C-Mac
11-09-2008, 04:59 AM
Chiefs’ Thigpen has started to quiet the doubters (http://www.kansascity.com/sports/chiefs/story/881748.html)
By KENT BABB
The Kansas City Star
The chartered jet hummed on a tarmac at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, and Tyler Thigpen could feel the eyes on him. He leaned back and tried to ignore the storm clouds that gathered in the north Georgia sky and the negative energy that surrounded him.
Thigpen’s first start had been a forgettable one, or at least he wanted to forget it, and it was enough to make the Chiefs want to move Thigpen into the disregarded pages of Kansas City history. He didn’t lead the offense to a first down until 9:11 was left in the first half, and a minute after that, Thigpen threw his second of three interceptions. The Chiefs sat inside their Boeing 737 that day, mostly silent after a 38-14 loss to the Falcons.
In the coming days, Chiefs coach Herm Edwards would do something he’d vowed days earlier to stop: make another quarterback change, the once-promising Thigpen out and the aging Damon Huard back in. Tight end Tony Gonzalez, baffled and discouraged by a game that made Thigpen — and the coaches who started him — look overmatched, would ask Chiefs president Carl Peterson for a trade. The team had lost 12 consecutive games and was desperate, but it could no longer be desperate enough to start Thigpen.
“A bummer,” Thigpen remembers thinking. “Sometimes you get one start, and that’s your only opportunity.”
The jet took off and pointed toward Kansas City. Thigpen had lost his coaches’ confidence, and teammates had all but written him off.
“After that game,” Gonzalez says, “I lost a little bit of faith in him.”
Thigpen looked out the window, the ground easing by below, thinking that after the 737 landed, his long and unusual ride to the NFL might be forever grounded.
• • •
A dozen elevator men gathered in a room Friday morning, same as they do the first Friday of every month.
The branch manager, Steve Larson, called the meeting to order and said he first had a pair of congratulations to issue. It had been an eventful month for this Otis Elevators outfit in Columbia, S.C. Larson first wanted to praise a mechanic who had gone above and beyond in modernizing an outdated elevator.
Then Larson turned to a 57-year-old man who has been a technician nearly three decades.
“Clint,” Larson said, his tone serious, “I just want to thank you for having a son who’s helped me win my fantasy football games the last two weeks.”
The workers laughed, and Clint Thigpen beamed. The other men knew Clint’s younger son played for the Chiefs. But until recently, Tyler Thigpen was a name on a roster, a long shot, the answer to a future trivia question at some sports bar in his hometown of Winnsboro, S.C. They knew he’d played at Coastal Carolina, a school where Thigpen holds all the school’s passing records because football wasn’t a sport there until Thigpen’s freshman season in 2003. Now, they know Tyler as a player with limitless potential.
Thigpen got another chance after the Atlanta game, and he’s stunned most everyone with what he’s done with it. Five weeks after Thigpen was an afterthought, his last two starts — three passing touchdowns, a combined 444 yards passing and, most important, no turnovers — have the Chiefs thinking they might have lucked into finding a quarterback they can lean on this year and, heck, maybe beyond.
Thigpen says he has no idea what happened after the Atlanta game. But here he is, sitting in a tiny room at Chiefs headquarters, trying to explain how a light in his mind seemed to come on after the team gave up on him, and then had no choice but to turn back to him
In Thigpen’s last two starts, the Chiefs have averaged more than 25 points, twice as many as their average the first six games.
But don’t ask Thigpen. He’s just the quarterback.
“A lot of people want to give me credit now for the way the offense is going,” he says. “But it’s really not me. I’m just going out there; all 11 guys are playing football and having fun doing it.”
They are now. Two weeks ago, Brodie Croyle and Damon Huard suffered season-ending injuries, and Thigpen, a second-year player, was the last man standing. The Chiefs changed the offense to suit Thigpen; now they’re running the spread, and Thigpen says he’s confident and comfortable. Maybe that’s why he’s been successful. Whatever it is, the Chiefs just want him to keep doing it.
Thigpen has been doubted before, and he’s proved himself time and again — even to those who can’t help but believe in him. One of the men in that Friday morning meeting says he’s the same as everyone else; he thought his son was finished after that Atlanta game.
