Blind Ambition | ✓

04 | The Alpha and the Omega

When you're a high school football player trying to play at the highest collegiate level possible, your scouting report is your golden fucking ticket. Your strengths, your weaknesses, your height, your weight, your shoe size, and every sordid offer letter and school visit you've ever done, all out in the open for coaches to read. Check one for yes. Check two for no. Check three for verbally committed to a school this dumbass doesn't even want to go to.

Dallas Gunther | 4-star

Dual-Threat Quarterback

6'3" | 194 lbs

Class of 2021

New Livingston Day School | Fairfield County, CT

10 OFFERS

COMMITMENT STATUS: CORNELL UNIVERSITY - VERBAL

STRENGTHS: pocket presence, decision making, mobility and running ability.

WEAKNESSES: arm strength

There was a video of me that went viral after Chris posted it to his 145,000 Instagram followers of me stiff-arming a defender and hurdling him during the playoffs last year. Running ability was added to my strengths column after that.

Football recruitment and commitment was different than most other sports, and not just because it drew more attention than flies to shit. Football was a fall sport, which meant the deadlines for commitment weren't until the Spring of senior year, after the season had ended. But if I had wanted to play baseball, I would have had to commit to a school last year.

Football was the exception to everything.

Chris and I loaded my BMW coup with our football bags and gear at 4:30 in the morning to make it to Syracuse by 7. We grabbed a case of Red Bull at the gas station on the way out of Fairfield and starting shotgunning them as soon as we hit the highway.

"I don't think you give your dad enough credit," Chris shook his head as he looked away from me and out the window, watching the early morning traffic zip by. "I mean, if he was dead to rights set on you going to Cornell, would he even let you come to this?"

I scoffed. "Have you met my dad? It's an ACC invitational camp - keyword being invitational. Just something else for him to brag about."

"Yeah, well the more you guys brag and flex, the more I'm sure that Cornell coach loses sleep waiting for your official letter of intent."

"Please don't point your moral compass at me," I groaned. "You're the one who is literally drowning in offer letters and won't make a decision, despite the fact that everyone and their mother knows you want to go to Alabama."

"That's different," Chris mumbled, turning his gaze back out the window.

Chris Thompson was so anti-confrontational that it actually gave him a damn near conniption every time he had to tell someone "no," afraid of upsetting them or damaging relationships.

I was enough of a people-pleaser to understand how Chris felt, which is I guess why out of everyone on the football team, he and I were always the closest. It went beyond simple quarterback/wide receiver chemistry. We'd dragged each other out of trenches and into the end zones since we were 11, and the only thing that mattered back then was what color Gatorade we drank. Things on the outside were far more complicated now, but we still sat around and listened to All The Small Things by blink-182 just like we did back then.

The ACC Summer Invitational Camp was held at Syracuse University in the infamous Carrier Dome. Even though it had a retractable roof and air conditioning, the roof was open, and the summer morning sun came down on us hard. There were about 150 guys that showed up, all in some variation of the 'camp uniform' - you were either team Nike or team Under Armor, in red or blue sleeveless compression shirts like a group of star-spangled assholes.