Bakhtiari goes from ‘knucklehead’ to star
Highest-paid offensive lineman transformed
GREEN BAY – Thirteen years ago, a high school senior sat upright inside his football coach's office, delivering the sales pitch of his life.
Outside, the sun hung just over the San Mateo, California, horizon as Junipero Serra High's football team conducted 6 a.m. workouts. Dawn Patrol, they called these summer mornings preparing for fall Friday nights. Only the dedicated attended.
One by one, coach Patrick Walsh plucked a kid out of the weight room into his office. He asked each about their football hopes and dreams, how those aspirations might merge into a role on his team.
David Bakhtiari, eyes wide and earnest, thought he had reasonable goals.
“I knew where I was,” Bakhtiari says. “I wasn't a good football player at all. So I was saying my truth.”
As he grips the steering wheel on his drive home from Lambeau Field, that truth feels like another lifetime ago.
Bakhtiari has become the rarest of
NFL players, a superstar offensive lineman. He may be the best pass blocker alive. The Green Bay Packers left tackle is a three-time Pro Bowler and fourtime All-Pro, once a first-team selection. His future Hall of Fame quarterback is convinced Bakhtiari will join him in Canton.
At age 29, Bakhtiari has transformed from fourth-round pick to showcase player for one of the NFL's legendary franchises. Fans buy his jerseys. His is the only offensive lineman's number hanging on the wall inside Lambeau Field's pro shop. Bakhtiari wears 69 on his back, and he's damn proud of it. “I may not have the best looking number,” his Twitter bio reads, “… but by God it is the Sexiest!!” Hat backward, the burly tackle epitomizes the Wisconsin spirit, chugging beers on the overhead scoreboard during Milwaukee Bucks playoff games.
Bakhtiari always had the megawatt personality to shine at a position bereft of stars. “He was a popular guy on campus,” says Denver Johnson, Bakhtiari's first offensive line coach at Colorado. “He was real handsome. Kind of had that dark complexion, dark hair.” Bakhtiari still combs that hair each day at his locker, locks that could make Fabio jealous.
Now he's the highest-paid offensive lineman in NFL history, freshly signing a four-year, $105.5 million extension with the Packers last month. It's validation for a face-of-the-franchise star who was overlooked most of his life. Those Pro Bowls? They came only after Bakhtiari was elected an All-Pro. The draft? Bakhtiari, not unlike the quarterback he protects, got the call only after a stunning slide.
To find the first slight, the first person who told Bakhtiari he'd never be where he is today, you have to go back
further.
As he sat in his coach's office, convinced his hopes and dreams were sensible, Bakhtiari first mentioned contributing on special teams. He wanted to earn his way on the scout team. Then, nervously, he aimed higher.
Eventually, Bakhtiari had the audacity to envision himself a starter on Serra High's offensive line.
“As soon as I said that, about being a starter,” Bakhtiari says, “he cut me off and said, ‘Look, I'm going to stop you right there.' And then I remember him saying to my face, ‘As long as I'm the head football coach at Serra High School, you will never set foot on my football field.'”
The ‘knucklehead’
Walsh remembers the conversation a little differently.
Yes, Bakhtiari was a dedicated high schooler, dragging his butt out of bed for early-morning workouts, but he wasn't singularly driven. There was another level to dig, an obsession required to meet the gravity of high school football in northern California.
The cornerstone of Walsh's program was one word: overachiever. Bakhtiari was an underachiever. And it ticked Walsh off.
“I was really, really hard on him,” the coach says. “Really hard on him.”
Bakhtiari had the pedigree to be great. One older brother, Eric, was already in the NFL. Another, Andrew, was a year older and the star of Serra's football team. Walsh was determined to forge the “greatness” he saw in the youngest Bakhtiari. “They wouldn't call David by his first name until he earned it,” Eric says. “They called him Eric or Andrew.” Andrew winced each time he heard his name associated with his little brother, preferring to distance himself from David's antics.
“Until essentially his senior year,” Andrew says, “he was just kind of that ... knucklehead that you would always hear about in high school.”
