Jarrett Stidham and the ultimate voluntary workout

WACO, Texas — In the football ecosystem, there are few relationships more adversarial than that of quarterback and defensive back.

Jarrett Stidham feels this. He’s felt it since he was 5 or 6 years old — a decade and a half of fall seasons playing quarterback for a football team, save for two years: His sophomore year of high school, and this one.

That’s why his Thursday mornings this fall have been so important to him. Thursday mornings are spent at D1Sports, a steel-trussed and turf-lined athletic training facility five miles from Baylor University’s Simpson Center, where Stidham worked out the last time he was a quarterback for a football team.

On Thursday mornings he runs through speed and agility drills identical to the ones he endured as a Baylor quarterback from January 2015 through June 2016. And equally important, he does them alongside two defensive backs — one a future Baylor Bear and the other entering the semi-pro ranks. They provide Stidham with something he needs and craves: competition.

“I’ll talk (expletive) to them. I’m straight up like, ‘You don’t know what you’re about to get,’ ” Stidham says over dinner on a recent weeknight.

Stidham’s trainer Leonard Burks admits he was surprised at first by the 6-3, 210-pound Stidham’s quickness, but his competitiveness was evident from the beginning. He saw it when Stidham would call out his workout partners for not placing their feet behind the line at the start. He saw it when Stidham, upon finding out the facility staff had a fantasy football league, asked to join.

“There’s times when he’s beating the DBs in the drill and then letting them know that he’s beating them,” Burks says. “They know when Jarrett wins, because he’ll let them know.”

He lets his roommates, former Bears tight end Lee Bristow and current Bears offensive lineman Tanner Thrift, know when he beats them in a video game or gets back to their house first when they’ve been out somewhere. One night he challenged his girlfriend Kennedy Brown, a tough competitor herself from her role on the Baylor women’s soccer team, to see who could eat their dinner fastest. “We’ve tried some stuff, man,” he says. “I just gotta compete somehow. I just miss it, you know?”

Stidham notes that Nov. 21, the Monday before Thanksgiving, was the first anniversary of his last snap in an actual football game. In the year since, the coach who recruited Stidham to Baylor, Art Briles, was fired for his handling of sexual assaults perpetrated by some of his players. And Stidham, citing growing uncertainty about the Bears football team’s future, decided to transfer before his sophomore season.

But rather than enroll in a school with a prominent FBS team this fall, the former four-star recruit who once seemed assured of extending Baylor's line of record-setting passers opted to complete an associate’s degree at nearby McLennan Community College. Finishing the 16 credits he needed did two things for Stidham: It made him a value commodity in college football, a highly sought after, recruitable free agent for any FBS team, and it allowed him to enroll in his next school in January, thus giving him a full spring and summer of meetings and practice before playing immediately in fall 2017.

Stidham says he knew that as a result of his self-imposed football hiatus, he would feel a constant need to feed his competitive streak. He also knew something else gleaned from his years of quarterbacking. For his plan to be successful, he had to surround himself with a supportive team.

An unusual autumn

Stidham says he speaks to Briles every other week and talks and texts every week with Briles’ son Kendal, the Bears’ offensive coordinator. But beyond sharing a roof with Thrift, he has very little contact with the football players and friends who populated his first year here.

“I’ve learned a lot about people, from having friends to deciding to leave the school to having no friends,” Stidham says. “I think it just comes with the territory.”

The moment Stidham made his decision to leave Baylor the first week of July, he started staking out new territory in the area. The first place he went was D1Sports, where general manager Kevin Engelbrecht paired him with Burks.

Burks, who played collegiately at Mary Hardin-Baylor and later worked Tarleton State’s athletic performance department, came up with a regimen that had Stidham at the facility each Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday morning.

“What Jarrett really wanted was to mimic a program he had been doing at Baylor the previous year,” Burks says. “So it was easy for me to come up with a weightlifting program for Jarrett and also come up with something for him to do speed and agility-wise.”

