The Blind Side (3 page)

From the tape alone, Lemming couldn’t say how much Michael Oher had helped his team, just that he was big, fast, and fantastically explosive. “To make my lists they almost always have to have production,” said Lemming. By “production” he meant honors and achievements—not mere potential. “He was different from just about every other kid I picked to be a high school All-American in that he didn’t have any.” But if Michael Oher in the flesh was anything like Michael Oher on the videotape, Lemming was afraid not to make an exception of him. He had his reputation to protect. Nothing was as embarrassing to him as leaving a kid off his lists who, four years later, was a first-round NFL draft pick. And the last time he had seen a player with this awesome array of physical gifts was back in 1993, when he went to the Sizzler Steakhouse in Sandusky, Ohio, and interviewed a high school junior working behind the counter named Orlando Pace.

“Michael Oher’s athletic ability and his body—the only thing you could compare it to was Orlando Pace,” said Lemming. “He kind of even looked like Orlando Pace. He wasn’t as polished as Orlando. But Orlando wasn’t Orlando in high school.” Pace had gone from Lemming’s All-American team to Ohio State, where he’d played left tackle and won the Outland Award given to the nation’s finest college offensive lineman. In 1997, he’d signed the largest rookie contract in NFL history, to play left tackle for the St. Louis Rams, and he was about to sign an even bigger one (seven years, $52.8 million). Pace became, and would remain, the team’s highest paid player—more highly paid than the star quarterback, Marc Bulger, the star running back, Marshall Faulk, and the star wide receiver, Isaac Bruce. He was an offensive lineman but not just any offensive lineman. He protected the quarterback’s blind side.

When Tom Lemming walked into the football meeting room at the University of Memphis, looking for Michael Oher, the ghost of Lawrence Taylor was waiting. Taylor’s legacy had led to a queasy tilting of the finances on the NFL’s line of scrimmage. The players on the blind side of a right-handed quarterback—both offensive and defensive—became, on average, far more highly paid than the players on the visible side. This was strange. There was no financial distinction between left and right guards. Right-side linebackers who (unlike Taylor) routinely played off the line of scrimmage continued to be paid the same, on average, as left-side linebackers. Right-side cornerbacks, even further from the line of scrimmage, were paid the same as left-side cornerbacks. Only the two players engaged in the battle for control of the turf between the line of scrimmage and the right-handed quarterback’s back were paid more than their counterparts on the side that the typical, right-handed quarterback faced. A lot more. By 2004, the five most highly paid NFL left tackles were earning nearly $3 million a year more than the five most highly paid right tackles, and more than the five most highly paid running backs and wide receivers.*

The fantastic general rise in overall NFL salaries since 1993, when players were granted the right of free agency, obscured a more striking shift in relative pay. The players all made so much more money each year than they had the year before that few paid much attention to the trends within the trend. But there were several, and this was the most revelatory. In the early 1980s, the notion that a single lineman should be paid much more than any other—and more than star running backs, wide receivers, and, in several cases, quarterbacks—would have been considered heretical had it not been so absurd. The offensive line never abandoned, at least in public, its old, vaguely socialistic ideology. All for one, one for all, as to do our jobs well we must work together, and thus no one of us is especially important. But by the mid-1990s the market disagreed: it had declared this one member of the offensive line a superstar. Not some interchangeable homunculus, not low-skilled labor, but a rare talent. This judgment was not rendered overnight; it was the end of a long story, of football coaches and general managers sifting and judging and scrambling to determine the relative importance of the positions on a football field, and to find the people best suited to play them. And at the beginning of the story was Tom Lemming.

