Dallas Cowboys

Eastern Illinois has forged an unlikely pipeline to the NFL

Published Jun. 30, 2017 6:28 p.m. ET

foxsports

CHARLESTON, Illinois — If a football player comes to Eastern Illinois on a recruiting visit, he’ll often get flown into Indianapolis, then be driven two hours West through cornfields, more cornfields, and a billboard that says “Welcome to Illinois Amish Country.” The school was founded as a two-year teacher’s college; the student body has never surpassed 9,000. The football program has had flashes of success, but isn’t rooted in championship tradition; the Panthers had just one winning season in a 30-year stretch before 1977.

None of this help explains how Eastern Illinois University has become the source of the NFL’s unlikeliest pipeline. In Week 1, it was the only school to claim a starting quarterback (New England’s Jimmy Garoppolo), a head coach (the Saints’ Sean Payton) and a general manager (Chicago’s Ryan Pace). Had Tony Romo been healthy, the Panthers would have been the only college program to claim two Week 1 starting quarterbacks.

Is there something in the water in Charleston? “Well,” says Chiefs offensive coordinator and former Vikings head coach Brad Childress, who attended EIU for a year. “I don’t know if there’s something in the water, but maybe it’s something in the beer, because there’s only about two places to drink down there.”

“It’s really remarkable when you think about it,” says former NFL head coach Mike Shanahan, two-time Super Bowl champion and EIU class of 1974. “We’re just a very modest school. And nothing has really changed much since I’ve been around.”

Perhaps there’s an EIU experience each of these men shared that led to their success. Last week, I drove down to Charleston in an attempt to identify it. With the help of long-time Panthers radio play-by-play man Mike Bradd, we looked back at the time spent on campus for some of the NFL’s biggest headliners.

We began with the three quarterbacks: Garropolo, Romo and Payton. Though Bob Spoo had a 25-year tenure as head coach that spanned from 1987-2011—covering Romo and the recruitment and first two seasons of Garropolo—each man played under different head coaches and in completely different systems. Payton was a tad short, at 5' 11", and the program was running a West Coast offense that fit his skill set. Under Spoo, Romo got to play as a true drop-back passer. Garoppolo began his career in that mold. But when Spoo retired the school hired Dino Babers, fresh off a stint as a Baylor assistant, where the offense put up huge numbers with quarterbacks like Robert Griffin III. “Everyone assumed Babers would have preferred a running quarterback, like RG3,” Bradd says. “But he went with Garropolo,” who ended up adapting to a hybrid up-tempo, no-huddle offense.

One thing all three quarterbacks shared: None were awarded the starting job right away. There’s no enablement at a school like EIU, and certainly no entitlement. Payton actually came in with another freshman quarterback, who he roomed with, and that player started for a full season before Payton won the job. Romo, famously, was only offered a partial scholarship—“Shows how much we knew, huh,” Spoo quips—and even was a member of a fraternity as he sat out his freshman season. Garoppolo didn’t earn a start until four games in, as a JUCO transfer won the job in training camp. That’s another thing about EIU: By virtue of being in the FCS, it attracts transfers every year, and if they come from a bigger, FBS program, they can play (and start) right away. So each of these quarterbacks, who were lightly recruited out of high school, had to compete for their job again each summer.

Bradd notes that all of them were football junkies. When the bus would stop at rest stops to road games—EIU busses to nearly every away game—Romo would often get off and throw passes in the gas station parking lot. Garoppolo regularly stayed 30 minutes after every practice to do extra drills.

“There’s something about being at a school like Eastern Illinois where you have a chip on your shoulder and feel you need to earn everything,” says Spoo. “Some of these kids wanted to go to the state institution at Illinois and just weren’t good enough at the time to be recruited. But they would work every day to prove they were.”

“You weren't that empowered as a football player,” Childress says. “You didn't get a false sense of self.”

As for the coaches, Childress, a transfer from Illinois, would have played quarterback or safety but suffered an injury before he ever played a game. “For the people who just aren’t good enough, you learn a little bit more about yourself, and sometimes that makes the best coach,” he says. “Those are the guys who have a burning desire just to get a paycheck in football.” Shanahan sustained a devastating injury in practice; a hard hit ruptured his kidney ruptured and his heart stopped for nearly 30 seconds (a priest was brought to the hospital to administer last rites). After that abrupt stop to his playing career, Shanahan moved on to coaching. Pace, an undersized defensive end who graduated one year before Romo, knew he didn’t have the skill set to play professionally. The day after graduation he drove a beat-up car from Charleston to New Orleans for a scouting internship with the Saints.

Of course, when the players made the NFL they looked out for the EIU fraternity. Romo, undrafted, could have gone to any team but signed with the Cowboys at the urging of their then-quarterbacks coach, Payton. “Well, I actually tried signing him first,” says Shanahan, coaching in Denver at the time. “I obviously had followed Tony’s career at EIU and wanted him on our squad. The Cowboys offered him $10,000, we offered $20,000. But he chose the Cowboys because they had fewer quarterbacks and he’d be higher up on the depth chart…. kind of hurts though when you offer him double the money.”

It ended up working out for Romo. And things are working out for EIU. Though the state of Illinois is undergoing immense budget cuts (in June the university president wrote a public letter reaffirming the school would not close, even during a state funding crisis) EIU’s famous alumni have given the school a boost.

In the Sunday Night Football opener pitting Garoppolo against the Arizona Cardinals, Bob Costas narrated a two and a half minute video about the quarterback’s ascent.

“I was told that a 30-second ad in that game cost $665,000,” says EIU’s athletic director Tom Michael. “The game is in 23 million households. You do the math. What I know is that there’s no way we could afford that type of advertising, or exposure.”

This article originally appeared on