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“Why is everyone whispering?” I asked David, a Boise sportscaster, in my own hushed tone. He and I were leaning against a railing inside the Caven-Williams Sports Complex, Boise State’s new regal indoor practice facility. We were encompassed by the interior of a barn-like edifice that seemed better suited for housing 747-jets. Thirty five feet in front of us was a white stripe that someone had carefully painted on synthetic grass to indicate the 40-yard-line on the school’s only green football field. Forty-five yards to the left of that line sat Ryan Clady, Boise State’s 6’6”, 315-pound All-Everything left tackle, two months removed from declaring for the NFL draft and two months away from becoming a multi-millionaire. He was stretching out. Sixty five yards to the right of the stripe gathered more than 50 NFL talent evaluating experts, a collection that included coaches, front office executives and scouts. They were all there acting as sleuths for their respective clubs, tasked with gathering clues about the mystery that had brought them to Idaho.

“I don’t know,” David said in response to my half-rhetorical question. He himself had been whispering until my question had pointed out the absurdity of the situation: More than 100 total people gathering in a 78,000-square foot facility to gauge how prepared a few college-aged athletes were to play a violent, noisy game in front of 70,000 screaming fans on Sundays. Whispering in that environment was like bringing a book to the movies.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” he continued, deliberately increasing the volume of his voice. “It’s like we’re in church.”

“Maybe we whisper because nobody here really wants to share their clues,” I thought. At that moment, the mystery stood up. He was all stretched out.

 

I couldn’t decide whether it was sad or pathetic. I was standing amongst the talent evaluators, quietly watching Clady go through blocking drills. When he pile-drove a fellow BSU lineman 15 yards and had come within fifteen feet (felt like two) of hitting me at full force, I realized that it was the most danger I had ever faced. I anxiously looked around to see if anyone had noticed my fleeting fright. Scanning the crowd, my eye caught hold of scout Frank Arnold. He was leaning up against the wall, a good 20 yards behind the group. Like everyone else, he followed the action intently, but wrote down very little. With 28 years of experience in pro football – including five years as an offensive coordinator and eight as a high-ranking front office executive. What he was witnessing was nothing new. And if it was, his obligatory scout face (which is really just an advanced poker face) refused to admit it.

The night before, Frank and I had gone out to dinner. The evening was, as usual, quite interesting. Like any good scout, Frank is direct and pointed in his words, which are regularly sprinkled with heavy salt. He chooses them carefully because his time in the business has taught him to be guarded.

“I know how that off-the-record s— works,” he replied when I genially reminded him that whatever he said over dinner with a friend would not be made public.

Frank is one of the sharpest minds in pro football. While in the front office, he helped bring in a few future Hall of Famers and Super Bowl champions. Of course, he also helped bring in a few letdowns and character nightmares.

Frank wasn’t the only highly-credentialed talent evaluator watching Clady that day. Standing to my left was Panthers head coach John Fox. With him was virtually Carolina’s entire offensive coaching staff, as well as GM Marty Hurney. I first saw Fox earlier that morning as he was leaving the BSU football offices with Clady. When I had visited with him, he told me that they would be moving left tackle Travelle Wharton to guard in ’08, which I reasoned meant Carolina was in the market for a new bookend to Jordan Gross, their very solid veteran starter who had been a first-round pick in ’03.

Standing across the practice ring from Fox was Bengals assistant head coach/offensive line coach Paul Alexander. He was conducting most of the drills. I assumed that he had visited with Boise State head coach – and famous owner of some of the biggest cajoles among play-callers in all of football – Chris Peterson. Seemingly everyone at the workout spoke with Coach Pete.

I later learned that Bears head coach Lovie Smith was scheduled to fly in to attend a private workout for Clady. Smith’s team desperately needed an offensive tackle to block for lethargic former fourth-overall pick Cedric Benson. I had heard that Lane Kiffin was also supposed to stop by at some point. Holding the fourth pick in the draft, it was conceivable that the Raiders would select Clady to make up for disappointing former No. 2 overall pick Robert Gallery (now a decent left guard).

Playing left tackle for any NFL team would require great footwork and uncanny agility in pass protection. Upper-body strength and athletic explosiveness would also be prerequisites. Clady, though a little chicken-legged, appeared to have all these traits. He seemed to detonate like a bomb when firing off the line of scrimmage. The violence in his initial pop actually made me fear for the safety of the man holding the blocking pads. His natural strength was striking, and the ease with which he did everything seemed like it should be illegal.

“Everyone, to a man, said he blew them away. He was extremely athletic, extremely quick,” Clady’s agent Pat Dye Jr. told the Idaho Statesman afterward.

Witnessing Clady’s brilliance firsthand, a large part of me still felt that he was proving very little. His explosiveness was displayed in shorts and a t-shirt, not full padding. His initial pop was augmented by the fact that he did not have to read an opposing defense. And, of course, he knew that the blocking pads he popped would not pop him back. Essentially, Clady was proving that he’s dominant when going up against tackling dummies and thin air.

I wondered how important this workout was in the minds of the men who had flown in just to see it. The paradox in this very question was strong enough to imply the answer.

“(NFL teams) want to see, they want to be convinced he has the right temperament and disposition to play offensive line,” Dye had added. “If you’re going to draft a guy as high as (Clady’s) going to be drafted, they want to know he’s got that in him.”