“Well,” Clint Thigpen says, “who didn’t?”
• • •
A path like this, well, it makes Tyler Thigpen think a lot about fate. He keeps talking about how this opportunity is a blessing, and he’s hoping to make the best of it. Even he didn’t expect this.
“I didn’t even think I was going to play in college,” he says, “let alone this.”
Back in South Carolina, fate teased him. He wanted to play quarterback, but his high school coaches had other plans. They liked the single-wing offense. Thigpen was 240 pounds, and coaches stuck him at wingback.
It was there that he began an unusual journey that somehow brought him to the NFL. Coastal Carolina University was starting a football program when Thigpen was a senior at Fairfield Central High. The college’s coach, David Bennett, needed a rock. Another coach called to tell Bennett about Thigpen, who could punt and catch and kick field goals. He could throw, too, and who knew what else?
“You ought to see him hit a golf ball,” Bennett says. “He can probably hit it 330. We just looked at him and said, ‘What the heck?’ ”
Bennett gambled on Thigpen; Coastal Carolina was the only school to offer a chance to play quarterback. It worked: The Chanticleers won nearly 80 percent of their games in Thigpen’s first three seasons, but it was his senior year that caught pro scouts’ attention. Bennett wanted to try the spread and see how Thigpen ran it. Thigpen backed into the shotgun formation, and away he went. Coastal Carolina went 9-2 that season and won the Big South Conference title. Thigpen was a first-team All-American.
Bennett pulled Thigpen into his office one afternoon and told him some scouts had called. They wanted to see him. A few years after he couldn’t play quarterback for his high school team, Bennett told Thigpen he might someday play the position in the NFL.
“Everything happens for a reason,” he says now.
The men wearing NFL logos slogged through the Carolina marshland and stopped in a football stadium parking lot. There was a quarterback they wanted to meet, but time’s tight, kid; there are faces to see and forties to time, so this better be good.
One chance, and it’s not easy. Stand here on the 50-yard line. No running start. Stand here, rear back and toss that ball through the uprights. Extra points if you hit the crossbar.
Go ahead, one of the men said. One throw, and then they’re gone. The kid turned toward the goalposts, and the men snickered. Thigpen reached back, twisted his hips and let loose, the ball flying and spiraling and coming down finally until — clank — it bounced off the crossbar.
The men stopped laughing and looked at this quarterback nobody had heard of. He finally had their attention.
“OK,” one said. “Do it again.”
• • •
Thigpen is smiling now, walking through an empty corridor at the Chiefs practice facility. It’s under construction. He runs his finger along an unfinished slab of drywall, taking stock in what it might look like someday.
The Chiefs are a more complex project, and Thigpen could be a missing piece. But Kansas City is being careful, players and coaches not yet able to forget Atlanta.
There’s a reason Thigpen wasn’t drafted in 2007 until Minnesota picked him in the seventh round and a reason the Vikings cut him five months later. There’s a reason Thigpen’s name still carries doubt in Kansas City. He hasn’t been consistent, and that’s all that matters in the NFL.
“In practice,” Gonzalez says, “he just doesn’t look that good at certain times. In the games, I guess he just relaxes. He has to prove he can go out there and do it week in and week out. That’s the difference between good and great.”
But Gonzalez says he’s starting to believe in Thigpen. So are the Chiefs, although they still don’t know what he is or what he’ll be. He has potential, but is it enough to gamble with the team’s future and pass on a quarterback early in next year’s draft?
If nothing else, Thigpen has complicated things. For now, drafting a top quarterback still is the plan. There are eight games left for Thigpen to prove himself one way or the other; show he’s more Tampa Bay and New York than Atlanta.
Thigpen comes to the end of the corridor and slips inside an archives room. Old trinkets and media guides are piled in here. The names of a hundred quarterbacks are hidden in these pages, Len Dawson and Trent Green and Todd Blackledge. It’s too early to know where Thigpen’s name belongs, but as he has done throughout his football career, he has gotten the Chiefs’ attention in the same unusual way he made it to the NFL.
He opens a small refrigerator and grabs a bottle of water. Thigpen stands for a moment behind a closed door, more than a dozen reporters on the other side.
Before he goes in, he takes a gulp.
