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 likea 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.
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the father of evolutionary biology, that we, as a species, can
adapt and change over generations because of our changing
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