NFL teams
Bruce Feldman 19y

Mis Direction

Missouri Tigers, New York Jets

The story was going to start this way: You must understand that Brad is special, they explain. Not just great or terrific or dynamic. Special. The words, when they were written one year ago, were meant to illuminate the amazing world of Brad Smith, a humble kid who had become an almost mythic figure. If you believed those around him, he hadn't been delivered to Missouri just to resurrect its football program.

His story was scheduled to run in the Sept. 27, 2004, issue of this magazine, right after Mizzou started 2—0 and Smith had parlayed a nationally televised Thursday night tune-up against Troy into a personal Heisman commercial. Smith, who in his first two seasons had passed for 4,310 yards and rushed for another 2,435, was already staring out from magazine covers, filling pages in The New York Times and fueling chatter on the football talk shows. After an off-season spent honing his passing skills, folks everywhere were saying he was now a complete quarterback, among the very best in the game. All of that was before Troy won.

The story was rewritten for 2005 and was to run after 2-0 Missouri beat New Mexico and headed toward a rematch with Troy. It would start something like this: Brad Smith is a rock, having built his life on the three sturdy principles of keeping the faith, doing the work and staying the course. It had been burned into his brain that his purpose was bigger than moving a piece of leather down a field. Football was his way to move The Message. But when you can't move the football—Smith's problem for too much of last season—the message gets lost.

Too bad New Mexico didn't cooperate. So let's try to get this thing going one more time. This time we'll keep it simple: What happened to Missouri and Brad Smith?

THAT HE can even play football is quite an achievement. Bradley, the third child of Phillip Smith and Sherri Brogdon, was born with what the doctors called "weakened metatarsals." To his folks, that sounded something like clubbed feet. Their son would be able to walk, the Smiths were told, but it was going to be a struggle. The doctors fit Brad for a variety of braces and casts, and his mom watched the tears stream down his cheeks whenever they wedged his balled-up feet into the latest contraption. Eventually, Brad says matterof-factly, God fixed the problem.

His parents' marriage fell apart and Sherri moved her three kids, with little more than the clothes on their backs, from a house in Los Angeles into one room in the home of friends in Youngstown, Ohio. Sherri took an administrative job with the Mount Calvary Pentecostal Church and the church quickly became the glue for a fractured family.

When Brad and his older brother, Joshua, suited up for the church's Pee-Wee football team, the Sons of Thunder, his path was clear. "It felt just so … natural," Smith says of his grade-school gridiron experience. "It was like, this is what I am supposed to be doing." Brad's coaches, a collection of former college and semipro players, immediately saw his talent. They reported to Bishop Norman Wagner—who was not only the head of Mount Calvary, but also the presiding prelate to the 1.5 million members of the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World—that Brad was destined for the NFL. Wagner thought he was destined for even more.

He already knew this enthusiastic, coltish kid was special. Brad sang in Mount Calvary's choir, stayed after for extra prayer and was the first to sign up for church programs. At 13, he became an assistant to Wagner during services and on his travels. Whenever Wagner's car pulled up, Smith was there to open the door. Wagner reinforced the self-discipline already instilled in Smith. "If you get a child who is like a stallion," Wagner explained a year ago, "you don't want to break his spirit, you just want to bridle it."

A stallion. That was Brad on the field, a free-wheeling, instinctive, slashing runner. But those intangible skills weren't easy for scouts to quantify. So, although he was all-state twice, he remained an under-the-radar recruit, piquing the interest of only Bowling Green and Youngstown State. Then Gary Pinkel, head coach at Toledo, was handed Smith's tape by assistant Matt Eberflus. He was blown away. "Are we even going to have a shot at this guy?" Pinkel asked.

Smith liked Pinkel. More important, so did Bishop Wagner and his Mount Calvary congregation. It did get a little complicated when Pinkel took the Missouri job and wanted Brad to come too. A meeting with Pinkel and Eberflus (the Tigers' new defensive coordinator) was arranged in Wagner's office. Awaiting the coaches, though, weren't just Wagner and his protégé, but also a half-dozen church members assigned to research Pinkel's family and his history of developing quarterbacks, plus Missouri's campus life and graduation rate. "They knew everything," says Pinkel. "What church I went to, where I went to college, the names of my children, how long I'd been married."

The visit lasted more than two hours. Finally, Wagner excused everyone except the coaches. "I want you to know we've decided to allow Brad to go to Missouri," Pinkel recalls Wagner saying. "I said, 'Boy, that's great.' Then he looked at me and said, 'You have no idea what you've got here, do you?' I said, 'Yes sir,' but he looked at me and smiled: 'No, you don't. You have no idea.' "

Smith knew what Wagner meant, knew he couldn't disappoint his church. The kid was a pleaser, anyway, and he understood his purpose. And not just to Mizzou. He believed God had sent him to preach, to reach children who don't know and grown-ups who don't know better. That's why he was given that powerful right arm and those dancing feet and the ability to see cracks no one else can. "Bradley's gonna be a minister on the football field, a minister by his talent," Wagner has said. "He doesn't have to preach from a pulpit. When he gets to the NFL, Brad will be a compass."

No one even considered that "when" would become a big "if."

BRAD'S STORY at Missouri has always been pure. Spring break is a road trip, with Mom, to a church convention in Atlanta. "Cutting loose" is what he does to a tangled line when he fishes with his buddies. Friday night pregame routine? Church. He is hooked on the Discovery Channel, loves animals (as a kid, he had a pet worm named Wormy) and is a huge fan of The Cosby Show. "There are no curse words," he explains.

