The best quarterback to come into the draft in nearly a decade, Lawrence will enter the NFL with the billing of a generational signal-caller, a keen sense of self and a burning desire to prove absolutely nothing.
The following written content by Michael Rosenberg
The sun is setting in Laguna Beach, Calif., and Trevor Lawrence wants to enjoy it. He opens the blinds so the light can stream in. His fiancé, Marissa Mowry, sits with a glass of red wine. They met as kids and started dating seriously in high school, and soon they will move to . . . well, hang on.
“It’s beautiful out here,” Lawrence says. “Soaking this in is nice. . . . [I’m] just not looking too far ahead. I’m the type of guy if I look too far ahead, I get kind of stressed out.”
He knows what is coming. He has known it for years. On April 29, Lawrence is widely expected to be the NFL’s No. 1 draft pick. As his father, Jeremy, says, “He is leaving the little world of Clemson,” heading to Jacksonville, entering a sports-media industrial complex that will inflate expectations and then chastise him for not meeting them, a warped world that rewards people with warped priorities.
The NFL is a league for the obsessive and the petty, so much so that fans can identify most star quarterbacks by their slights: 199th pick in the draft; passed over by his hometown 49ers; told he should switch to receiver even after he won the Heisman as a quarterback; drafted behind Mitchell Trubisky. This is the league of Bill Parcells’s saying, “This is not a game for the most well-adjusted people”; of Baker Mayfield’s taking offense when his old Browns coach, Hue Jackson, took another job after Jackson was fired; of defensive backs Richard Sherman and Darrelle Revis’s feuding long after Revis retired. And now it is the league of Trevor Lawrence’s saying, “It’s not like I need this for my life to be O.K.
I want to do it because I want to be the best I can be. I want to maximize my potential. Who wouldn’t want to? You kind of waste it if you don’t.”
Lawrence is only 21. He finished Cartersville (Ga.) High three years ago and still peppers his sentences with like. But he lacks that youthful desire to conquer the world. Read more from Sports Illustrated.
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