New Colts quarterback Jacob Eason has spent his entire career under weight of expectation
The spotlight follows the arm.
The golden-boy right arm of Jacob Eason, impossible to overlook and impossible to deny, capable of making any throw, attached to a tall, throwback frame.
The arm brings opportunity and expectation, the endless range of possibility that awaits Eason in Indianapolis after the Colts drafted him in the fourth round, the first time Indianapolis has drafted a quarterback since 2012.
Eason’s arm made him one of the most coveted recruits in the nation, a freshman starter at a traditional SEC powerhouse and a ready-made heir to one of the Pac-12's best teams. A kid coming of age in the public eye, every move followed by thousands of fans.
“I don’t think anything about Eason’s last four to five years has been easy,” said Missouri quarterbacks coach Bush Hamdan, who spent the past two seasons as Eason’s offensive coordinator at Washington. “These college quarterbacks are put under the microscope. Put under more pressure than a lot of NFL players.”
A rare commodity
They used to fly across the country just to get a glimpse of him.
Eason was a rare commodity, one of only two five-star quarterbacks in the recruiting class of 2016, and he’d picked Georgia early. Eason first committed to Georgia in July 2014, two years before he’d be able to take a meaningful snap in Athens.
Bulldog fans, Georgia recruiting reporters, they couldn’t wait that long. They’d hop on a plane, take a five or six hour flight to Seattle and make the hour-long drive north to the Lake Stevens High School practice fields.
“They’d be sitting in the stands, and then after practice, he’d go and meet with the little kids and the parents, he’d sign their little helmets and their shirts,” said Lew Widmann, Eason’s high school quarterbacks coach. “To have our own audience of people from another state, it was pretty bizarre.”
All to see the kid they called Skinny.
NFL DRAFT GRADES: Ravens, Vikings nab top team hauls while Packers, Eagles confound
2021 RANKINGS: Trevor Lawrence, Justin Fields highlight early top 25 prospects
MORE: 8 NFL players still in flux after draft
Eason’s dad, Tony, had given him the nickname by accident, the result of a haircutting mishap. Tony kept trying to even out the cut, kept buzzing more and more hair off, until finally the razor got right down to the skin.
Only a nickname can fix a cut like that.
From the time he was little, even before he’d gotten that haircut, the city of Lake Stevens knew Skinny was going to be an athlete. Tony had played wide receiver at Notre Dame, and his son clearly had taken those genes to another level, football at the center of his focus, particularly the quarterback position.
“I was a tremendously big fan of Peyton Manning,” Eason said. “One year when I was six or seven, I got his jersey under the Christmas tree and had Colts hats, Colts shoes, you name it.”
Eason blossomed into one of the top high school quarterbacks in the country, a blessing and a curse given the spotlight that shines on recruits.
Even the guys who commit early aren’t immune to the constant phone calls, the social media overtures and attacks from fans. When Georgia fired Mark Richt in November 2015, Eason took a visit to Florida to weigh his options, and the pressure fired up again, especially after Richt landed on his feet at Miami.
Under far too much pressure for a kid who hadn’t turned 18, Eason never missed a workout, was never late for practice, not even for the Sunday-night quarterbacks meeting Lake Stevens holds every week.
There was a little girl once, a Georgia fan being treated at Seattle Children’s Hospital, who came out to practice wearing a mask, in need of oxygen everywhere she went.
Eason made sure he spent a lot of time with her.
“I’ve always thought he does a great job of sharing himself with people,” Widmann said. “He’s always been willing.”
'I have had a lot of time to learn and grow '
The Georgia fan base saw Eason as a savior.
An inability to get the Bulldogs into national title discussion, punctuated by a lack of a clear successor to the quarterbacking legacies of Matthew Stafford and Aaron Murray, cost Richt his job. Kirby Smart was brought in from Alabama to get Georgia to the next level.
Eason took the starting job away from incumbent Greyson Lambert as a true freshman and turned in a solid freshman season. Under the microscope that comes with being a starting quarterback in the SEC, there were rumblings before Eason’s sophomore season that the quarterback partied too much. Those rumblings seemed to rear their ugly head after the Colts picked Eason on Saturday; ESPN’s Chris Mortensen reported NFL teams were concerned about his work ethic and accountability, among other things.
“A lot of the criticisms come from stories of early on in my college career,” Eason said. “I think I have had a lot of time to learn and grow from those situations.”
Even back then, those criticisms were likely overblown.
A Georgia spokesman declined a request for an interview with Smart on Saturday, saying in part that the Bulldogs coach has limited his comments about Eason and another former Georgia quarterback, Ohio State’s Justin Fields, in recent months after a flood of questions about the pair last fall.
But Smart has had only good things to say about Eason in the past.
Back before that sophomore season, Smart was asked about Eason’s work ethic, whether his starting quarterback was more interested in having fun than learning football.
“He works really hard,” Smart shot back, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Jacob comes in and meets extra every chance he gets. A lot of the things you have heard about Jacob may not be true. … I think he does a tremendous job of trying to lead the team, of trying to be the guy.”
Eason’s leadership — his character — was tested immediately that season.
Three drives into the season opener against Appalachian State, Eason sprained a ligament in his left knee. Jake Fromm replaced him, Georgia caught fire and by the time Eason was healthy again, the Bulldogs didn’t want to mess with the chemistry they had rolling in a season that would ultimately end with an SEC Championship and a loss in the national title game.
