Grad transfers face crash course
Learning new terminology, system from afar a major test for quarterbacks
During their weekly skull sessions last spring, the quarterback and his new coach employed the latest in technology — and some old-fashioned ingenuity. Brandon Harris and Keith Heckendorf would connect via FaceTime. Two or three times a week, they would talk about North Carolina’s schemes, terminology and principles. And it was cool, because while Heckendorf was in his office in the Kenan Football Center, Harris was in Baton Rouge, some
900 miles away, finishing his final classes at LSU.
“We would get an hour or two in of football,” Harris says. “It worked well.”
The setup worked very well, except when they needed to watch video together. Then, Heckendorf, North Carolina’s QBs coach, would set his iPhone on the desk, prop it up on a coffee mug and point it at his desktop screen.
“You’ve got to think about it,” Harris says. “I was 13 hours away.”
But with the low-tech solution to a high-tech problem, it was almost like being in the same room.
That’s important, because Harris is one of a growing trend of graduate transfers at the game’s highest profile and position. Since Russell Wilson left North Carolina State, degree in hand, and led Wisconsin to the Rose Bowl in
2011, the move has become almost commonplace. And so has a quandary:
How to best prepare the player you hope will win the starting job at the sport’s most important position while that player is still on another campus? They’re cramming to learn a new system — and there’s no book on how best to teach it. That’s in part because the trend is still young, but also because each situation has variables.
Two years ago, Oregon replaced Heisman Trophy winner Marcus Mariota with Vernon Adams, who transferred as a graduate from Football Championship Subdivision-level Eastern Washington. When Adams finally joined the Oregon team in August 2015, he spent early mornings huddled with then-offensive coordinator Scott Frost, studying the elementary principles of the offense.
Adams had worked by himself for months while still at Eastern Washington, studying a new system from afar. He used HUDL, an online game film program, to learn the Ducks’ formations and plays. And he talked a couple of times a week with Frost. But when August came, he had a lot of catching up to do and very little time to get there.
“Obviously, if we’d have gotten him earlier, he’d be even farther along,” Frost said then. “But I’ve been blown away by how fast he can memorize this stuff and understand it.”
It’s like that in almost any case. Heckendorf consulted friends who had coached at Wisconsin when Wilson was there.
“Really, a lot of it is the player,” he says. “They’ve got to immerse themselves in it and be fully committed to it and maximize every second they’ve got, because time is of the essence.”
Almost by definition, grad transfer quarterbacks are selfmotivated. Tony Petersen, who was offensive coordinator at Louisiana Tech when the Bulldogs accepted grad transfers Cody Sokol and Jeff Driskel in consecutive years, says both quarterbacks treated the assignment as though they were already in the NFL rather than college.
“It was work time, time to get ready,” he says.
In early June, when Harris moved to Chapel Hill, he had not yet completed a degree in sports psychology. But he hitched a U-Haul trailer to the back of his Chevy Camaro SS convertible (“I know,” he says, “it was illegal as crap,” and that was before adding the part about how he didn’t have a working taillight rig for the trailer).
Harris wasn’t able to participate in organized team activities until officially graduating in early August, but he began to get acquainted with teammates. He got together with receivers to throw. And he spent more time studying, both on his own and with Heckendorf. The biggest challenge for Harris — and perhaps for any grad transfer quarterback — wasn’t so much the formations as the lingo.
“You have to empty your mind out of everything you’ve learned the last three years and redo everything,” Harris says. “The way they call defenses at LSU is totally different than the way they call defenses here. How we called fronts at LSU is totally different. How we called three-step dropbacks is totally different than how they call it here.”
One example: At LSU there was a coverage call: “Cover Three Buzz.”
“Over here, we call it ‘Three Suzz,’ ” Harris says.
As much as anything else, Heckendorf says teaching the program’s unique phraseology (at Arkansas, Bret Bielema calls it “Hoganese”) was the goal of those FaceTime sessions, and remains the biggest challenge. It was the foundational teaching, beginning with Harris’ March visit.
“Speak my language,” Heckendorf would tell Harris. “It was less plays and more structure, because we felt like if the day he stepped on campus he could understand the language and how we communicate, we were a step ahead.”
And yet during preseason practices, Harris occasionally found himself using the old terminology. That’s not unusual — welltraveled assistant coaches sometimes call a play or a technique by the term used at one of their previous stops — but in the case of a quarterback who’s trying to win a job in a matter of weeks, it’s not a good thing to be thinking through things on the fly.
“The communication alone is the thing that takes the longest,” Tar Heels coach Larry Fedora says. “Throwing a football, handing a football off and running with the football, God gave him the ability to do that.”
Still, graduate transfers are often rusty when they finally get back on the field. Though he was offered use of the LSU facilities last winter and spring, Harris worked out on his own. He didn’t participate in spring practice. And then, although he operated from a spread offense in high school and had long wondered how he might fare in a similar scheme on the college level, the initial experience was a shock to the system.
He says during the first days of preseason practice he felt “basically like a freshman.”
“The pace (at LSU) was a lot slower,” he says — surprising no one. “Now you’re here, and Coach Fedora is like, ‘Go!’ It’s like a track meet, just going really fast.”
And, of course, there’s no guarantee things ever slow down. Wilson was a star at Wisconsin. Adams was very good when healthy at Oregon. There are other examples of success, as well. But more recently, Malik Zaire transferred from Notre Dame to Florida — Florida worked hard to get a Southeastern Conference rule changed to make it happen — and didn’t win the starting job for the season opener.
Harris started Saturday in a loss to California, but he played only five series and threw two interceptions; redshirt Chazz Surratt played nine series and was better. Fedora says he won’t name a starter before Saturday’s game with Louisville. He told reporters the decision wouldn’t be based solely on the first game and he would probably continue to play both for a while longer.
Which means for Harris, like other graduate transfers at the game’s most important position, a steep learning curve continues. As East Carolina’s Petersen says: “It’s a crash course.”