ESPN's Seth Wickersham on Alex Smith's stunted NFL development

Athlon Sports

In this exclusive interview with Athlon Sports' Doug Farrar, ESPN's Seth Wickersham discusses his blockbuster Caleb Williams story, and how Alex Smith was another young quarterback whose coaches failed to help him.

Transcript

00:00Could you tell the Alex Smith story? Because this is the other one and I had heard it before,

00:04but the way you put it, because did you talk to Alex for this book?

00:07I did.

00:08Okay. So, you know, people are going to, oh, no NFL team would actually do that. Yeah, they would.

00:16Well, again, I think it's like one of those things you think of these teams as being these

00:20finely tuned functioning operations and then things get going and, you know, there's a lot

00:26of decisions that don't make a ton of sense. And one of them would be, I think, drafting

00:31a quarterback first overall, making him the face of your franchise and not putting an

00:36infrastructure around him to be the best possible chance of success that he could be, especially

00:41if your coach is a defensive coach. So what happened was that in February, I was talking

00:49to Caleb and I had been told that he would complain and kind of just throw up his arms

00:57that like he would watch film by himself. And we were talking about Alex Smith and Alex

01:01told me about this. And it's something he's talked about where he got to the 49ers. He's

01:0620 years old. He's the face of the franchise. And nobody would watch film with him. He was

01:12sitting in a room in the dark, just watching tape. No idea what to look at. No idea what

01:18to study. No idea what to replay or analyze or take notes on or make marks on and try to

01:23improve. No idea what questions to ask. He was by himself. Now, Alex, of course, came

01:29out before the rookie wage scale. So whatever he signed for, I don't remember off the top

01:33of my head. It's a massive investment. One would think that with that kind of investment,

01:39they would populate him with an entire infrastructure to help him be successful, but they didn't.

01:48And when Alex later ended up with the Chiefs, and they drafted a guy named Patrick Mahomes,

01:55he made a point of teaching Patrick how to be an NFL quarterback. And one of those key

02:05areas is how to watch film. The head coach can't watch film with the quarterback all day,

02:09even one like Andy Reid, who obviously is an innovative offensive mind. And Alex had to teach

02:17Patrick, you know, this is what you're, this is what we're doing on Mondays. This is what

02:21we do on Tuesdays. Wednesday, we do this Thursday. Thursday is a long day. We're going to do this

02:25on Thursday, Friday. This is what we prepare for. And he taught him that rhythm and how

02:30to do it. And I think that like Patrick would have been a successful quarterback no matter

02:34what. But I think that there's, I think that we just can't overstate how important it

02:39is to have someone as savvy as Alex Smith, as generous as Alex Smith is, by the way,

02:44because not every veteran quarterback would do that, but just somebody who was looking

02:47out for him.

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