The average heart of a young, healthy male who weighs 200 pounds and stands 6-foot and-a-quarter inch weighs about 12 ounces and is the size of a fist.
Unless that healthy young male is named Trace McSorley.
Then that man’s heart — imbued with a 31-9 record, 9,899 yards passing 1,697 yards rushing and 107 touchdown — is much larger. Much.
And, at times, even immeasurable. Or, as Dr. Seuss once wrote of a certain green character, it’s a heart that can grow three sizes in one day. (Or, one drive.)
There’s no doubting that.
At the Senior Bowl and the NFL Combine and NFL on-campus Pro Days, the National Football League may do a cardiac evaluation, but it also looks a whole ‘nother set of nunbers as well.
More hum-drum, cut-and-dried numbers. To The League, the tale of the tape matters.
Not totally, of course.
As one NFL scout told me as we stood at the railing of the Beaver Stadium playing field 90 minutes before kickoff this fall: “You need to see a quarterback play in person — in a game, and on tape, if you are truly going to evaluate him. That’s primarily why I’m here, to see McSorley.”
GRINDING FOR GRUDEN
This week, the mobile McSorley can be seen in Mobile, Ala., both in person and on television on ESPN and the NFL Network.
He just finished three days of extensive drills at the Reese’s Senior Bowl under the direction of North squad coach, Oakland Raiders boss and renowned quarterback whisperer Job Gruden, who has liked what he has seen from McSorley.
“McSorley, not a big quarterback but a tough guy. Got a lot of Rich Gannon, Jeff Garcia in him. Bulldog, fighter-type quarterback,” Gruden said during his initial press conference in Mobile, according to Raiderswire.
Gruden said measurables don’t account for everything. “We’re looking for guys who can play and can do a lot of different things,’ the coach said. “And they come in all shapes and sizes, nowadays.”
Gruden will get another up-close and personal look at McSorley this Saturday at Ladd-Peebles Stadium, where the Penn State QB alum and teammate Amani Oruwariye will compete at 2:30 p.m. Eastern in an all-star game telecast by the NFL Network.
At the Senior Bowl, players meet nightly with representatives from the NFL for one-on-one interviews and chalk talk interactions. No doubt about it, though: McSorley, with a high FB IQ, will McSurley shine in such sessions.
Here’s how DaeSean Hamilton described those evening interviews to me last year when he was at the Senior Bowl playing — and me, reporting — last year: “Interviews are kind of easy,” Hamilton said. “You go in there and be yourself, and answer questions honestly. If they want to talk football, I can talk football for days. You have to be yourself and know football.”
Trace McSorley knows football.
SIZING HIM UP
But, given his smallish size for an NFL quarterback, how does he measure up when it comes to the tangibles?
Things like height, weight, speed in the 40, arm length and hand size. We wondered that, too.
So, I combed through the numbers for a small fleet of smaller QBs, looking at their numbers taken at the Senior Bowl and the NFL Combine — or, in the case of the older players, when they first arrived in the NFL. IT was an exercise in benchmarking a guy who was impossible to put on the bench the past three seasons.
That list includes Super Bowl champion Drew Brees of the New Orleans Saints, as well as Russell Wilson, who made it to the Big Game with the Seattle Seahawks. Also in this small sample, I’ve included Heisman winners Doug Flutie, Johnny Manziel, Baker Mayfield and Kyle Murray. (Measurables were tough to find for Murray given that he hasn’t run the NFL numbers gauntlet. Yet.)
I’ve included old-school types like scrambling Fran Tarkenton, the 6-foot Hall of Famer who played 18 years in the NFL and threw for over 47,000 yard and 340 TDs, and 5-11 Sonny Jurgensen, another HOF’er who also played 18 years in the NFL, throwing for over 32,000 yards and 250 TDs. That Jurgensen played many years for Washington, and McSorley was 55-5 as a starting high school QB in suburban D.C. and wore N. 9 like Sonny, I thought made for some nice symmetry.
(The question comes up: How well would Tarkenton do these days? Not great. He is, after all, 78 years old.)
I also added Dashaun Watson, who is 6-2 but is a running QB like McSorley, and 6-foot-4 and made-in-the-NFL mold Christian Hackenberg, McSorley’s predecessor at Penn State. Hack started 37 games at PSU, but never took a snap in an official NFL game.
