The buses were rumbling, waiting to take the Oklahoma football players — dejected after a stunning loss to an unranked team spoiled their undefeated season — back to campus. They flew home from Kansas State in silence, drudged down the steps to the tarmac, and headed for their rides.
The loss, Hurts told the players that surrounded him, happened. They couldn’t change the result but they could control their future. Their attitude, Hurts said, was wrong as they simply expected to win because they thought they were the better team. You can’t do that. “He got into the huddle, broke the team down,” said Shane Beamer, then Riley’s assistant head coach. “It was pretty evident then that this guy was about the right stuff. There was no part of me that thought, ‘This is a different guy from who we thought we were getting.’ He was actually even better.”Hurts and Basquine sat together in the grass later that spring, taking off their cleats after the new quarterback threw a series of passes to his new weapon.
He easily could have been a mercenary as he built his stock for the NFL draft. But Hurts, from his first practice to his first throws with a new receiver, invested in his team. Guaranteeing Hurts a job, Riley said, would have sent a poor message to the rest of the team as they all needed to win their spots. The other QBs, who were on campus before Hurts arrived, would get their shot.
“The best way to explain it is that he’s a very intense, process-driven, hyper-focused guy which obviously has some huge benefits,” Riley said. “But at times, I thought it restricted him with the way he played and at times, being a little too robotic.” “If he got anything from us in that year, learning to see the game and approach it a little bit differently, learning to play a little more free-flowing and trusting that, I thought it helped him a lot in his year with us,” Riley said. “And I think as I’ve seen him grow in the NFL, I think that was an important step for him that he did a great job with us.”Hurts was no longer robotic on the field but he still seemed a bit automated away from it.
Hurts, a few months after sitting in the grass with Basquine, invited the receiver over to his apartment. Hurts had an old Xbox 360 and NCAA Football 14, the last edition in the video game series that halted production when Hurts was a freshman in high school.