BACK IN 1978, at the age of twenty-three, Lemming had an idea: he’d travel America and meet the top high school football players in the country, and decide which ones were the best. There was no videotape, so he had to visit high schools and ask to see the 16mm film of their players. While there he’d interview the players, get a sense of their characters, and extract from them everything from their college preference to their grade point averages. Then he’d publish a book ranking them. “I had such excitement knowing I was doing something no one else was doing,” he said later. “No one had ever gone to see everyone in the country.” When he drove away from his home in Chicago he had to wonder who was going to pay for his bizarre enterprise. No one, at first: In the early days he spent every other night sleeping in his car at an Oasis truck stop. (“But then people started shooting people in Oasises, so I had to find different places to park.”) The first year his budget allowed him to meet and interview every notable high school football player east of the Mississippi. The next year he crossed the Mississippi and went right to the base of the Rockies. “I would go as far as my cash would take me,” he said. “I was sort of like Lewis and Clark, except instead of waiting for resupply I was waiting for enough radio shows to promote my books.” In 1983 he crossed the Rockies and never looked back.

It took him seven years to turn a profit, but by then he had a frantic following in college football. What must have seemed at first a mad notion—why would anyone care what some twenty-three-year-old guy with no experience thought about high school football players? Why would any high school football star waste his time answering the questions of a stranger and filling out intrusive forms?—became a thriving business. Bear Bryant, Dan Devine, Bo Schembechler—all these big-time football coaches took an interest in Lemming’s work. He was, in effect, the only national football scout in America. Baseball had hundreds of scouts—guys who spent 365 days a year traveling the country to evaluate teenagers. Strictly speaking, of course, a sixteen-year-old football player wasn’t a commodity in the way a sixteen-year-old baseball player was. A high school baseball player could be drafted to play in the pros; a high school football player could not. Less strictly speaking, high school football players were far more highly prized, in part because colleges could usurp a great deal of their (skyrocketing) market value. Eight times a year Lemming published a newsletter to which all but seven of the 117 Division I college football programs subscribed. After they’d read it, all these college football coaches would call Lemming for the kids’ addresses, phone numbers, and anything else he might know about them. High school football players across the country, with the help of their fathers and their coaches, inundated Lemming’s little office in Chicago with tapes of their performances, press clippings, and letters of recommendation. All they wanted was for him to make them famous.

There simply was no one else doing what Lemming was doing. Overnight he became, by default, the leading independent authority on the subject of U.S. high school football players. It was a booming market with an obvious gap: colleges on one side of the country had no information about players on the other. Even in the lawless days of football recruiting—before the NCAA began seriously to crack down, in the late 1980s—recruiters from big-time football schools hunted for talent mostly in their own backyards. Coach Bear Bryant’s machine at the University of Alabama spent its time and energies on southern players; Bo Schembechler’s machine at the University of Michigan spent its time and energy on players in the Midwest. In the late 1980s, when the NCAA began to pass, and enforce, elaborate rules governing the interaction between college football coaches and high school football players, the hole in the market widened. College football coaches were forbidden to so much as wink at a prospect until he began his senior year. By then Lemming had studied the prospect’s play, his character, and his grade point average. Plus he’d have a pretty good idea of where the kid might like to go to college.

The flow of information improved—videotape, cell phones, the Internet all made his life a lot easier—and Lemming’s ability to make sense of it improved as well. When he started out, he felt, he had been too impressed by sheer physical talent and insufficiently respectful of actual on-field achievement. He’d thought future great NFL running back Barry Sanders was too small, for instance, even though he’d run for a zillion yards in high school. He still made mistakes, but fewer. By the 1990s he had a vast, informal network of informants whom he trusted—high school coaches and fans, mainly—who allowed him to shrink the pool of 3 million high school football players down to a few thousand. He watched tapes of those players and winnowed the pool to about 1,500, whom he interviewed in person. From those he selected 400 for his annual book of the nation’s top prospects, and from the book he culled his list of the Top 100 players in the nation. And finally, he selected his most rarified group, the 25 or so high school players he pronounced “All-Americans.” His hit rate was very high. Of the twenty-five players he picked in 1995, for instance, fourteen wound up becoming number one draft choices in the NFL. In the mid-1990s, ESPN began to publish an All-American team, selected by Lemming. USA Today published another one, also mainly selected by Lemming. In 2000, the U.S. Army High School All-American football game was born, and broadcast on national television. Lemming selected the eighty players for the game. Reggie Bush, Vince Young, Adrian Petersen, Dwayne Jarrett, Chris Leak, LenDale White, Brady Quinn: the game became a turnstile for future Heisman Trophy candidates and top NFL draft picks.