“When somebody asks me, ‘What’s the story of how you got here?’ That’s when I kind of think about it,” he says. “And to tell you the truth, I don’t even know where to start.”
By KENT BABB
The Kansas City Star
The chartered jet hummed on a tarmac at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, and Tyler Thigpen could feel the eyes on him. He leaned back and tried to ignore the storm clouds that gathered in the north Georgia sky and the negative energy that surrounded him.
Thigpen’s first start had been a forgettable one, or at least he wanted to forget it, and it was enough to make the Chiefs want to move Thigpen into the disregarded pages of Kansas City history. He didn’t lead the offense to a first down until 9:11 was left in the first half, and a minute after that, Thigpen threw his second of three interceptions. The Chiefs sat inside their Boeing 737 that day, mostly silent after a 38-14 loss to the Falcons.
In the coming days, Chiefs coach Herm Edwards would do something he’d vowed days earlier to stop: make another quarterback change, the once-promising Thigpen out and the aging Damon Huard back in. Tight end Tony Gonzalez, baffled and discouraged by a game that made Thigpen — and the coaches who started him — look overmatched, would ask Chiefs president Carl Peterson for a trade. The team had lost 12 consecutive games and was desperate, but it could no longer be desperate enough to start Thigpen.
“A bummer,” Thigpen remembers thinking. “Sometimes you get one start, and that’s your only opportunity.”
The jet took off and pointed toward Kansas City. Thigpen had lost his coaches’ confidence, and teammates had all but written him off.
“After that game,” Gonzalez says, “I lost a little bit of faith in him.”
Thigpen looked out the window, the ground easing by below, thinking that after the 737 landed, his long and unusual ride to the NFL might be forever grounded.
• • •
A dozen elevator men gathered in a room Friday morning, same as they do the first Friday of every month.
The branch manager, Steve Larson, called the meeting to order and said he first had a pair of congratulations to issue. It had been an eventful month for this Otis Elevators outfit in Columbia, S.C. Larson first wanted to praise a mechanic who had gone above and beyond in modernizing an outdated elevator.
Then Larson turned to a 57-year-old man who has been a technician nearly three decades.
“Clint,” Larson said, his tone serious, “I just want to thank you for having a son who’s helped me win my fantasy football games the last two weeks.”
The workers laughed, and Clint Thigpen beamed. The other men knew Clint’s younger son played for the Chiefs. But until recently, Tyler Thigpen was a name on a roster, a long shot, the answer to a future trivia question at some sports bar in his hometown of Winnsboro, S.C. They knew he’d played at Coastal Carolina, a school where Thigpen holds all the school’s passing records because football wasn’t a sport there until Thigpen’s freshman season in 2003. Now, they know Tyler as a player with limitless potential.
Thigpen got another chance after the Atlanta game, and he’s stunned most everyone with what he’s done with it. Five weeks after Thigpen was an afterthought, his last two starts — three passing touchdowns, a combined 444 yards passing and, most important, no turnovers — have the Chiefs thinking they might have lucked into finding a quarterback they can lean on this year and, heck, maybe beyond.
Thigpen says he has no idea what happened after the Atlanta game. But here he is, sitting in a tiny room at Chiefs headquarters, trying to explain how a light in his mind seemed to come on after the team gave up on him, and then had no choice but to turn back to him
In Thigpen’s last two starts, the Chiefs have averaged more than 25 points, twice as many as their average the first six games.
But don’t ask Thigpen. He’s just the quarterback.
“A lot of people want to give me credit now for the way the offense is going,” he says. “But it’s really not me. I’m just going out there; all 11 guys are playing football and having fun doing it.”
They are now. Two weeks ago, Brodie Croyle and Damon Huard suffered season-ending injuries, and Thigpen, a second-year player, was the last man standing. The Chiefs changed the offense to suit Thigpen; now they’re running the spread, and Thigpen says he’s confident and comfortable. Maybe that’s why he’s been successful. Whatever it is, the Chiefs just want him to keep doing it.
Thigpen has been doubted before, and he’s proved himself time and again — even to those who can’t help but believe in him. One of the men in that Friday morning meeting says he’s the same as everyone else; he thought his son was finished after that Atlanta game.
“Well,” Clint Thigpen says, “who didn’t?”