It wasn't that David Bakhtiari was untalented. Walsh saw a potential star, he says. Bakhtiari was not only the largest of his brothers, but also the most athletic. A standout lacrosse player, he was blessed with the quickest feet for a big guy Walsh ever saw. “He was able to mirror anyone on the lacrosse field,” Andrew says. David Bakhtiari won the lacrosse team's “lockdown defender” award as a sophomore.
Walsh saw those quick feet under a big body and thought they would be perfect for offensive tackle. There was just one problem. “He was kind of soft,” Eric says. “Which is weird, because he was used to getting his ass beat by us all the time.”
David Bakhtiari liked football. He devoted more time to playing guitar, video games and shenanigans.
One day during Dawn Patrol, as David Bakhtiari goofed off through another workout, Walsh finally snapped.
“I told him as he was fooling around in the weight room,” Walsh says, “'You'll never play a down for me if you keep up this attitude.' And I remember he looked at me in a pretty scary way, if you can think of David's eyes.”
Walsh quickly called Bakhtiari's mother, Debbie, after the workout. He told her two things. One, her son would probably threaten quitting the football team when he got home. And he might also want to beat up his coach. Then he gave Debbie a guarantee. “I am 100% confident,” he told her, “you will not be paying for college.”
It was a big statement that bordered on outlandish. By Bakhtiari's senior season, he had never started a game. He also played in an offensive system that hid his talent from college recruiters. Under Walsh, Serra High ran the triple option. Bakhtiari pass blocked maybe a half dozen times each week.
“It's funny,” he says, “that's what I'm known for now.”
Bakhtiari changed his coach's mind first in the weight room. During bench week, as he pumped the barbell off his chest, Walsh watched with his quarterback. “We were doing max bench,” Bakhtiari remembers, “and I was like the second strongest.” Cody Jackson, the quarterback who would turn Walsh's triple option into a scholarship at Army, relayed his coach's praise afterward.
“He told me he had a smirk,” Bakhtiari says, “and I was like flush red and all giddy, like, ‘Really? Coach Walsh asked about me?' That was, like, the first moment.”
There would be more. Bakhtiari earned a starting spot. In his first game, he “dominated” California state powerhouse De La Salle High. “He was just getting off the ball, bending,” Walsh says, “and legitimately pancaking De La Salle linebackers, which are quick and nimble and strong.” The overachiever obsession that has defined Bakhtiari's rise began to take root. Later that season, as his family ate dinner at a pizzeria, David pulled Eric outside. He was lining up that Friday night against a high school star named Kevin Greene, who had a full-ride scholarship to USC and seven sacks the previous week. David Bakhtiari had no ride. Eric, a linebacker on the San Francisco 49ers practice squad at the time, pass rushed one-on-one in the parking lot, simulating moves his younger brother might see from Greene.
“He wanted to show me how he was blocking,” Eric says, “and teach him how I would stop him here. So I was literally in a parking lot during the week rushing my high school brother so he could stop this dude.”
Greene had no sacks that week. From a three-year backup, David Bakhtiari was becoming a high school star. Almost nobody noticed. College recruiters weren't filling the Bakhtiaris' mailbox. Walsh brought Bakhtiari to California's spring game after his senior season. He didn't hear from the Golden Bears until a few years later, once Bakhtiari established himself at Colorado. They wondered why a high school coach in their area never brought him to their campus.
It wouldn't be the last time a team whiffed.
The lobster in the pot
The Bakhtiaris gathered in Palm Springs, California, for the 2013 NFL draft, ready to party. David Bakhtiari was sure he'd hear his name called before the third day, if not in the first round. He'd left Colorado a year early, fleeing from a 1-11 season as the Buffaloes were in the midst of hiring a fourth head coach since he arrived.
“I'd been through three different hell weeks,” Bakhtiari says, “with coaches knowing they can't fire kids, so they try to make them quit, essentially. The thing that came into my mind was, ‘Well, if I'm going to prove myself to a new coach, I might as well get paid doing it.'”
