For Steve Van Meter, it seemed obvious that the second year student had every quality that a university coach would like in a quarter.
On the school level, Cam Ward was near the top of his class. Athletically, he was the top scorer of his high school in basketball and a naturally precise passer in football. When Van Meter, a retired coach specializing in quarter training in the Houston region, asked him to modify his mechanics to launch, Ward could process the information and make the next representative.
And then there was his explosive right arm. The first time he watched Ward throw, the battle turned so quickly that she whistled.
“I was chief coach-chief of Texas High School for 28 years and I trained 38 years in high school and I had quarters of division I,” said Van Meter. “The ball did not come out of the hands like that on anyone that I never trained.”
However, when Van Meter evangelized on Ward’s skills on the network of university coaches he had cultivated over the decades, everything he heard was a decline. Ward played in a small town and in an offense far from the standard and which offered few possibilities to pass. It was enough to scare recruiters. He entered the summer of 2019, a few weeks before his last high school season, without a single university scholarship offer.
“It happened to the point where I was questioning myself,” said Van Meter. “I said to myself,” Do I even know something about it? ” Why don’t these people see that? I know no one throws him like this kid.
Almost six years later, Ward, now 22 years old, should cross the scene Thursday at the NFL draft as a n ° 1 selection – and, in doing so, may have become the first most improbable choice in the modern history of the league. It is not only that Ward began his university career at a lower echelon – it is that he barely had the chance to play university football. This is why many close to Ward believe that the biggest question about it has never been of its talent, but if a college program would take the risk of recognizing it.
“I had many coaches who told me how much they liked it, and they simply could not try on the occasion,” Eric Morris told Ward his first and the only university scholarship when he was head coach of the University of The Incarnate Word, a private Catholic school in Texas. “I say to myself:” Yeah, yeah, yeah – whatever. Of course you do now that he had all this success. “”
From Baker Mayfield, who refused the Division I scholarship proposed to walk in Texas Tech before finding the renown at Oklahoma, to the offensive line player Eric Fisher, who was not announced when he signed with the center of Division I of the Central Michigan, the neglected recruits were selected n ° 1 in the NFL draft. The Josh Allen (Wyoming) and Aaron Rodgers (California) quarters have also gone from high school students to slightly recruited to win the NFL MVP honors.
However, these are exceptions in a project in which it has been shown that recruitment rankings are correlated with future selections of the NFL project. Five -star recruits have a much higher chance to become first round choices.
When Ward introduced himself to the embodied Word campus in San Antonio for a football camp in the summer of 2019, he was not an unknown goods among the coaches of Texas College. The previous year, Ward and his father had attended as many university camps as possible to obtain the exhibition that he lacked as a starter at the Lycée de la Colombie-Western, a small town one hour south of Houston. There, Ward’s team organized a “Wing T” offense which mainly ran the ball, a style that was an anachronism in a state in which the propagation offensive was king, with quarter-backs sometimes throwing 50 times per game to four or five receivers.
Brent Mascheck, coach of Ward Secondary School, said that he was thinking that it was a “cop” for recruiters to quote the T wing as a drawback in the assessment of Ward’s talent, rather than trusting their own projections.
From Austin to Dallas, Ward crossed the state hoping that the display of the arm which was rarely unleashed on its high school tapes could make a scholarship. However, at a time when it was never so simple as a recruit was noticed – thanks to the own publications on the social networks of athletes and the booming media coverage concerning the recruitment of secondary football – Ward has owned a scholarship only weeks before its senior season. On a five -star recruitment scale, Ward was zero.
Texas A&M, like a handful of other schools, was about to offer but finally never, said Van Meter. In Mascheck and Van Meter, several college coaches have expressed a feeling that goes far beyond the Ward case – that it was too politically difficult to guarantee A recruit not announced on one or five stars, even if a coach was convinced that the lower player was better suited.
“If you try to bring this child to this head coach, you would better know what you are doing because if you don’t do it, if this child does not go, then guess what? You are looking for a job,” said Van Meter.
With less than 6,000 undergraduate students in 2019, and playing in the highest second division of the NCAA, embodied Word was a grain in the hierarchy of university football and was not in competition for five stars.
