The Blind Side Read Online Free PDF

body, then spin off of it, and long arms helped to keep them at bay. He had giant hands, so that when he grabbed ahold of you, it meant something.
But size alone couldn’t cope with the threat to the quarterback’s blind side, because that threat was also fast. The ideal left tackle also had great feet. Incredibly nimble and quick feet. Quick enough feet, ideally, that the idea of racing him in a five-yard dash made the team’s running backs uneasy. He had the body control of a ballerina and the agility of a basketball player. The combination was just incredibly rare. And so, ultimately, very expensive.
The price of protecting quarterbacks was driven by the same forces that drove the price of other kinds of insurance: it rose with the value of the asset insured, with the risk posed to that asset. Quarterbacks had become wildly expensive. Even the rookie quarterback contracts now included huge guarantees. The San Francisco 49ers had agreed to pay Alex Smith $56 million over seven years; and if his career ended tomorrow, they’d still owe him $24 million. The New York Giants were paying their young quarterback, Eli Manning, $54 million for his first seven years of service; if an injury ended his career, they were still on the line for $20 million. The highest paid NFL quarterback, Eli’s brother, Peyton Manning of the Indianapolis Colts, had a seven-year contract worth $99.2 million. Several others made nearly $10 million a year. The money wasn’t all guaranteed, but a career-ending injury still cost an NFL franchise millions of dollars—if Peyton Manning suffered a career-ending injury, the Colts were out of pocket about half of their entire 2005 payroll. And those lost dollars would be but a fraction of the Colts’ misery; there would also be the cost of playing without their star quarterback. When a star running back or wide receiver is injured, the coaches worry about their game plans. When a star quarterback gets hurt, the coaches worry about their jobs.
Their anxiety came to be reflected in the pay of left tackles. By the 2004 NFL season, the average NFL left tackle salary was $5.5 million a year, and the left tackle had become the second highest paid position on the field, after the quarterback. In Super Bowl XL, played on February 5,2006, the highest paid player on the field was Seattle quarterback Matt Hasselbeck—who had just signed a new six-year deal worth $8.2 million a year. The second highest paid player on the field was the man who protected Hasselbeck’s blind side, left tackle Walter Jones, who made $7.5 million a year. (The closest Steeler trailed by $1.9 million.)
The other force that drove the price of quarterback insurance was the supply of human beings who could plausibly provide it. There weren’t many people on the planet, and only a few in the NFL, with Walter Jones’s combination of size, speed, agility, hands, feet, and arms. Jonathan Ogden, Orlando Pace, maybe Chris Samuels of the Redskins. They were the prototypes. And it was these men—Walter Jones, and the few NFL left tackles of his caliber—that Tom Lemming had in mind when he arrived in Memphis in March of 2004 and went looking for Michael Oher.
     
EVEN MORE THAN USUAL, Lemming needed to see this kid. It just smelled fishy: there was no way an American high school player in 2004 with this kind of talent could be such a mystery. Film occasionally deceived: maybe he wasn’t as big as he looked. Maybe there was something seriously defective about his character. Football was a team game; there was a limit to the pathological behavior it would tolerate, especially in a high school player. “Baseball can tolerate a Barry Bonds,” said Lemming. “In football you never do anything alone. Even though you’re Joe Montana you still need Jerry Rice, and the nine other guys on offense, if you’re going to be any good. That’s why [NFL receiver] Terrell Owens got himself in so much trouble. He thought he was bigger than the game. And no