When the NFL's college advisory committee informed Bakhtiari he'd likely be a second-round pick, that made his decision to leave school easy.
Bakhtiari was not a perfect prospect. He'd always been undersized for a future NFL tackle. “He had those little toothpick arms when he first got into Green Bay,” longtime Packers guard and teammate T.J. Lang says. Bakhtiari was 244 pounds at his freshman weigh-in at Colorado. A.J. Dillon, the Packers' rookie running back, weighs more. Even now, it's a chore for Bakhtiari to maintain his 310-pound frame. His diet can include two Chipotle burritos, an entire extralarge pizza, a protein shake every night before bed. “I'm talking uncomfortable eating,” Bakhtiari says. When he retires, Bakhtiari anticipates quickly shedding 50 pounds.
What stood out about Bakhtiari were the intangibles. Brian Gutekunst remembers visiting Colorado midway through the 2012 season, when the Packers general manager was the team's director of college scouting. The Buffaloes were mired in a long losing streak — they would end Bakhtiari's junior season with eight straight losses, most of them blowouts — but Gutekunst was in search of hidden gems. When he asked around, everyone pointed to the undersized left tackle.
“Then you watched him,” Gutekunst said. “… The way he prepared and practiced, the way he worked, you knew there was something a little bit different about him.”
In high school, David Bakhtiari backed up his brother. Andrew was always a year older, a step ahead, but he noticed David surpassing him as a redshirt sophomore.
They trained together in the summer before that season, and Andrew realized he was no longer stronger. “All the sudden,” Andrew says, “he was taking what I would do for my max, and he was repping it out.” If it felt strange in the weight room, nothing compared to one-on-one pass-rush drills. Andrew, a defensive end at the University of San Diego, always whipped his brother one-on-one growing up.
That changed overnight, too. “We're talking a lot of smack to each other,” Andrew says, “and low key in the back of my mind, every single time I got off, he beat me to the point every single time. When I started trying to spin back inside or fake a move outside and come back inside, he was always right there with his hands to strike me. If he wanted to, he would destroy me.
“And I was like, ‘Oh, my god. I can't get past my younger brother. What is going on?'”
Andrew soon saw his brother beating edge rushers in the Pac-12. But the NFL draft is about tangibles, not intangibles. Bakhtiari could play, but his 34-inch arms made scouts wary of his future. Was he a guard? A center? Bakhtiari remembers one workout with Baltimore where all he did was alternate between both.
He clung to that second-round projection from the NFL draft's advisory committee. Bakhtiari was gone, convinced the NFL was where he belonged. He had the blessing of not only his parents, but also his last Colorado head coach, Jon Embree.
“Your arm length isn't going to change,” says Embree, now the San Francisco 49ers assistant head coach. “That's who you are. So it wouldn't have mattered.”
The picks passed with the rounds that spring night in 2013, and Bakhtiari waited for his call. That evening was the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, a collection of concerts that draw the biggest artists across all music genres. It was the perfect setting for the Bakhtiaris to celebrate a bright future. They were ready to leave for the festival as soon as the call came.
Bakhtiari never made it. His phone stayed silent. When the first three rounds ended, he sat in a hot tub, stewing.
“We were like lobsters boiling in a pot,” Walsh says. “It was just really uncomfortable, because it was the ultimate night of celebration that wasn't. And he was, oh my god, I've never seen him so mad in my life. But I looked him in the eye, and I said, ‘This is the best thing that ever happened to you, dude. Doesn't feel like it, but it's the best thing that ever happened to you.'
“He didn't throw anything, he didn't break anything. I could just tell there was this growing kind of, ‘I'm going to prove you wrong,' feeling inside of him. The theme of that night was, ‘Well, the good news is you've got something to be pissed off about the rest of your career.'”
More than 100 players were drafted before Bakhtiari in 2013. Eight were offensive tackles. Only two have been selected for the Pro Bowl. Bakhtiari is the only first-team All-Pro.
Walsh wasn't with Bakhtiari when the overachiever was drafted in the fourth round. His son was being baptized that day. Eric stood beside his younger brother, watching him get a call the undrafted linebacker never got himself.