One of the first calls Stidham made was to Bailee Begnoche, whom he had met upon arriving at Baylor as an 18 year old in the winter of 2015. Begnoche worked in sports nutrition for the Baylor athletic department at the time but had moved on to become a dietitian for the nearby Midway Independent School District.

Begnoche helped him formulate a protein-rich meal plan for the summer and fall, providing him grocery lists and even fielding calls from him when he was walking store aisles. But just as important, she joined his family, his roommate Bristow, his girlfriend Brown, and Brown’s father and Houston Rockets CEO Tad Brown as reliable sounding boards and advisers.

Begnoche’s best advice also was the most surprising to Stidham. She told him he should go back to high school, so to speak.

“I kind of pushed him to go do that,” Begnoche says. “He was only going to throw back and forth. I was like, ‘You need to go practice with them, you need to get some mileage in just like you normally would, otherwise you’re going to go into January wherever you end up and your body’s going to be in shock.”

That was how Stidham ended up having lunch with Jeff Hulme, head coach of Midway High School, one day in July. “He thought I was gonna ask to use the weight room or the indoor facility that they had,” Stidham says. “I was like, ‘You know, I don’t really have anybody to throw to. Do you mind if I come run your scout team every week?’ ”

Hulme had played for Briles at Georgetown High nearly 30 years before Stidham became Briles’ pupil. He checked with Midway’s athletic director, and by the first week of September, Stidham was throwing against Midway’s defense three days a week.

“You gotta remember, in Texas high school football, it’s like family,” Hulme says. “If you played for somebody and I played for somebody, then in a lot of ways we are family. And I think our team would look at him as part of the family as well.”

Hulme appreciated the way Stidham stood out during drills — his ability to fit the football into tiny spaces gave the Midway defense invaluable practice looks — and quietly blended in before and after. Stidham appreciated the opportunity. He remembers players being surprised that someone who completed 63% of his passes for a ranked FBS team a year earlier was now trying to complete passes on their practice field. He told them, “This is really big for me.”

It helped Stidham toward the goal he set out for himself shortly after the Fourth of July: to be in mental and physical game shape even though there would be no games.

“Through all of this transition, it was never something like, ‘Oh well, I don’t know what to do.’ ” Begnoche says of Stidham. “It was, ‘Alright, this is what I’m going to do, I’m going to make a grown-up decision, I’m going to make some plans, I’m going to find some good people, I’m going to surround myself with people who will push me, and then I’ll move on.’ ”

The future

There have been games, of a sort. Though he hasn’t worn a college uniform since Baylor’s spring game, he says he’s watched more football this fall than ever before. Every Saturday he has a television and laptop running simultaneously from morning until night. On Sundays he tunes into every NFL timeslot and says he has gained a better understanding of what professional quarterbacks are seeing and doing on every play.

“It's been pretty hard honestly,” he says. “Especially if there's home games here, I'm sitting in my room watching it, saying, ‘Aw, I should be on the field right now.’ That gets pretty tough. Right now I wish I was sitting in bed watching film for this weekend's game.”

Stidham is steadfast that his decision to use this fall as his mandatory sit-out season was the right one for him. As frustrating as it has been to not be part of a team, he says it would be worse for him if he was part of a team during the season but, because of transfer rules, were unable to play. “I think the way I’m doing it is the best thing for me to handle it,” he says.

He also has an idea of what will make the best team for him.

“I just want to find a great coaching staff; that’s big for me,” he says. “At Baylor I was around a lot of good people, and I want to find something like that. That’s a big deal. Also an offense that can put up a lot of points. I want to find a team that is full of good guys on and off the field. A team that I feel like can help me achieve every team goal that I’ve ever wanted — conference championships, Playoffs, national championships.”

Stidham has visited Auburn three times this fall, hosted Tigers offensive coordinator Rhett Lashlee here on Dec. 2 and is expecting a visit from Lashlee and head coach Gus Malzahn on Friday. Florida also is aggressively recruiting him, and other schools are in the mix. Stidham hopes to be able to make a decision next week, with the goal of being on a new campus with a new team by the new year.

“Wherever he goes in January, he’s going to go be the starter,” Hulme said. “I have no doubt that’s what he’s going to do.”