’m really proud of how hard he’s worked on that and how important it is to him. He’s very driven, and he’s a very committed young man.”

Lamar did the work – in the football facility at 6 a.m. to watch tape, or up late viewing it on his iPad. He’s showing the workaholic signs of so many successful QBs.

That drive was instilled in large part by Lamar’s mother, Felicia James. (His father, Lamar Jackson Sr., was killed in a car accident when Lamar was younger.) She is “a character,” in Swain’s words, both her son’s biggest booster and biggest critic.

When Swain would drive Lamar home after practice, Felicia often would greet him with a medicine ball and put him through a core workout. When the Boynton Beach coaches informed her that the fastest guy on the team was not winning wind sprints – i.e., her son – she let him have it. One day when someone offered him a ticket to a Miami Dolphins game, mom interceded to say that her son had promised to work out and would be unable to attend.

“She’s like a coach,” Lamar said, smiling. “She knows what’s going on. When I talk to her she goes first to what I did bad. She’s going to ask me, ‘Why did you throw those interceptions? Why did you fumble?’

“But actually, I usually agree with her. I know what I’ve got to work on to get better.”

That’s why Jackson has been so reserved in his assessment of his play this season. He’s absolutely torched Charlotte and Syracuse, accounting for 13 total touchdowns and 1,015 total yards – first and second in the nation, respectively – but remained mostly unimpressed.

“It was all right,” Jackson said of the Syracuse game, when he broke the Atlantic Coast Conference record for total yardage with 610.

The most spellbinding play came on a scramble when receiver Jamari Staples missed a block and left Jackson one-on-one with a defensive back. The Orange defender dipped his head just slightly to go for the tackle, and Jackson hurdled over him like Edwin Moses and then strolled into the end zone.

“I saw him take off and I was like, ‘Whoa!’ ” Staples recalled. “I think he can do anything on the field. He can play any position.

“From here on out, Lamar’s the Heisman front-runner. No doubt in my mind he’s the best player.”

The time to prove that with the nation watching is Saturday. Second-ranked Florida State comes to town to take on No. 10 Louisville, in a game that ranks on the short list of the biggest in Cardinals football history. ESPN’s “College GameDay” will be here for the first time, and the focus is largely on Lamar Jackson.

Those watching him closely for the first time may well see what Rick Swain witnessed often at Boynton Beach, and what Bobby Petrino discovered on a practice field more than a year ago. The kid can play quarterback.

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