You look at the best players in the league, the best players at quarterback - I mean Drew Brees, Peyton Manning, the top names - none of those guys are throwing it through a brick wall. They'll have touch.
I carried around a lot of weight and anxiety - expectations of being a top draft pick and fulfilling those. It was really burdensome and not fun. Stressful. I had to go through some things before I finally turned that around and got back to playing for the right reasons.
At the combine and at my workouts, I tried to be the perfect player. I tried to promote my strengths and conceal my weaknesses, and on paper, I kind of succeeded: I was the first pick in the draft. And with that, I inherited this big shiny trophy that I carried around, and it had one word engraved on it - anxiety.
Obviously, flagrant things have to be called. There are rules. You have got to play to the rules, no question.
This is the honest truth: I could absolutely care less on yards per game. I think that's a totally overblown stat.
I was on some bad teams, and I played bad as a young player, certainly, at times. And that all mounts. Yeah, that all mounts. The perception. Everything that goes into that. And so, yeah, I think to kind of get over the hump of that, to change perception, it can be difficult. It's a tall task. And it takes a long time.
We can only control how we react and how we respond, and that complex but so simple idea helped me survive.
That's a special time, to get drafted.