“It was a little easier to take a chance on a child,” said Morris, now a head coach in northern Texas. The success depended on the search for good players hidden in sight. Ward’s performance at the school camp was “phenomenal, as good as a camp training I have ever seen,” said Morris, who had trained the future quarters of NFL Mayfield, Patrick Mahomes and Case Keenum at university.
However, even then, the school coaches were “guess of ourselves,” said Mack Leftwich, then offensive coordinator under Morris, to understand why they were apparently alone by recognizing Ward’s potential.
Morris said: “We all scratch our heads,” What are we missing here? “As a college coach, I think you are starting to look for all the negatives.
Said Leftwich: “In this situation, you must simply be able to trust your assessment and trust your instinct on a child.”
That summer, the staff was still intrigued by Ward’s potential when Morris, at a staff meeting, called Van Meter and put him on the speaker to ask for his impressions. That no one else had offered to the prudent school to be the first.
“I said:” Well, coach, don’t offend you, but if Cam was in my attack, or in a propagation attack that let him launch the ball 25, 35, 40 times per game, you would not have luck “,” said Van Meter. “And everyone in their staff started laughing. But (Morris) said:” Coach is exactly what we talked about – we think we had a flight. “I said,” Coach, I promise you, you have a flight. ” »»
Ward’s launch mechanics needed to polish and there was the question of how much a quarter-rear that had only tried 267 passes in three seasons in high school could be when he launched 40 or more at university attempts. Mascheck said that a college coach criticized Ward’s frame, who at the time was about 6 feet 1 inch and approximately 240 pounds, about 20 pounds more than he weighed in the combination of the February NFL.
What sold an embodied word was to partly look at the Ward basketball band. Ward had been raised around the game – his mother trained in high school – and he played with his eyes in traffic, anticipating open teammates and driving, a job that is not different from playing quarter. The staff loved he hated losing, inspired by Kobe Bryant. It also did not hurt that the embodied word did not ask Ward to be his Savior.
The school already had an American starter in a quarter-back whose presence would allow Ward at least two seasons, in Leftwich’s belief, to learn a propagation offensive as a safeguard with little pressure. When Covid canceled the fall 2020 season of Incarnate Word, Ward had even more time to learn the nuances of the propagation offensive during training.
This additional development time has proven to be critical. Ward entered Morris’ office on his first day on campus in the first year and said that he would win the departure position not in two seasons, but this fall. It happened, three months later, after doing “about one or two games a day when you say to yourself:” Oh my god, this kid has a chance to be special, “said Leftwich.
“His confidence in what he does on a daily basis, and not becoming nervous or frightened, no matter who is in front of him, is one of the strongest qualities,” said Morris.
In a practice, Ward sort of bent a passage around a blitzer coming in the opposite direction in the hands of his receiver. Leftwich, now the Texas Tech attacking coordinator, said that a few hours later, the embodied word coaches had gathered to review the game at least 15 times.
Ward was an anomaly. However, its ascent was helped by registering in college at a time when the NCAA rules changes no longer required transfers to oppose one season, giving players who started in smaller colleges more ascending. With the open transfer portal, Ward was transferred to the state of Washington in 2022 (after Morris left to be the offensive coordinator of cougars) then in 2024 in Miami, where he increased his draft stock by reproducing his large production against more difficult competition. Along the way, Ward praised its freshness under pressure and an external confidence that puts its teammates at ease – features that were also exposed to high school, if someone was looking for.
During his stay in Incarnate Word, Ward and her attacking coordinator, Leftwich, spoke of the possibility of playing him one day in the NFL. In fact, before Ward even played a match for Incarnate Word, Leftwich passed Thanksgiving in 2020 with his family when he said to his father and brother, another university coach, this embodied little word had a future quarter of the NFL on his list.
This week, Ward will perform this prediction. And it may never have happened without the desire to offer Ward what no other team would do.
“Holy Cow, we have just caused a global choice n ° 1 potential at the University of Incarnate,” said Leftwich. “It’s quite incredible, honestly.”
