The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
After 12 NFL seasons, Orlovsky weighs future
As the offseason revs up with the start of mandatory minicamps, Dan Orlovsky ponders his next move. The future is suddenly murky for the welltraveled quarterback.
Twelve years in the NFL have undoubtedly taken a toll on his body, but Orlovsky, 33, isn’t ready to walk away. He still eats and trains — albeit with lighter weights these days — as if he’s preparing to play another season.
“That’s not to say that I don’t hurt getting out of bed every morning,” Orlovsky said recently by phone. “I still love it, I love that hurt. It probably makes me a little weird, but it makes me feel alive. I’ve always loved the grind. I love that it takes as much mentally as it does physically.”
If it seems like Orlovsky is a glutton for punishment, it’s because quarterbacks tend to be wired differently. After all, what possesses someone to scrape themselves off the turf and jump back into the huddle just moments after being flattened by a 250-pound linebacker?
“There’s just not a lot of people on the planet like us,” Orlovsky said with a laugh.
Orlovsky spent last season with the Detroit Lions, but the team opted not to re-sign him with 24-year-old Jake Rudock waiting in to supplant him as the backup to Matthew Stafford. If this is the end for the former Shelton High School and UConn star, Orlovsky
will leave having thrown for 3,132 yards, 15 touchdowns and 13 interceptions across stints with the Lions (twice), Houston Texans, Indianapolis Colts and Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He made 12 starts, including seven as a member of the 2008 Lions, the only team to finish 0-16.
“I’ve had some talks with teams this spring about playing another season,” he said. “I don’t have to make that decision just yet.”
Raising eyebrows
Offenses, especially at the high school level, have undergone a radical transformation since Orlovsky last donned a Shelton uniform. In those days, teams rarely utilized the no-huddle drill early in games, but the Gaels ran it whenever they pleased with the state’s Gatorade Player of the Year at the controls.
“He had a way of seeing things on the field that very few high school players could see,” said former Shelton head coach Joe Benanto, who let Orlovsky call the plays.
Orlovsky’s ability to make nearly every throw caught the attention of several prominent college programs, including Michigan State. The Spartans ran Orlovsky through a series of drills during their visit to Shelton.
“They basically offered him a scholarship on the spot,” Jeff Roy, a former defensive coordinator and current head coach at Shelton, said. “They said they didn’t have a quarterback on the roster who had the arm strength that Dan had.”
Shelton finished the 2000 season 12-0 and beat Greenwich 22-8 in the Class LL championship game. Orlovsky passed for over 2,300 yards, 24 touchdowns and just five interceptions in his third year as a starter.
Purdue and Virginia joined the Spartans in pursuit of Orlovsky, who already stood 6-foot-5 and weighed more than 200 pounds, but Orlovsky chose to stay close to home and commit to UConn. That decision surprised even a few members of his own camp.
“A lot of people and coaches around here questioned it a bit because he had some big-time offers,” Roy said. “But Dan knew what he wanted. He wanted to be the guy that put UConn football on the map.”
The daunting leap from Division I-AA to I-A was just beginning for UConn, which still played its home games before scarce crowds at 16,000-seat Memorial Stadium. The Huskies finished 3-8 in their first year as an independent in 2000 under Randy Edsall.
“He was the guy at 17 who said, ‘Hey, it’s cool to go to UConn,’” Edsall said.
But, if they were patient, there were rewards ahead. The Huskies were still a few years away from moving into Rentschler Field, a 40,000-seat, state-of-theart facility down the road in East Hartford.
“I know there were people in his camp that maybe were pushing him to go to bigger places, more established places,” Edsall said, “but we just did the things we needed to do to convince him that, ‘Hey, here you have a chance to make a bigger impact.’”
Settling into home
Rob Ambrose stared into those dark, brown eyes and grilled Orlovsky in one of the most awkward get-toknow-you moments that anyone can imagine.
“I asked him if he thought he was really good. He said, ‘Yeah,’ pretty arrogantly,” recalled Ambrose, who took over as the quarterbacks coach at UConn during Orlovsky’s sophomore year in 2002. “I said he was too skinny, his release was too long, he wasn’t really athletic and, as far as I could tell, he wasn’t really being a student of the game.”
Any guesses as to how that turned out?”
“At first he was angry,” Ambrose continued, “then he said, ‘OK, teach me.’”
Ambrose never shied away from making Orlovsky feel uneasy. If ever Orlovsky said he was the best quarterback in Connecticut, Ambrose would half-heartedly reply, “Congrats, that’s like being the best quarterback across three counties in another state.”
Call it tough love.
Orlovsky needed to have some pretty thick skin in order to build the Huskies from the ground up and set them on the path to the Big East, which they joined in 2004.
“He said, ‘Hey, I’m going to do something different,’” Edsall said. “He’s the face that really got this program started . ... He never batted an eye. He never flinched.”
The week of a game against Navy late in the 2002 season, the Huskies trotted out to practice during a driving rainstorm. Orlovsky whined about how cold it was. Tired of those complaints, Ambrose ordered the junior to roll around a puddle before proceeding to practice.
“I pulled him aside and said, ‘You’re about to have the best ... damn practice of your life,’ and he did,” Ambrose recalled.
Coincidentally, that week’s UConn-Navy game was played in a driving rainstorm. Orlovsky had one of the best games of his career, completing 29 of his 35 attempts for 272 yards and three touchdowns in a 38-0 rout.
Orlovsky passed for 3,485 yards and 33 touchdowns that year for a 9-3 team. The next year he led the program to its first bowl game — a 39-10 victory over Toledo in the Motor City Bowl.