JaMarcus Russell is set to possibly get a hand full of tryouts in the coming weeks, and if he does get a job he can thank Jeff Garcia for that one.
Garcia, the former NFL and CFL quarterback, has been tutoring Russell for the better part of six months now. Garcia told NFL AM that Russell has all the tools to be a successful quarterback in the NFL, his mindset simply needed work.
“Physically, he didn’t lose much as to where he was four years ago,” said Garcia, the former NFL signal-caller, who added “it was more the mindset” that needed repairing.
“Mentally, was the state where we needed to get him back to thinking football, speaking football, knowing football, being a student of the game. I don’t know if that’s ever been part of his background, to be a student of the game. That’s where he needs to get to. He needs to sleep, eat, drink football. It can’t be anything else if he wants this bad enough.”
Garcia hinted that when Russell first showed up to work, he seemed a defeated man.
When Russell showed up at TEST, he had “that slouch, early on, when he was kind of hunched over, hood pulled over his head walking in, not smiling as much,” Garcia said. “A month later, that hood was off his head, you could see the transformation.”