(Editor's Note: This first-person recount from Jesse Holley, as told to DallasCowboys.com staff writer Zach Buchanan, will be featured at various times throughout training camp.)
Aug. 9 Entry:
Today, we're going to talk about the life of a rookie in the NFL. It's a great experience, but sometimes it's not all what it's cracked up to be.
One thing about being a rookie in the league is you start from ground zero again. You leave college when you're a senior, and most times being a senior, you were the man. I don't care what team you played for, you were the man there, if not the guy, one of the main guys at your program. And then you come to a place where you now fall back to the bottom of the pit.
It doesn't matter whether you're a first-rounder, second-rounder, sixth-rounder, undrafted or like myself, coming off a TV show. You're at ground level.
Things are good, but things also suck. Of course you have rookie hazing. Your veteran group of guys will make you do things. For example, every time we have a Gatorade break during practice, I have to get Gatorade for Patrick Crayton and Roy Williams. After practice I've got to carry the veterans' helmets, shoulder pads, in Roy's case, his shoes.
You're left to do all these things for the veterans. It's fine. It's all good and well, you just hate doing it at the time. You've got to get up and you've got to sing in front of everybody. You are the little brother of the group.
A lot of times when the season comes around and you've got to take the veterans out to dinner, they run a tab up to X amount of dollars. Sometimes they don't even eat, they don't even drink. They'll waste it, but just to run your bill up, they'll do it. So you're stuck with a $5,000 bill, $10,000, depending on your pay grade, but you're stuck with these types of bills that the veteran guys hit you with.
And you're just like, "I can't wait 'til I become a veteran. I can't wait 'til I'm a second-year guy, so that one day I'll get to do this to somebody else." But you're just stuck.
And it doesn't matter how many plays you make on the field. It doesn't matter how much you sign for. None of that stuff matters. Especially the part about going out, it hurts you more the more you get paid because the more you get paid, the more extravagant, the more costly that outing will be because they know you have the money to foot it.
Then you have a whole new playbook, a whole new offense. You have that whole new foreign language again. Sometimes you may run into a system, especially nowadays in the college game with a lot of teams running the West Coast system, running the 3-4 defense, so a lot of times offensively and defensively you run into a system again that the NFL coaches look at college players and say, "Okay, he's a linebacker who played in a 3-4 defense in college, he wouldn't have a hard time adapting to the 3-4 defense that I teach in the league." Therefore the transition won't be as hard for you.
But still, everybody has their own verbage, everybody has their own way of doing things, running things, and they may call it different. You hear this whole new language, this whole new plan, scheme. And things are different. The field is broken up different - you've got the college numbers and NFL numbers. So they way you run in college may not be the way you run in the NFL. So you have to get acclimated to that.
The speed of the game is tremendously different. Football, it's a hard game, but it becomes easier the more you know. With colleges, you have two or three guys who may be the best guys on their team, and you have another team that has three really standout guys. But when you get to the NFL, you now have eleven guys versus eleven guys - the eleven best guys. The guy snapping the ball was an All-American. The catching the ball was an All-American. The guy blocking was an All-American. The guy coming was an All-American. You have a bunch of these All-Americans and all these popular guys out there going at each other.
Being a rookie, you could have a veteran guy go out there an run a route, and you could do the exact same thing he just did, and the coach will say, "You were too deep," or, "Why didn't you come out your break like this? Get your hands up. Tuck the ball away." I didn't the same exact thing that this veteran guy did, but they say absolutely nothing to the veteran guy but chew you out.
So that wears on you a little bit. You say, "I want to do exactly what the veteran guys do because obviously they're doing something right. They've been here for a while, they're playing." But then you turn around and say, "Well every time I do what the veteran guy does, you still get on me. When I try to do what you say, you still get own me. When I do my own thing, you still get on me."
It's a constant barrage of coaching. I understand that coaches want to make you the best player you can be and everybody has a different way of doing it. It just gets frustrated sometimes when you see somebody doing it who's one of your veteran guys and you turn around and do the same thing where they weren't scolded, you were scolded.
On top of every time you come back to the huddle, every time you come back to the sideline, you're saying, "He's pointing this out, he's pointing that out." It's to make you a better player, but sometimes you just don't want to hear that, especially in the heat of battle. You're getting out there, you're already getting a little bit confuse and things are moving fast, and you try to focus in on what you want to do.
You become a robot sometimes, and it takes away from you going out there and just naturally playing football because you're just trying to do everything so right so at least when you come back he'll say, "Job well done."
Those are just some of the things that go on for a rookie player in this league that sometimes just wears you out, mentally, physically and emotionally. It makes you want to pull your hair out sometimes, but the one thing is you only have to be a rookie for seventeen weeks.