Few things are more difficult than losing a starting job due to injury. Colts head coach Frank Reich knows. When he was a senior at Maryland, Reich separated his shoulder, and although head coach Bobby Ross had a policy that no one lost their starting job due to an injury, Reich was briefly kept on the bench after he got healthy, a decision that was hard to take.
Eason knew what Fromm’s ascendance meant. A team can play only one quarterback at a time. Shortly after the national championship game, Eason decided to transfer, ultimately back home to the University of Washington.
But in the months between the injury and that decision, he earned the respect of everybody at Georgia.
“He never said a foul word,” Smart said in a radio interview with Atlanta’s 680 The Fan shortly after Eason’s decision was announced. “He was the first one to support Jake Fromm. He helped a lot of other guys on the team through their freshman year. He will always hold a special place in my heart, as well as his family, because of the way he handled everything.”
Two alpha males; clear rapport
A few weeks before the start of the 2018 college football season, Hamdan walked downstairs to the Washington quarterback room, a room that suddenly had two alpha males in it.
The incumbent, Jake Browning, already a Huskies legend after three seasons as a starter, was there. So was Eason, the local schoolboy hero coming back home after a rough break in the SEC to take the reins from Browning and keep Washington in Pac-12 title contention.
Hamdan sat back, watched Browning and Eason from afar for a bit, two kids with very different personalities who’d already developed a clear rapport.
“You never know what to expect when you take a five-star kid as a transfer,” Hamdan said. “How is he going to fit in? I just really felt like, this guy’s mentality, his personality, everything about him was remarkable how well he fit in with our team.”
Eason had to sit out that year, part of the NCAA’s transfer rules.
All he had was the work.
“People maybe don’t understand what it’s like to go through a year like that, where you’re training and you’re prepping and trying to get ready, but you know you can’t play,” Hamdan said.
Eason’s approach was to work hard at everything else. The weight room, the film room, running the scout team, working with Browning. The goal was to get himself ready for the 2019 season, take over for Browning and keep Washington humming along at the clip that had produced three straight 10-win seasons.
“I think that paid off, because this last season I was able to boost myself up as a leader,” Eason said. “I think guys responded to that well.”
Eason had to lead through adversity.
A Washington team that was picked to challenge Oregon for the Pac-12 North title instead stumbled to 8-5, in part because of inconsistency from Eason, a storyline Hamdan believes was overblown. Eason's weapons weren't full of NFL talent the way Browning's had been; Washington had just one other player, center Nick Harris, taken in this weekend's draft.
Eason refused to point fingers, tried to take the blame himself.
Hamdan believes the quarterback kept Washington together despite a disappointing year.
“There’s guys that play for you that you enjoy, and then there’s guys that play for you and will leave a lasting impression on you,” Hamdan said. “Eason is a person I’ll always remember. A guy who went through as much criticism at the University of Washington as more than half of the NFL starters, and a guy who handled himself unbelievably.”
Colts did their homework
The Colts have spent months putting Eason under their own microscope.
Colts assistant director of college scouting Matt Terpening remembers Eason catching his eye as a freshman at Georgia. Area scout Chris McGaha watched him tear up Eastern Washington in August and immediately texted general manager Chris Ballard to say Eason needed to be on their radar.
When the season ended, Reich dug into the tape, not only on Eason but on all the quarterbacks in the draft.
The physical tools that made Eason a five-star prospect in the first place were evident. The size, the arm, the underrated athleticism. A few more — accuracy, footwork, reading through progressions — need to improve.
But the Colts needed much more to get comfortable enough to put him on their board.
“We all know that playing this position is a lot more than physical,” Reich said.
Colts assistant general manager Ed Dodds and director of player development Brian Decker, the former Green Beret whose job is to dig into a player’s internal makeup, went out to Washington to take a look at Eason. Indianapolis devoted a lot of time to him at the Combine; after the coronavirus pandemic shut down visits, Reich and the rest of the Colts coaching staff spent plenty of time burning through Zoom calls and conferences with the big-armed passer, a process they put several quarterbacks through in this draft process.
“I think I talked to them more than any other team,” Eason said.
Ultimately, the Colts believed in Eason enough to put him on their draft board. Ballard believes the ESPN report was unfair; Terpening made it clear Saturday night that if a player’s going to make the Indianapolis draft board, the team has to be confident in his character.
“You get comfortable with them,” Reich said. “It’s not just as a football player, but as a person. You talk to them, you dig deep. You try to figure out what makes a guy tick. At the end of the day we felt like we were able to spend enough time with him to feel that way.”
The Colts had to feel confident that Eason can handle the pressure.
Because it will be there, even though Ballard made it clear Saturday night the team does not view him as the clear future at quarterback, saying it would be a mistake to consider Eason “the next messiah walking into town.”
The reality is that Eason’s a quarterback, a passer a lot of draft analysts touted as a late-first, second-round pick. A Colts fan base hungry for a franchise quarterback and an NFL media corps rightly obsessed with the quarterback position are going to watch his every move.
Eason should be ready for the scrutiny.
By now, it’s all he knows.
“Everybody is going to have their opinion, everyone is going to have things to say, especially at the quarterback position,” Eason said. “I know who I am deep down. I know what I can be and what I can do.”
And he knows it’s up to him to prove it.