 

“Why do roughly fifty percent of early-round draft picks fail?” I had asked, four days before Boise State’s Pro Day.

Sitting across from me in one of the 8,500 Starbucks in town was Green Bay Packers left guard, and former Boise State standout, Daryn Colledge. An hour before that, the 6’4”, 305-pound inked-out goliath had pulled up on a 2006 93-SS Indian, which, in layman’s terms, means bad ass motorcycle. He had worn a German motorbike helmet, menacing sun-glasses that looked more like tinted goggles, and the type of leather boots that hush a noisy faction when the chimes of their dangling buckles prelude the bass of their booming soles upon first contacting the hardwood floor of a bar.

“Because other guys are trying to feed their families,” Colledge quipped. “You got other dudes that are making it in the NFL every single day before those rookies got there, and they don’t want to give up their jobs.”

Colledge started for four years as Boise State’s left tackle. He was a large reason why Clady had spent his freshman season playing on the right side.

After pondering my question some more, he added: “I think a lot of them, the pressure gets to them…Your first-and second-rounders are the only guys who are ever handed a position and told, ‘Hey, be productive.’”

Asked how Clady would do in such circumstances, Colledge opined that his former understudy had the talent and potential to thrive at the pro level – the key would be whether he could emerge out of his taciturn shell and effectively communicate with coaches and teammates.

 

I was well aware of Clady’s reticent nature. One time, during his sophomore season, I sat a few tables over from him at the food court in the mall. What I remembered was that a.) his bicep was bigger than my torso, and b.) his friends did virtually all the talking. A buddy of mine had told me that he had bumped into Clady before and had also noticed how awkwardly quiet the kid was. Just that morning, in fact, while driving over to Boise State, I had listened to the school’s assistant athletic director, Brad Larando, answer a radio host’s questions about Clady’s shy demeanor and staunch avoidance of talking to the media. The latter issue, of course, was merely part of the unwritten code of offensive linemen (something that Colledge, by the way, a loquacious aspiring sportscaster, never adhered to). Still, I wondered if Clady’s preternatural humility wasn’t, in actuality, debilitating diffidence.

At the pro day I stood next to a Redskins scout and watched Clady amble through the motions of being a fill-in defensive lineman during another player’s blocking drill. “Okay, we want live, game-action speed here, Ryan,” Paul Alexander pronounced to the big mystery. “We’re watching you as much as we’re watching him.” Clady remained reserved and gave no indication that he had heard the coach. Then, on the next snap, he erupted with reckless abandon.

I thought about something John Becker had told me: flaws like poor hand placement and blocking technique (which virtually every scouting report identified as Clady’s primary weaknesses) were things that could easily be corrected, as long as a player was coachable.

“That’s good, Ryan,” Alexander said.

 

Over dinner, Frank, by means of laying down pink and white sugar packets on the table, had explained to me the significant differences between his team’s pass protection scheme and those of other clubs. It was part of the template he used when scouting players like Clady. A few days before, Colledge had talked about how his rigors of learning a new position in the NFL had been ameliorated by the fact that Green Bay’s blocking scheme was very similar to Boise State’s.

As the workout wound down, I gazed at the crowd watching Clady and saw representatives from some thirty two different teams, all of which ran essentially thirty two different systems under thirty two different methods of operation. Each team presented a different cast of personalities, all of which had their own unique manner of interacting with players like Clady. I started to understand what Colledge had meant when he credited his early career success (28 starts in 32 games) to having “great coaches around me…great teammates…(and) a great locker room.

“The NFL,” he said, “is a lot about opportunity. You have to be so lucky in this league.”

The talent evaluators continued to watch, privately speculating whether the dreadlocked monster was likely to become the next Jammal Brown or the next Mike Williams. Or maybe they were speculating about how different Clady would be once he moved to a new city, worked with an entirely new group of people in an entirely new system against an entirely new league after opening up an entirely new bank account.

 

On April 26, nearly two months after my visit to Boise State’s Pro Day, I sat in front of my TV and encountered what was apparently a gripping event. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell walked to the podium at Radio City Music Hall, glanced at the raucous, though temporarily tame, audience and spoke into a microphone: With the 12^th pick in the 2008 NFL Draft, the Denver Broncos  select Ryan Clady, offensive tackle, Boise State.

The fans hooted and hollered. Chris Berman teed up Mel Kiper, who orated to the multi-million strong ESPN television audience on Clady’s raw skills and vast potential. The network rolled clips of the lineman’s dominance in the Western Athletic Conference as hundreds of message boards lit up across the World Wide Web. Newspapers in Idaho and Colorado began preparing stories about the newest first-round draft choice, while pundits and experts submitted their analysis of what impact Clady would have in Denver’s zone-blocking system.

Long gone were the whispers, for the far-reaching football community had its concrete answer. Everything that could have possibly been written or said about the talented offensive tackle had been done in exhausting fashion over the past few months. The hype had crescendoed in just a few seconds, and now everyone was riding out the wave of jubilation.

I watched the hoopla with the enthusiasm of a Russian nihilist. Quietly, I wondered if anyone else recognized that we were all still a few years away from having the Ryan Clady mystery solved.