IF THE QB FITZ
From Arizona upbringing to Harvard days, humble Ryan takes right approach for Jets
THE KID quarterback arrived at Harvard in the fall of 2001, his eastbound journey taking him some 2,300 miles, from the former “hay capital of America” to a brainy bastion of the academic elite.
He was fifth or sixth on the Crimson depth chart as a freshman. He moved up fast. In the first game of the 2002 season, against Holy Cross, Harvard coach Tim Murphy watched his team’s star senior quarterback, Neil Rose, take a hard hit to the head late in the third quarter. The coach summoned his backup, sophomore Ryan Fitzpatrick, of Gilbert, Ariz.
The Crimson had a three-score lead at Harvard Stadium, and Murphy vividly recalls his marching orders to Fitzpatrick:
Keep the clock moving. Stay inbounds. If you run, just slide. Don’t do anything crazy. Just get this game over.
As Murphy remembers it, Ryan Fitzpatrick, on one of his first plays, made a deft play-fake and took off on a naked bootleg. A Holy Cross cornerback raced up toward the line of scrimmage, poised to make the stop. The Harvard quarterback didn’t just run over him. He ran as if he were a fullback on the one-yard line with the national championship hanging in the balance.
“Fitzy hit him so hard they had to stop the game for 10 minutes,” Murphy says. “I turned to an assistant and said, ‘What the hell do we have here?’ ”
Tim Murphy got the answer to his question soon enough. What they had there was a beefy, hyper-competitive kid who played quarterback as if he were trying to get in touch with his inner linebacker, who went on to set a slew of school records and captain an undefeated team in 2004, when he won the Bushnell Cup as the Ivy League Player of the year, his performance helping him get enough attention that Fitzpatrick became the first Ivy quarterback to be drafted in more than two decades, in 2005. He went in the seventh round to the St. Louis Rams, the 250th pick overall, and if you are thinking that’s not the neighborhood of star quarterbacks, you are right. You are also missing the point, because if Ryan Fitzpatrick, age 32, who became the starting quarterback of the New York Jets last Tuesday — a day that will live in jaw-breaking infamy — has proven anything in his 11-year NFL career, it is that makeup and intelligence are no small parts of the quarterbacking arsenal. A Harvard degree is about the greatest credential a job-seeker can have, if he or she is seeking a position on Wall St. or a major law firm. The NFL does not typically set up a table at Ivy League recruitment drives.
“I’ve been a Division I coach for 29 years, and he’s one of the five toughest players I’ve ever coached,” Tim Murphy says.
Though he set records and won championships at Highland High School in Gilbert, Ryan Fitzpatrick was hardly a prized college prospect. Tim Murphy was perplexed by that, because he liked everything about the kid, from his arm to his pound-it-out running style
and especially, his competitiveness. Murphy admits that Fitzpatrick’s reserved demeanor during his home visit made him wonder if the kid had the leadership skills and charisma to take charge of a college football team, but otherwise was completely sold.
“I felt that people must know something that we didn’t,” Murphy says. “I thought he was way under-recruited.”
Being under-appreciated is nothing terribly new for Fitzpatrick, who has been a Ram, a Bengal, a Bill, a Titan, a Texan and now a Jet. Apart from his famous score on the Wonderlic intelligence test — he reportedly scored a 48 out of 50, the highest ever recorded, and completed the exam in nine minutes — he is not a player whose natural gifts necessarily draw raves, or bring to mind what you look for in a franchise quarterback. Fitzpatrick long ago reconciled himself to the inevitability of being stereotyped.
“People are mainly done with the jokes and stuff,” says Fitzpatrick this sunny Saturday afternoon. “When I came in as a rookie, I had to learn Mike Martz’s system. It’s not an easy one to learn. He’s not very easy on ya if you mess up a play in the huddle. I heard all about being the dumb Harvard kid and all that my rookie year. You have to develop the thick skin and gotta continue to get better and not make the same mistakes. It’s certainly a transition and something I remember as a rookie.”
The first Harvard quarterback to start an NFL game, the 6-2, 230-pound Fitzpatrick has had a pro career like few others. He has been good enough, and rugged enough, to start 89 games over 10 seasons, but has also gone 3355-1 in those games. Nobody has ever questioned his leadership or his toughness, but consistency was something else, his results careening between “FitzMagic” and “FitzTragic”, especially in his times with the Bills, the team that signed him to a six-year, $59 million extension after the 2011 season.
Fitzpatrick had three straight 3,000-yard seasons with the Bills. He also had 54 interceptions and 23 fumbles in those three seasons, earning a reputation as a gunslinger, a guy who, for all his undeniable smarts, had a penchant for forcing balls into imprudent places, and not taking care of the ball.
Or as Steve Tasker, a CBS broadcaster and one of the Bills’ all-time greats, said, “Sometimes he tries to do a little too much with his arm. He’ll try to write a check that his arm can’t cash.”
Fitzpatrick didn’t dispute Tasker’s point when a reporter brought it up.
“There are probably times I get like that a little bit. Over my career,” he said, “if you look at it, there’s been some inconsistency and that’s probably a little bit of it, so being able to rein that in (is important.)”
In his one season with the Texans in 2014, Fitzpatrick took better care of the ball (17 TDs, 8 INTs), but lost his job to Ryan Mallett when the team dropped four of five games in one stretch. When he got the job back two games later after Mallett suffered a pectoral injury, Fitzpatrick had the greatest game of his career, throwing for 358 yards, six touchdowns and no interceptions in a victory over his former team, the Titans. Two weeks later, Fitzpatrick suffered his own seasonending injury, a fractured tibia, in what would be his final game as a Texan before being traded to team No. 6 in March in exchange for a seventh-round draft choice.
The move to New York drew little notice in an offseason dominated by the acquisitions of Darrelle Revis and Brandon Marshall, but when the Jets open up against the Cleveland Browns on Sept. 13, the man at the most important position of them all will be Ryan Fitzpatrick, former economics major from Harvard, still wearing the same No. 14 he wore in his Crimson days.
In his first press conference as a starter, just hours after Geno Smith’s jaw was broken by a locker-room haymaker, Fitzpatrick was typically reserved about his sudden ascension. With his thick, backwoods beard and a low rumble of a voice, Fitzpatrick praised Smith and expressed disappointment in his misfortune. He spoke of the comfort he has playing in the system of Chan Gailey, his coach for three years in Buffalo, and of his conviction that he was still getting better in his 11th season.
“If I didn’t want to be here and if I didn’t love this game and I didn’t have confidence in myself . . . I’d be on vacation with my five kids, sailing off into the sunset with a career probably nobody thought I’d have,” Fitzpatrick said.
Fitzpatrick’s wife is a former Harvard soccer All-American, Liza Barber. He has one brother who swam at Notre Dame, another who was an accomplished tight end at Northern Arizona. With athletic excellence all around him, Ryan Fitzpatrick finds himself back at the helm of a new football team, eager to show Jets fans that he’s more than a journeyman with a brilliant mind.
Tim Murphy won’t pretend to be unbiased on the matter, but he thinks that Ryan Fitzpatrick is going to surprise people, that all these years after the QB left Gilbert, the one-time hay capital, he might well provide bounty that nobody expects.
“I believe he’s one of the 15 best quarterbacks on the planet, but how do you get a chance to prove that when you have played in a dozen systems with hundreds and hundreds of players?’ ” Murphy says.