He'll never forget what David Bakhtiari told Ted Thompson on the phone.
“I didn't hear what Ted said,” Eric says, “but Dave was like, ‘I've got your back, and I've got Aaron Rodgers' back.'”
The rookie
A day after Bryan Bulaga tore his ACL in the Family Night scrimmage, forever altering the event and two careers, David Bakhtiari approached a veteran across the locker room.
He was just a rookie, but already Bakhtiari had grown close to Clay Matthews. They trained together in the offseason, sharpened each other in Bakhtiari's first training camp. Bakhtiari first impressed his new team in one-onone drills with Matthews. An all-world pass rusher in 2013, Matthews was famous for his speed-to-bull rush, an explosion of acceleration and force that almost nobody stopped.
Bakhtiari was no different. The rookie tried to dig in his heels. Matthews put him on a sled, driving him back. What Bakhtiari didn't understand at the time was his one-on-one reps with Matthews were moral victories. He, unlike many, actually stayed on his feet.
“I can remember him getting frustrated,” longtime Packers offensive line coach James Campen says, “and he's getting pushed back and things like that, but he's staying in front of him. That's the thing as a coach. You go, yeah, but he's getting pushed back — but he's staying in front of him. You're not getting knocked on your ass, you're not getting halved and swam. You're staying in front of people.”
When his first camp began, Bakhtiari held onto his sensible hopes and dreams. He wanted to be “the starting co-right tackle” with Marshall Newhouse. That was his truth.
It changed in one play. A disastrous twist of Bulaga's knee.
Nobody inside the Packers' locker room knew Bakhtiari — the player, the person — better than Matthews. A morning after Bulaga's injury, when it became evident the Packers would lose him for the season, Bakhtiari approached his friend searching for encouragement. He got something else.
“I remember him just telling me,” Bakhtiari says, “'Hey, look man, they're not going to trust you. You're just a rookie. They're going to move Marshall back over to left. Congratulations, you made the team, you're probably going to have a starting spot to lose at right tackle. Good for you.' And he kind of just moved on.”
Bakhtiari chuckles as he recalls the conversation.
“I was like, ‘Thanks for the vote of confidence.'”
The coaching staff had other thoughts. Campen had seen Bakhtiari's
nimbleness, how he kept his feet against even the league's best pass rushers, and struck an idea that was nothing short of bold. Left tackle is among the game's most unforgiving positions. A false start here. A sack allowed there. One mistake can erase four quarters of perfection.
Quarterbacks never see what's coming.
Left tackles walk a tightrope with no net and a stiff wind. They often block the best pass rushers, and because they're left tackles, they often block alone. There are minimal chips and double teams. A left tackle is expected to win.
The pressure can warp anyone's mind. For a rookie, it can shake confidence, stunt development.
“When Bryan got hurt,” Lang says, “I don't really remember the thought process other than, ‘Holy (expletive), we just lost our starting left tackle in (expletive) training camp.'”
So when Campen mentioned to his boss, head coach Mike McCarthy, the Packers should move Bakhtiari to left tackle, the suggestion required a stroke of crazy.
It was also genius.
“I think the decision,” Campen says, “is just that, hey, he's the best guy for this job. He's the most athletic kid, he plays with good balance. Yeah, but he's not long, he doesn't have this. Hey, the guy knows how to play football.”
Bakhtiari remembers sitting in the offensive line meeting room that day his career changed, watching Campen enter. No words were exchanged. Campen quietly walked to the whiteboard and started writing the new depth chart, left to right.
The first number was 69. “I remember that moment looking forward,” Bakhtiari says. “Like, OK, I knew my time was going to come, that I'd be a starter. That fork in the road, I want to call it, in my career. I didn't know it was going to happen this quick, and one of the most important positions protecting the most important player in the NFL. But I was like, ‘OK, this is my opportunity. I either become the guy, or I become a guy.'
“And now we're here today.”
The overachiever
The All-Pro left tackle is still an overgrown rascal. Nobody plays a prank like Bakhtiari. On his teammates. On his friends. A 30-minute family FaceTime can quickly turn into an hour and a half if the youngest Bakhtiari brother infiltrates the call.
