Ex-NFL Journeyman Dan Orlovsky Knows Exactly What The Combine Doesn’t Get

This last week we watched the NFL Combine, the annual job fair that draws college football players to interviews wearing shorts and t-shirts and carrying gym bags rather than briefcases. For a solid week, they took turns running, jumping, sprinting, lifting, throwing and catching, and were measured by every possible means, all in the hope of getting included in the NFL Draft, which will take place this year on April 25-27 in Detroit.

In the meantime, the NFL’s 32 teams will take home reams of data, crunch the numbers for nearly two months and try to find that perfect match or matches. Given the wealth of information at their disposal, you would think that the scouts and evaluators’ toughest challenge would be choosing among this embarrassment of riches.

So why, you might ask, do NFL teams get player recruitment so wrong, so often—especially with quarterbacks?

One man who has a pretty good idea is Dan Orlovsky, ESPN’s top football analyst and himself a former professional football player. Orlovsky was selected out of the University of Connecticut in the fifth round of the 2005 NFL Draft as the 145th overall pick by the Detroit Lions. He played in two regular season contests that year and left Detroit after three years, becoming a journeyman quarterback, which is one way of saying he was a perennial backup, for several other teams before retiring in 2017. Despite playing in very few games, Orlovsky managed to have a 12-year professional career, much longer than most.

After retiring from football, Orlovsky became a sports analyst and experienced the kind of success that had eluded him during his playing days. Since joining ESPN in 2018, he has made a name for himself by reporting what he saw, which, it turned out, was an extraordinarily deep appreciation for football’s intricacies, and communicating it with remarkable clarity to his listeners. In an interview during the combine, he seemed the perfect person for me to ask about the dismal success record of pro scouts.

Orlovsky pointed to two main reasons for the failure. First, he said, teams have come to over rely on physical measurements — size, speed and strength — not only for the linemen, running backs and wide receivers, but also for the quarterbacks. And while that stuff does matter, Orlovsky says they’re not the stats that determine success.

“The most important quality in quarterbacks is not how big they are but how fast they think,” Orlovsky said in our interview. “For example, it’s not enough to make the right throw. You have to make the right throw at the right time. In the first quarter, I may have to throw a 20-yard touch pass over a linebacker. Later on in the fourth quarter, that same receiver might run a different route to get open at 20 yards, but now I have to throw between two linebackers. Completely different read, and making the read is not one of those things you can take a tape measure to at the combine.”

The second reason QB draft picks fail is that teams put too much stock on individual players and not enough on supporting them in what is, after all, a team game. “Teams will focus on a quarterback and say, ‘Hey, we’re gonna take this quarterback. He's going to be our franchise guy!’” explained Orlovsky. “But if you don’t get good linemen to project him and good receivers to catch the ball, the quarterback will struggle for several years until the coaches and organization decide he’s not playing up to the level they expected.”

Then, as Orlovsky knows well, it’s the player who gets moved. It was at ESPN that Orlovsky found the team on which he could not only start but also star, despite not having the alpha dog playing or coaching credentials of other analysts and broadcasters. In this regard, ESPN got right what many NFL teams get wrong: rather than looking for a guy who looked like all the other ex-athletes, ESPN saw potential in one whose strengths came from not playing.

That’s right, backup quarterbacks are critical figures on NFL teams and often serve as player-coaches for starting quarterbacks and receivers. Many are smart as heck and know the game inside and out. And if lasting 12-years in the NFL without playing much offered any indications of future performance, ESPN knew they were looking at a world-class work ethic in Orlovsky.

When it comes to transitioning from playing football to analyzing for fans around the world, he agrees.

“I think being the most prepared and informed person is never a waste for me,” Orlovsky said. “I used to get mad, because my jaded mindset was like, ‘Everybody should watch the games like I do.’ No. That's what makes me different.”

So, Orlovsky learned the tricks of the trade, which included cutting to the chase when making a point on air, finding his own voice and mastering the technical side of broadcasting, which is much harder than it looks and sounds to the average sports fan.

Some of those sports fans learned that first hand at this year’s Super Bowl in Las Vegas, thanks to “TCL Gameday” Consumer Anchor Experience, which gave fans the chance to use equipment provided by the consumer electronics company to put their broadcasting skills to the test reading sports highlights with some coaching by pro broadcasters. The amateurs could then create their own segment clips for sharing on social media.

The pros included NFL broadcasters, Taylor Bisciotti, Rich Eisen, Field Yates, Tom Pelissero, Mina Kimes and Orlovsky. “People don’t realize how difficult it is to read the teleprompter and watch the game highlights at the same time,” observed Orlovsky with a chuckle. “The screens are right next to each other and you have to marry the words coming out of your mouth with the play on the screen.”

The whole setup tends to make people nervous, and “when you get nervous,” Orlovsky continued, “you tend to talk faster, which can trip you up. And once you go sideways, it’s very, very difficult to recover. So, I tried to keep things light and joke with them. The whole thing was very cool.”

When asked how a former journeyman quarterback handles criticizing players who are current stars, Orlovsky is simple and direct. “I can't let the fact that I was a backup hold me back from trying to do my job at the highest level, being comfortable in my career and being the very best in the world,” he explained. “There are some who will never accept me, but I don’t get defensive and I don’t overcompensate by turning arrogant about my success.”

That’s just about as awesome a leadership lesson about controlling the controllables as you’ll find. But Orlovsky leaves us with another leadership lesson as well: know your customer. It’s the secret behind his trademark appeal.

“I want to be as efficient as possible. I want to be as clear as possible. But I also want to make sure I look like I'm having fun. If I don't look like I'm having fun, no one’s going to watch. I want to look like I'm being joyful.”