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sifting machine.
One of the perks of Lemming’s role in the market was a worm’s-eye view of its trends. When he opened for business, he assumed he was simply identifying future college football stars. He didn’t give much thought to their professional futures. College football was mainly a running game, for instance, and the NFL, increasingly, was a passing game. College football had an appetite for all sorts of players the pros had no use for: option quarterbacks, slow fullbacks, midget linebackers. That changed as the big-time football programs came to function as training schools for the NFL. To attract the best high school players they had to persuade them that they offered the smoothest path to the NFL. It helped, then, if they ran NFL-style offenses and defenses. Because of this—and because of the steady flow of NFL coaches into college football—college football became more homogenous, and less distinguishable from the game played in the NFL. In the late 1980s, Lemming began to notice the erosion in the differences between college and pro football. By the mid-1990s he saw that, in identifying the best future college football players, he was identifying the best future professional ones, too.
The other, related trend was a trickle-down of NFL prototypes into America’s high schools. The NFL would discover a passion for athletic (read: black) quarterbacks, or speedy pass rushers, and first the colleges and then the high schools would begin to supply them. There was a lag, of course. If Lawrence Taylor created a new vogue in the NFL for exceptionally violent and speedy pass rushers with his dimensions in 1981, it might be 1986 before Lemming encountered a big new wave of similarly shaped violent and speedy high school pass rushers. But the wave always came. What the NFL prized, America’s high schools supplied, and America’s colleges processed. “It goes from Sunday to Saturday to Friday, five years later,” said Lemming. The types came and went—one decade there would be a vogue for speedy little receivers, the next decade the demand would be for tall, lanky receivers. And there were antitypes; Lord help the white running back or wide receiver or, until the early 1990s, the black quarterback. The Lawrence Taylor type, however, came and never left. When Lemming hit the road in 2004, he knew he would find big linebackers, and small defensive ends, whose chief future use would be to wreak havoc with the minds and bodies of quarterbacks. He also knew that he’d find the type that had arisen across the line of scrimmage in response. The guy who could stop the Lawrence Taylor type. The left tackle type.
When Tom Lemming looked at left tackles, he thought in terms of others he had selected for his All-American teams who went on to be stars in the NFL: Jonathan Ogden, Orlando Pace, Walter Jones, Willie Roaf. These people looked nothing like most human beings, or even the players Lemming interviewed in the late 1970s and 1980s. “Two hundred and fifty pounds used to be huge for a high school lineman,” he said. “Now you’ve got to be three hundred pounds or no one will look at you.” Even in this land of giants, the left tackle type stood out. Freak of nature: when he found one of these rare beasts, that’s the phrase that popped into Lemming’s mind to describe him. When Lemming put high school junior Jonathan Ogden on the cover of his Annual Prep Report, Ogden was six foot nine inches tall and weighed 320 pounds. (He’d fill out in college.) When he did the same with Orlando Pace, Pace stood six six and weighed 310 pounds. (And hadn’t stopped growing.) The ideal left tackle was big, but a lot of people were big. What set him apart were his more subtle specifications. He was wide in the ass and massive in the thighs: the girth of his lower body lessened the likelihood that Lawrence Taylor, or his successors, would run right over him. He had long arms: pass rushers tried to get in tight to the blocker’s