He gets the mischievousness from his brothers. When David was 19, Eric and Andrew told him one of the family dogs — a Cavalier King Charles spaniel — ate the other dog. It took some convincing, but Andrew says David eventually was in tears. He changed his Facebook profile photo to memorialize the family's fallen pet.
It's especially sweet to pull one over on David, Andrew says. Usually, pranks flow the other way. “He's like Loki,” Andrew says, referencing the Marvel Comics character. “The god of mischief. Sometimes it's like pulling teeth trying to have a serious conversation with him.”
But Bakhtiari flips a switch when it comes to football. After games, he'll watch three versions of film, the sideline and end zone angles followed by the broadcast copy. He eats massive portions to keep his weight but doesn't drink beer near as much as his legend suggests. (His chugging is a preternatural gift, and, no, Eric and Andrew won't share what age they realized he had it.) Nothing deviates David Bakhtiari from his craft.
That drive is foundational for the overachiever. Bakhtiari has had to learn how to play a different game, built on speed instead of size. Without length, he has mastered how to use leverage. He has one of the funkiest stances in the NFL, straightening his left leg back as far as it can stretch at an angle that looks uncomfortable, if not painful. At times, he looks more like a sumo wrestler than an offensive lineman.
“Everyone kind of almost laughs,” Bakhtiari says. “They don't understand how I move in my stance. My feet are so wide, and that's also in the run game. They do it all the time, they go, ‘I have no idea how you move.' I'm like, ‘Look, I don't know either.'”
The stance is a testament to maybe Bakhtiari's most undervalued skill. At a position known for rigid bulk, Bakhtiari has rare flexibility. “That flexibility,” Andrew says, “that's what is hall-of-fame potential. Don't know any other offensive lineman who can do the full splits.” Bakhtiari prides himself on having the quickest reaction to the snap. His balance allows him to always be in position, gathered and controlled.
He absorbs a bull rush as smoothly as he shifts his feet laterally to block a spin inside. Once his hands engage on a block, they don't let go.
“If you just watch the film,” Lang says, “nobody can get by him. You just can't beat the guy, and it's so fun to watch. I always get jealous of those guys. He reminds me of Josh Sitton, where they just made it look so easy. I was a guy, I always felt like every play, I had to do my absolute best to win. You watch Dave, and he's just doing it effortless.”
Bakhtiari was one of the NFL's best left tackles before almost anyone knew. Embree, his college coach, remembers watching film as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers tight ends coach before the Packers traveled south late in 2014. “Holy cow,” Embree thought as he clicked through the snaps, “he's a wall. The left side is shut down. It's over. Don't even try it.” That season, Sitton told Bakhtiari he might be one of the best in the league one day. Then he returned from the Pro Bowl and told Bakhtiari he was wrong. “Dude,” Bakhtiari remembers Sitton telling him, “you're better than all those guys I just played with.”
The accolades were slow to arrive. Bakhtiari wouldn't be selected to his first Pro Bowl until 2016, when he was an injury replacement. By then, he was already second-team All-Pro.
It seemed nobody recognized the scouts got it wrong. The fourth-round pick was a top-10 talent, if not the game's best at what he did. Given the journey, Bakhtiari's destination is surreal to everyone he knows. When the Packers hosted the New England Patriots in 2014, Eric gathered his family in the stands.
“I'm like, ‘Hey, I just want everyone to know,'” Eric says, “'we're watching David Bakhtiari in Lambeau Field, in prime time, block for a hall-of-fame quarterback, playing against Tom Brady right now. That's who he is.' That was a big moment when we were kind of like, ‘Holy (expletive).'”
He wasn't supposed to be here. David Bakhtiari was too small, too late, too damn goofy to ever become the best. Now, he's on top of the game. Nobody who has played his position has ever been paid more. When he signed that contract extension last month, Bakhtiari knew what it meant. He understood the history.
Nobody tells David Bakhtiari what he can't do anymore.