Sports Illustrated - USA (2021-12)

44 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED | SI.COM

mechanics must be routine before experimenting—but

“by the time these kids get to high school, you can really

push the boundaries of what they’re able to do. Now, you’re

trying to get them consistent in the craziest throws out

there, the craziest situations that may come up.”

›

In Fort Lauderdale, Lamar Jackson’s personal coach,

Joshua Harris, wields a broom during practice and

swings it at his future $40-plus-million-a-year client while

he drops back in the pocket to pass. The pair have been

working together since Jackson was at Louisville, and

Harris has grown adept at frustrating Jackson with the

cleaning tool, making a whoooosh sound that reverberates

in Jackson’s ear before he throws the ball.

Harris says that over the last year, roughly a third of

their practice time has become devoted to making off-

platform throws or nontraditional arm slots, expanding

from a five- or 10-minute period at the beginning of their

working relationship.

“It’s recognizing the reality of the position,” Harris

says. “We’ve lived in this false narrative for so long of,

‘Get your feet like this.’ Well, it’s never really like that.

The pocket is never really clean at any level of football.”

Harris admits to shaking his “herd mentality” when he

saw Jackson unleash his own beautiful anomaly in NFL

games, a sidearm pass that hooks around defenders like

a free kick in soccer. In a January divisional playoff game

against the Titans, Jackson used it to gain a first down

despite being enveloped by a mass of bodies in the pocket,

bending the ball around the helmet of an offensive lineman.

He didn’t think much of it when he saw Jackson make

that throw the first time, because he was playing with

children. Jackson, who allows kids to approach him during

training sessions and throw the ball around, began twirl-

ing passes from absurd arm angles while maintaining a

foundational base with his lower half. Harris’s fear that

he risked becoming the man who ruined Lamar Jackson

began to dissipate as he designed practice routines that

included the sidearm throws, along with a new credo for

training the NFL’s most fascinating quarterback.

“Yo, does it work?” Harris asks. “If it works, let’s do it.”

A

BOUT 10 YEARS ago, Hoekstra, the Harvard pro-

fessor, traveled to the sand hills and alfalfa farms of

northwestern Nebraska along with a small team led by

then postdoctoral fellow Rowan Barrett to see evolution

in real time.

Their experiment would draw from the theory of Darwin,

the father of evolutionary biology, that we, as a species, can

adapt and change over generations because of our changing

environment. We can evolve through natural selection.

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Passers continue to top records in efficiency, with the 2020 and ’21

seasons already marking a 6.9% jump over the previous decade

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