It’s Rich Gannon’s job as a CBS analyst to critique NFL players.
But it was when he was playing that Gannon really cast stones.
When he was quarterback of the Oakland Raiders, Gannon used to arrive at the facility before dawn during the week of a game — long before his teammates would get there — so he could study video on the opponent. The first few times that happened, he would grab a fistful of pebbles and plink them off Jon Gruden’s second-story office window, so the head coach would come down and unlock the door. Gannon eventually got a key of his own.
The point is this: To succeed in the NFL — and Gannon was the league’s most valuable player in 2002 — a quarterback is basically required to squeeze every hour out of the day.
“It gets to the point where it’s an obsessive-compulsive type of thing, for the great ones,” Gannon said in a phone interview. “I know it is for a guy like Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, those guys. In order to be at their very best, they put a lot of time in that other people don’t talk about or don’t know about.”
One of Gannon’s keys to success was to get as much work done as possible on Tuesday, the players’ day off, to get a running start into the next four days of preparation.
“I can remember as a player myself, people would say, ‘What about the pressure on game day?’ That was nothing,” he said. “The pressure for me really came during the course of the week. You keep challenging yourself, keep pushing yourself to do more and more.
“It’s almost like an addiction. It’s like, ‘Well, I watched three games last week and I watched two reels of the blitz cutouts. This week I’m going to watch four games. And what am I going to do the following week to trump that?’
“Here’s the one thing I notice: When I go around and do all these NFL games, I think it’s really clear when I sit down with a quarterback and I ask them a couple of questions, which ones really have a routine, a program, a system in place that helps them to be the best prepared player on Sundays. And I know the ones that don’t.
“I know a guy that didn’t even come in on Tuesday. If you don’t come in and watch film on Tuesday … there’s no possible way you could be prepared. He should already know what their base blitzes are, and when they’re going to do nickel, what they’re going to do in the red zone. A good quarterback has watched three or four games at that point. He’s got a good feel for this team. He understands why we’re putting in the run game, what’s the point of it, what are we trying to do in the passing game?
“Some of the guys I see, quite honestly, aren’t being trained properly. And the results will be very discouraging down the road. I can promise you.”
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