Sielski: Reich draws on experience with prodigies to teach Wentz
Frank Reich has spent a fair share of time around athletic prodigies, going back to when he was himself a three-sport star at Cedar Crest High School in Lebanon, Pa. He has played with and against gifted men and coached them, too, and he has learned to appreciate the small, oft-unseen things they do to make themselves great and the lengths to which an opponent might go to prevent them from manifesting that greatness.
Frank Reich has spent a fair share of time around athletic prodigies, going back to when he was himself a three-sport star at Cedar Crest High School in Lebanon, Pa. He has played with and against gifted men and coached them, too, and he has learned to appreciate the small, oft-unseen things they do to make themselves great and the lengths to which an opponent might go to prevent them from manifesting that greatness.
Take, for instance, Sam Bowie. Before the Portland Trail Blazers decided to draft him instead of Michael Jordan in 1984, before he began his star-crossed and injury-riddled NBA career, Bowie was a demigod at Lebanon High School, Cedar Crest's neighborhood rival. The prospect of having the 6-foot-4 Reich, then the starting center on Cedar Crest's boys' basketball team, try to defend the 7-foot-1 Bowie one-on-one wasn't all that reassuring to the coaching staff or to Reich himself.
So the school's administrators made an unusual investment to upgrade the building's infrastructure. They installed breakaway rims in the gymnasium, specifically as an anti-Bowie countermeasure. Hanging on the rim was an automatic technical foul, and any player who committed two technical fouls earned an automatic ejection. It's easy to see what the Cedar Crest people were thinking.
"We figured he's going to dunk 10 times because I'm guarding him," said Reich, the Eagles' offensive coordinator, who himself had a 13-year career as an NFL quarterback. "Maybe if we could get him to break the rim away twice, we'd get him out of the game."
There was just one glitch in the plan: Yes, the first time Bowie dunked the ball, the rim broke away. But it was so obvious that the rim had collapsed from the sheer force of the dunk, and not because Bowie had hung on it, that the referees didn't call a technical on him.
"I'm sure our high school was saying, 'We spent all this money for nothing,' " Reich said.
The episode was an early lesson for Reich, a precursor to dozens of coaches' meetings and game-planning sessions. It taught him how far a team would go to stop a supreme athlete, and how that athlete might transcend the strategy anyway. Reich saw that same dynamic play out as the quarterbacks coach for the Indianapolis Colts, where he worked with a certain Hall of Famer in Peyton Manning, and as the offensive coordinator with the San Diego Chargers, where he worked with a possible Hall of Famer in Philip Rivers. And he is beginning to see it now, he said, with Carson Wentz.
"I've seen how teams try to stop elite quarterbacks who can think like that, who can throw like that," Reich said. "I've seen a lot of what they try to do to confuse them. Here's what happens: When you've recycled through it a bunch of times, you say, 'Oh, there are the three or four things they do.' Say you're the defensive coordinator and I'm Peyton Manning, and you have those four things in your back pocket. You think, 'I've got four options to try to stop this guy.' Peyton knows over all the years, 'There are four things that coordinators do to try to stop me. As soon as you do Number Three, I recognize that you're trying to do Number Three, and I have what I think is an answer for that.'"
It is a necessary aspect of Wentz's maturation - the thrust and parry between a defensive coordinator and a quarterback, the knowledge and experience that he can accumulate only over time. Make no mistake, too: The battle of wits is between the coordinator and the quarterback. A team's offensive system, Reich said, is less important to a defensive coordinator's game plan than the manner in which the quarterback implements that system.
The focus is always on the player first - minimizing his strengths, exploiting his weaknesses - and with every game Wentz will reveal what he does and does not yet know and what his intrinsic skills will allow him to do. So when the Chicago Bears and their defensive coordinator, Vic Fangio, presented a challenge Monday night with their group of excellent edge pass-rushers, it wasn't enough that head coach Doug Pederson and Reich devised a series of quick, short passes out of a no-huddle approach to help shepherd Wentz through the game's first possession. Wentz had to be decisive, and he had to use his terrific arm strength to make crisp, well-timed throws to his receivers, and because he was and did, the Eagles embarked on a tone-setting scoring drive.
The whole exercise appeared effortless for him. It won't always.
"There's no question he's ahead of the curve, but there's also no question that he's got a long way to go," Reich said. "I'm very happy, but I'm also very sure there are going to be hitches along the road."
There will be defensive coordinators getting creative, trying to take away this throw or that throw, trying to pressure Wentz with some complex blitz package he's never seen before, and it will be on Wentz to meet those challenges. As a high school phenom, Sam Bowie could, with ease. All these years later, Reich chuckled over that cockamamie scheme to trick Bowie into those technical fouls, but his true reckoning at Bowie's hands arrived in another Cedar Crest-Lebanon matchup. As the two of them thumped against each other under the basket to gain position for a rebound, Bowie caught Reich flush in the face with an elbow.
"He busted my nose so bad," said Frank Reich, who believes this process with Carson Wentz will be a bit less painful.
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