As the noise grew louder, and the money got bigger, the politics became worse: coaches and players pestered Lemming to be included in his books, and on his lists, and in the Game. At some point he basically ceased to believe what anyone told him about a high school football player. “There’s a reason I’m on the road six months a year,” he said. “I would never rely on what people tell me. I have to see ’em.” By the spring of 2004, he found himself interviewing the sons of players he had interviewed twenty-five years earlier. His business, and his influence, grew, but Lemming kept on doing what he’d always done. He still drove 50,000 to 60,000 miles each year and interviewed, in the flesh, between 1,500 and 2,000 high school football players. He was a one-man sifting machine.

One of the perks of Lemming’s role in the market was a worm’s-eye view of its trends. When he opened for business, he assumed he was simply identifying future college football stars. He didn’t give much thought to their professional futures. College football was mainly a running game, for instance, and the NFL, increasingly, was a passing game. College football had an appetite for all sorts of players the pros had no use for: option quarterbacks, slow fullbacks, midget linebackers. That changed as the big-time football programs came to function as training schools for the NFL. To attract the best high school players they had to persuade them that they offered the smoothest path to the NFL. It helped, then, if they ran NFL-style offenses and defenses. Because of this—and because of the steady flow of NFL coaches into college football—college football became more homogenous, and less distinguishable from the game played in the NFL. In the late 1980s, Lemming began to notice the erosion in the differences between college and pro football. By the mid-1990s he saw that, in identifying the best future college football players, he was identifying the best future professional ones, too.

The other, related trend was a trickle-down of NFL prototypes into America’s high schools. The NFL would discover a passion for athletic (read: black) quarterbacks, or speedy pass rushers, and first the colleges and then the high schools would begin to supply them. There was a lag, of course. If Lawrence Taylor created a new vogue in the NFL for exceptionally violent and speedy pass rushers with his dimensions in 1981, it might be 1986 before Lemming encountered a big new wave of similarly shaped violent and speedy high school pass rushers. But the wave always came. What the NFL prized, America’s high schools supplied, and America’s colleges processed. “It goes from Sunday to Saturday to Friday, five years later,” said Lemming. The types came and went—one decade there would be a vogue for speedy little receivers, the next decade the demand would be for tall, lanky receivers. And there were antitypes; Lord help the white running back or wide receiver or, until the early 1990s, the black quarterback. The Lawrence Taylor type, however, came and never left. When Lemming hit the road in 2004, he knew he would find big linebackers, and small defensive ends, whose chief future use would be to wreak havoc with the minds and bodies of quarterbacks. He also knew that he’d find the type that had arisen across the line of scrimmage in response. The guy who could stop the Lawrence Taylor type. The left tackle type.

When Tom Lemming looked at left tackles, he thought in terms of others he had selected for his All-American teams who went on to be stars in the NFL: Jonathan Ogden, Orlando Pace, Walter Jones, Willie Roaf. These people looked nothing like most human beings, or even the players Lemming interviewed in the late 1970s and 1980s. “Two hundred and fifty pounds used to be huge for a high school lineman,” he said. “Now you’ve got to be three hundred pounds or no one will look at you.” Even in this land of giants, the left tackle type stood out. Freak of nature: when he found one of these rare beasts, that’s the phrase that popped into Lemming’s mind to describe him. When Lemming put high school junior Jonathan Ogden on the cover of his Annual Prep Report, Ogden was six foot nine inches tall and weighed 320 pounds. (He’d fill out in college.) When he did the same with Orlando Pace, Pace stood six six and weighed 310 pounds. (And hadn’t stopped growing.) The ideal left tackle was big, but a lot of people were big. What set him apart were his more subtle specifications. He was wide in the ass and massive in the thighs: the girth of his lower body lessened the likelihood that Lawrence Taylor, or his successors, would run right over him. He had long arms: pass rushers tried to get in tight to the blocker’s body, then spin off of it, and long arms helped to keep them at bay. He had giant hands, so that when he grabbed ahold of you, it meant something.