CHENEY – Of all the pigeon holes in which people have tried to cram Julian Peterson’s 6-foot-3, 235-pound frame – too small to play defensive line, too big to play cornerback – only one of them ever truly hurt him.
Too dumb.
Too dumb to go to school with “regular” kids. Too dumb to get into college.
Too dumb to play professional football.
Peterson, the Seattle Seahawks’ linebacker and prized free agent addition, has heard them all.
And he’s overcome the odds.
“I hate when somebody tells me that: you can’t do this, you can’t do that,” Peterson said Monday from Seahawks training camp. “I always like to prove them wrong.”
Peterson has proven to be a versatile NFL player who has seen time at defensive end, linebacker, cornerback and safety. But his most amazing feat might be shedding the dumb-jock label.
Thanks to a learning disability, Peterson had to work harder than most just to get passing grades in high school and college. His low score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) forced him to attend junior college, and he reportedly had a single-digit score on the Wonderlic test, which is a 50-question quiz given to rookies leading up to the annual NFL draft.
But by no means is that any sort of indictment on his intelligence.
“He has football awareness, intelligence,” Seahawks defensive coordinator John Marshall said. “He has not had a problem picking up the defense. … If you coached Julian through a week, you wouldn’t say, ‘This guy’s got a learning disability.’”
Marshall first learned about Peterson’s situation when he was helping coach the Senior Bowl in 2000. Then defensive coordinator of the Carolina Panthers, Marshall had heard rumors coming out of Michigan State University about Peterson being known as, in Marshall’s words, “a hard learner.”
But Marshall was pleasantly surprised during the week of Senior Bowl practices.
“I never, at any time, felt like he didn’t understand anything,” Marshall said.
As proof, Marshall told the story about a practice play in which a receiver caught a seam pass on an underneath pattern. Marshall explained to Peterson that he needed to drop deeper into coverage and stay with the receiver until a safety arrived.
On game day, the same receiver ran a similar pattern on the other side of the field, and Peterson intercepted the pass.
“Right there, it told me that the guy is not a hard learner,” Marshall said. “You explain something to him, and he’ll turn right around and do it.”
Questions about Peterson’s intelligence began as early as middle school, when he fell behind in school.
“They tried to put me in one of those special ed classes,” Peterson said. “My mom said: ‘My son is not going to go in any class like that. He’s going to be in a regular class.’
“After she did that, I made it into some (advanced) programs, especially in math. I’ve always been good at math. When they told me I couldn’t do that, I had to prove them wrong.”
But the questions still dogged Peterson, especially after he posted low scores on the SAT. He was then diagnosed with a form of dyslexia, which helped explain his learning difficulty. He also had trouble remembering facts and statistics.
“It’s a memory thing,” he said. “I have to write stuff. If I don’t write it down – twice – I tend to forget it. That was my big thing: I had to write it down so it would get into my brain.”
Peterson’s poor SAT score landed him at a junior college, where he said he earned a 3.13 grade-point average on the way to an associate’s degree in business.
Peterson went on to Michigan State, but struggled so badly in his first semester that he failed all but one class and got a GPA of 0.7.
He learned how to manage his time better and earned a 2.75 the next fall. But his low score on the pre-draft Wonderlic – reports have surfaced that he scored either a 7 or an 8 out of a possible 50 – suggested to NFL scouts that he might not be smart enough to play at the next level.
Six years later, Peterson says that he didn’t even attempt to score well on the test and that he simply filled in the answers without reading the questions.
“I was like, ‘Man, this hasn’t got anything to do with football,’” Peterson said on Monday. “And so I just A-B-C’d it. (Tennessee Titans draft pick) Vince Young probably did the same thing I did: just went in there and (answered the written test without reading the questions).
“(The Wonderlic) has nothing to do with learning the football game. It was like an SAT or something. I’m not here for that. I’m here for the X’s and O’s.”
Despite the low Wonderlic score, Peterson still got drafted in the first round – the San Francisco 49ers selected him with the 16th overall pick in the 2000 NFL draft – and has gone on to have a Pro Bowl career.
So maybe those who said he wasn’t smart enough to play pro football are the ones feeling dumb right about now.
“Actually, I probably know defense better than half the people in this league because I’ve played all the positions,” Peterson said. “If I see a play in the flat, I can tell you what the corner(back) is supposed to do. (The questions about his intelligence were) just amazing to me.”
Despite his ability to overcome the learning disability, Peterson still has one goal that’s unattained.
He’s still 20 credits short of earning his bachelors degree from Michigan State, and he intends to go back and get it whenever his NFL career is over.
That might be his most unlikely feat of all.
“There are all sorts of people doing extraordinary things,” Peterson said. “You just can’t fall into the norm of: you can’t do this.”
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