Brad Smith knows exactly who he is off the field. But by the Troy game last September, he was trying to be someone else on it. He could no longer be the chuck-it-or-tuck-it Brad, who was as likely to run for 300 yards (he gained 291 against Texas Tech in 2003) as pass for them. Not if he wanted to testify on Sundays. Against Troy, Mizzou fans would see the next Peyton Manning. He would stand tall in the pocket, scan through all of his reads and fire the ball downfield. He was going to zing the deep out and check down and show everyone—Heisman voters, rival coaches, NFL scouts—he had it all. Yeah, that's right. They were in for a whole new Brad.

Early on against Troy, Smith was sharp, completing 13 of 14 passes while driving the Tigers to a 14-0 lead. Then Troy began to disguise its coverages-linebackers abate, safeties rotateand Smith looked lost in the pocket, as if he'd never played before. As the incompletions piled up, the athletic department's PR team decided maybe Monday wouldn't be such a good day to launch BradSmith4Heisman.com. The game ended with a series of plays in which Smith scrambled around the pocket, reversing field as if the rules didn't allow him to advance the ball. Troy won, 24-14. Smith connected on only 12 of his final 32 throws and averaged fewer than five yards per pass. Goodbye, Kirk. Goodbye, Corso. See ya, Heisman.

The game some of the local media dubbed Black Thursday turned out to be a microcosm of the season. Mizzou sank to 5-6. Smith rushed for a little more than half the yards he'd amassed as a freshman and threw a career-high 11 picks. "It was the lowest I've ever felt," he says now. "I internalized a bit too much, taking everything and putting it on myself."

The view from rival coaches (and crestfallen fans) is that Pinkel ruined Smith in trying to develop him. "I think Pinkel got more concerned with making him an NFL quarterback than winning," huffs a Big 12 coach. "He was the most dangerous runner in our league, tougher to handle than Vince Young or Reggie McNeal, and suddenly he got so stiff. You'd watch film and go, `What the hell are they doing with him?' It was like you could hear the gears grinding in his head."

Theories about Smith's decline burned across the web and the airwaves. But the worst shot came late in the season from Brad's estranged father. Phillip Smith had recently reconnected with the son he hadn't seen since the divorce. He moved from California to Kansas City and started a phone relationship. He came to a practice, then a game. In November, with the Tigers mired in a four-game losing streak, the old man rang up a talk-radio show and blasted Pinkel. "I'm not trying to be abstract or mean, but he has the personality of a dill pickle," the elder Smith told KCSP. "He's very stubborn. Even when he's wrong, he doesn't want to admit it."

The shots at Pinkel got a lot of play around the country. Tigers coaches say they were actually surprised the fallout wasn't worse. "It blew over faster than anybody thought," says Tigers QB coach David Yost. "We thought this could've been another 'Kurt Warner's wife' thing." But the spirit of the old man's comments still sting Brad. "It was a very difficult situation, and something I'd never experienced," he says, when asked about his dad's quote. "I'm real close to my mom, that's all."

Suddenly, Smith had just one more season to answer all of his skeptics and prove he belonged in the NFL. And he knew he couldn't afford to wait until he made it to the league to become a compass.

IT IS a steamy August afternoon, Mizzou's first day of camp, a new beginning. Most in the program are on edge. Less than a month earlier, Aaron O'Neal, a redshirt freshman linebacker, died after a workout (an autopsy revealed viral meningitis). Just like that, it wasn't about exorcising the personal and group humiliation of 2004. The team is dedicating the season to O'Neal. "Aaron's always on our minds," Smith says. "He gave everything he had. So we're focusing to give everything we've got."

The day before the tragedy, in a bizarre coincidence, one of the team's linemen, Monte Wyrick, had approached Smith to talk about life after death. "It is kind of freakish, looking back," Wyrick says. "We talked about how you need to appreciate life and how all this other stuff doesn't really matter."

The grief hit hard, especially among the young players who'd grown close to O'Neal. Pinkel has asked Smith to watch over his teammates and to let the staff know how they are coping.

But O'Neal's death turned out to be only the first bitter twist of the season. On Sept. 10, Mizzou was upset by New Mexico, 45-35, as the visiting Lobos picked apart the Tigers D. Smith did what he could, looking like his old, dazzling self. He became Mizzou's all-time leading passer and all-time leading rusher that night, and in his first two gamesaveraged 412.5 yards of total offense, running a souped-up new offense that incorporates principles of Urban Meyer's trendy spread option.

It may not matter. Smith and his Tigers are again at a crossroads. Questions about how well he can pilot the new offense have been replaced by how the Tigers will respond to yet another disappointment. Personal goals are irrelevant, he says.

Smith is man enough to admit the Heisman talk distracted him last season. But now that all seems so long ago. Heck, so does that night at Troy. For better or worse, he is a quarterback whose career record is 19—19. Maybe he can be a cautionary tale for the Chris Leaks and Marshawn Lynches about the hope that is piled onto kids as pundits search for a new horse to ride. Smith seemed like the last guy who'd get suckered by all of it. But in reality, maybe he was the most susceptible. After all, the lure of the NFL was the lure of his higher calling. He manages to smile and says he's learned a whole lot, and that he's more comfortable in his own skin these days.

"I won't take back what I did, but my focus was on proving myself and making plays," he says. "It wasn't totally on winning. I realize that if I focus on winning, everything else takes care of itself."

For now, that's the only message Smith needs to deliver.

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