The seasons and circumstances come and go, and one thing keeps being true: Nobody ever seems to pick Matt McGloin.
He is 27, a quarterback, a fill-in and an occasional overachiever for one team or another down on its luck. Now, again, the Oakland Raiders turn to him and hope.
This past weekend, Oakland starter Derek Carr broke a bone in his lower right leg, more than likely sidelining him for the rest of the season and bringing a promising year – with one game left, the Raiders are 12-3 and have a fragile hold on the AFC’s No. 2 playoff seed – to a disappointing, uncertain end.
Coach Jack Del Rio told reporters Monday, two days after his team defeated the Indianapolis Colts and Carr fractured his fibula, that the Raiders are nonetheless a good team, poised to win the AFC West and make Oakland’s first postseason appearance since reaching the Super Bowl following the 2002 season.
But now it’s with Carr, one of the league’s best young quarterbacks, on the sideline. Now it’s with a backup who has attempted four passes this season. Now it’s with McGloin, who in his fourth season remains largely unknown throughout the NFL – including, it seemed this week, to Del Rio, who said he’s still “getting a sense of who (McGloin) is and what he is and what he likes and what he does.”
He is a quarterback who took an unusual route to this point, who teams tend to get stuck with in times of great distress, who no team has chosen – at least in the traditional sense – since McGloin played high school football in Scranton, Pa.
“He relishes the role of the underdog,” said Paul McGloin, the quarterback’s older brother who also coached Matt McGloin’s high school baseball team. “The more you feel like he can’t do it, the more he wants to do it.”
The Raiders didn’t choose this late-season scenario, and in 2015, Del Rio inherited McGloin from the staff of his predecessor, Dennis Allen. The Raiders didn’t select McGloin in the 2013 NFL draft, instead bringing him on as a rookie free agent and training camp long shot to compete with Terrelle Pryor and Matt Flynn. Now more than three years later, Pryor is a Cleveland wide receiver and Flynn is out of the league; McGloin, as he has quietly done for years now, just waited his turn.
That’s what he did at Penn State, too. Not even the Nittany Lions picked him initially, though McGloin walked on, hung around and eventually led the Big Ten in passing as a redshirt senior in 2012. He had weathered the Joe Paterno storm, publicly supporting a coach who had supported McGloin, who later became an anchor of new Penn State Coach Bill O’Brien’s offense after Paterno was fired. He would lead the Lions in a comeback thriller against Northwestern in 2010, McGloin turning a 21-0 deficit into a 35-21 win and Paterno’s 400th victory. He would later lead Penn State to victories against Michigan, Iowa and Wisconsin.
McGloin wound up impressing O’Brien so much, had dedicated himself to learning a complicated scheme so thoroughly, had learned and followed instructions so willingly that O’Brien – who left State College after two seasons to take over the Houston Texans – seemed to make it his mission that McGloin would at least get a chance in the NFL.
McGloin indicated in 2013 that O’Brien had taught him to mind the details during their year together at Penn State. O’Brien, a former longtime New England assistant, had been a mentor to McGloin; he taught him the game as those at the highest level played and evaluated it, and the coach later wrote letters to NFL executives to vouch for McGloin.
“I didn’t want them to judge a book by its cover,” O’Brien was quoted as saying by Pennlive.com following a 2013 radio show appearance, and as much as anything, McGloin’s success was O’Brien’s success. The coach would parlay his reputation as a quarterbacks guru into an NFL head coaching job in 2014, and perhaps his most impressive student had been the 6-feet-1 former walk-on from Scranton.
And so Raiders General Manager Reggie McKenzie, architect of what has become the NFL’s most impressive franchise turnaround, gave McGloin that chance as an undrafted free agent. Allen, the former Raiders coach, went with McGloin as his starter for six games in 2013. Though Oakland finished 4-12, leading them a few months later to select Carr in the draft’s second round, McGloin had made enough of an impression that the team retained him as the young passer’s backup.
Paul McGloin, the quarterback’s brother, said Matt studied sports psychology and worked to mentally prepare himself in case of an emergency. He imagined himself under center and in the backfield, making reads and considering check-down options. He arrived at the team facility before most everyone, planning for this kind of scenario to play out yet again.
Paul McGloin said he has heard analysts express doubt the last few days that his brother can lead the Raiders into and through the playoffs. He has heard about how the team never picked this scenario and is surely in trouble with such an inexperienced passer now leading them.
If they get on a protective older brother’s nerves, a young quarterback out in Oakland is motivated by the doubt. To Paul McGloin, these are all reactions he and his brother have heard – and seen proved wrong – before.
“A lot of people would’ve quit by now; a lot of people would’ve said to hell with it and chosen another career path,” Paul McGloin said. “He’s never going to be the sexy pick. But if you’d bet against him up until this point, you would’ve lost a lot.”