• • •
A path like this, well, it makes Tyler Thigpen think a lot about fate. He keeps talking about how this opportunity is a blessing, and he’s hoping to make the best of it. Even he didn’t expect this.
“I didn’t even think I was going to play in college,” he says, “let alone this.”
Back in South Carolina, fate teased him. He wanted to play quarterback, but his high school coaches had other plans. They liked the single-wing offense. Thigpen was 240 pounds, and coaches stuck him at wingback.
It was there that he began an unusual journey that somehow brought him to the NFL. Coastal Carolina University was starting a football program when Thigpen was a senior at Fairfield Central High. The college’s coach, David Bennett, needed a rock. Another coach called to tell Bennett about Thigpen, who could punt and catch and kick field goals. He could throw, too, and who knew what else?
“You ought to see him hit a golf ball,” Bennett says. “He can probably hit it 330. We just looked at him and said, ‘What the heck?’ ”
Bennett gambled on Thigpen; Coastal Carolina was the only school to offer a chance to play quarterback. It worked: The Chanticleers won nearly 80 percent of their games in Thigpen’s first three seasons, but it was his senior year that caught pro scouts’ attention. Bennett wanted to try the spread and see how Thigpen ran it. Thigpen backed into the shotgun formation, and away he went. Coastal Carolina went 9-2 that season and won the Big South Conference title. Thigpen was a first-team All-American.
Bennett pulled Thigpen into his office one afternoon and told him some scouts had called. They wanted to see him. A few years after he couldn’t play quarterback for his high school team, Bennett told Thigpen he might someday play the position in the NFL.
“Everything happens for a reason,” he says now.
The men wearing NFL logos slogged through the Carolina marshland and stopped in a football stadium parking lot. There was a quarterback they wanted to meet, but time’s tight, kid; there are faces to see and forties to time, so this better be good.
One chance, and it’s not easy. Stand here on the 50-yard line. No running start. Stand here, rear back and toss that ball through the uprights. Extra points if you hit the crossbar.
Go ahead, one of the men said. One throw, and then they’re gone. The kid turned toward the goalposts, and the men snickered. Thigpen reached back, twisted his hips and let loose, the ball flying and spiraling and coming down finally until — clank — it bounced off the crossbar.
The men stopped laughing and looked at this quarterback nobody had heard of. He finally had their attention.
“OK,” one said. “Do it again.”
• • •
Thigpen is smiling now, walking through an empty corridor at the Chiefs practice facility. It’s under construction. He runs his finger along an unfinished slab of drywall, taking stock in what it might look like someday.
The Chiefs are a more complex project, and Thigpen could be a missing piece. But Kansas City is being careful, players and coaches not yet able to forget Atlanta.
There’s a reason Thigpen wasn’t drafted in 2007 until Minnesota picked him in the seventh round and a reason the Vikings cut him five months later. There’s a reason Thigpen’s name still carries doubt in Kansas City. He hasn’t been consistent, and that’s all that matters in the NFL.
“In practice,” Gonzalez says, “he just doesn’t look that good at certain times. In the games, I guess he just relaxes. He has to prove he can go out there and do it week in and week out. That’s the difference between good and great.”
But Gonzalez says he’s starting to believe in Thigpen. So are the Chiefs, although they still don’t know what he is or what he’ll be. He has potential, but is it enough to gamble with the team’s future and pass on a quarterback early in next year’s draft?
If nothing else, Thigpen has complicated things. For now, drafting a top quarterback still is the plan. There are eight games left for Thigpen to prove himself one way or the other; show he’s more Tampa Bay and New York than Atlanta.
Thigpen comes to the end of the corridor and slips inside an archives room. Old trinkets and media guides are piled in here. The names of a hundred quarterbacks are hidden in these pages, Len Dawson and Trent Green and Todd Blackledge. It’s too early to know where Thigpen’s name belongs, but as he has done throughout his football career, he has gotten the Chiefs’ attention in the same unusual way he made it to the NFL.
He opens a small refrigerator and grabs a bottle of water. Thigpen stands for a moment behind a closed door, more than a dozen reporters on the other side.
Before he goes in, he takes a gulp.
“When somebody asks me, ‘What’s the story of how you got here?’ That’s when I kind of think about it,” he says. “And to tell you the truth, I don’t even know where to start.”