Wentz has taken the NFL by storm in his second year, carrying the Eagles to a league-best seven wins while the team that didn’t think he’d ever be a top-20 QB is still winless.
PHILADELPHIA — The kid made it look so damn easy for seven weeks, he had some nerve Sunday making it look hard. When Carson Wentz had finally finished up a long and rainy day at the office, he had an awful lot of explaining to do.
How could he throw for only 211 yards, two touchdowns and a lousy two-point conversion? How dare he misfire on one sure touchdown, and maybe another, before beating the 0-7 San Francisco 49ers by a mere 23 points in his own backyard?
Wentz and his Philadelphia Eagles spent most of their postgame time with the news media willingly dissecting everything that went wrong in victory. The overriding narrative? The offense was slow and sluggish (Wentz’s words), the quarterback was rattled by the early San Francisco pressure, and he took too many hits behind an offensive line that sorely missed Jason Peters.
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An opportunistic Eagles defense and another steady outing from Carson Wentz lifted Philadelphia to 7-1 at the midpoint — the best mark in the NFL.
These were the sounds of elevated standards and heightened expectations, all good stuff for Philly fans wondering if they’ve been gifted the magical player who will lead them to the forbidden place. For Eagles fans wanting to believe Wentz will deliver the franchise’s first Super Bowl title, this 33-10 dismissal of the Niners was a hopeful development. The franchise player brought his C-plus game, and that was still plenty good enough to protect his status as the NFL’s first-half MVP.
Wentz’s job isn’t to win the heavyweight QBR championship. His job is to win the game, and today he stands as the only quarterback in the 2017 season to have won seven of them. For good statistical measure, Wentz is also tied with Deshaun Watson for a league-leading 19 touchdown passes — three more than Wentz had his entire rookie year.
Meanwhile, as the Eagles improved to a league-best 7-1 in their own ballpark, the Cleveland Browns were busy in London losing for the eighth time in eight tries. Call it a tale of two continents. These are the same Cleveland Browns who traded out of the No. 2 spot in the 2016 draft because they were afraid to put their future in Wentz’s hands. The same Cleveland Browns who employ poor Paul DePodesta, a Harvard man and chief strategy officer who indicated in an ESPN Cleveland radio interview that the team didn’t see Wentz developing into a top-20 quarterback.
Sunday’s Wentz probably looked a little more like the Wentz the Browns envisioned. The Wentz who grew from a 5-foot-6 high school freshman into a 6-foot-5 senior, and still didn’t land any major scholarship offers. The Wentz who broke his wrist as a North Dakota State senior and threw only 612 total college passes.
But after watching the Eagles quarterback play for a season and a half, it’s hard to believe any Moneyball metrics would instruct an analytics-based franchise to pass on him. Good football men in Fargo swore by Wentz’s worthiness as a top-two pick, never mind as a future top-20 passer, including one who knew how impossibly cruel the quarterback position could be to a small-college kid from North Dakota who wasn’t properly prepared.
Randy Hedberg helped coach Carson Wentz into the pros, and he has a story to tell. He joined the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 1977, the year after the expansion Bucs introduced themselves to the NFL with an ungodly 0-14 season. Hedberg had played his ball at Minot State, where he was a quarterback and three-sport star. He was an eighth-round draft choice of the Bucs, the 196th pick overall, and preseason injuries elevated him from a fourth-string unknown to something of a first-string sensation heading into opening day.
Hedberg had made the mistake of leading John McKay’s Buccaneers to a 14-0 victory over one of the NFL’s most storied franchises, the Baltimore Colts, in the final preseason game. Tampa Bay had lost 23 of 25 games, preseason included, and its fans were desperate for any sign of hope. Some wore T-shirts that carried Hedberg’s picture and the words, «RH Positive, a Bucs Transfusion.» Some called him «Randy Iceberg,» and some wore buttons that read, «Why Not Minot?» KCJB Radio in Minot scrambled to join the Bucs’ radio network.
Randy Hedberg, 22-year-old son of a wheat farmer from Parshall, North Dakota — a town with a population of 1,264 — was then planted behind a dreadful offensive line as he pieced together perhaps the worst small-sample career boxscore in league history. He went 0-4 as a starter, and threw 10 interceptions and no touchdown passes in 90 attempts. He was sacked 15 times and concussed once. He posted a quarterback rating of 0.0, spent 1978 on injured reserve, and landed briefly with the Oakland Raiders, who released him.
As it turned out, the Bucs had ruined the rookie’s shot at long-term NFL sustainability by rushing him into an overwhelmingly dire situation. «With the team just starting up and me coming from a small-school background, I wish I’d sat and learned,» Hedberg said. «I wasn’t ready for that at that point.» In sudden need of a less hazardous profession, Hedberg moved back to North Dakota and got into coaching.
Thirty-five years later, he ended up coaching another North Dakota prospect, Wentz. As an assistant at Southern Illinois, Hedberg had unsuccessfully recruited Wentz, a late bloomer at Century High School in Bismarck. They reunited at North Dakota State in 2014, Wentz’s first year as the Bisons’ starter and Hedberg’s first year as their quarterbacks coach. It was clear early that Wentz would have a chance to do things in the pros that his position coach couldn’t fathom.
Hedberg had seen Wentz’s athleticism and playmaking ability in high school. On the practice field at North Dakota State, where the offense often huddled up and placed its quarterback under center (imagine that), the coach was struck by the quarterback’s ability to quickly process pre-snap information at the line and to call out the proper protections. «A lot of players will tell you they watched two hours of film, but did they really know what they were looking for?» Hedberg said. «Carson always knew what he was looking for.»
Wentz constantly offered suggestions to his coaches on passing concepts he thought would work against certain opponents. On his own, he came up with a term that signaled a route adjustment to his tight ends. «The first time he did it in practice, we didn’t know what he was doing,» Hedberg said. «It was a concept that changed the whole scenario for the defense.» Two years deep into Wentz’s career in Philadelphia, Hedberg still refuses to identify the term. «The word hasn’t changed for us,» he said.
Wentz remains as big a hero across the valleys and plains of his home state as he is on Broad Street in Philly, and Hedberg is uniquely qualified to explain why.
