Matt Barkley - University of Southern California

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Matt
Barkley
USC QB, Sr.
Campaign Platform:
Restoring honor to Troy
TEAM SUCCESS
USC has 15 returning
starters and will be in
the mix for a national
championship. That
confers considerable
status: Seven of the
previous 12 Heisman
winners have been
quarterbacks who
played for the title.
THE NUMBERS
He threw for
3,528 yards and
39 TDs (with only
seven interceptions)
in ’11, and those stats
could increase with
the country’s best WR
combination, Robert
Woods and Marqise
Lee, at his disposal.
SCHEDULE
Barkley has early
(Stanford) and
late (Notre Dame)
showcases, but he
can make his biggest
impact on Nov. 3
against Oregon and
De’Anthony Thomas,
whom he will likely
face again in the
Pac-12 title game.
Trophy
life
The white-knight quarterback is
as much a part of Trojans
mythology as Student Body Right;
the latest one is a little more valiant
than all the others
I
By Lee Jenkins
n a back room at the original El
Cholo ­Spanish Cafe, a Mexican restaurant in mid-city Los Angeles so old
it claims to have invented the nacho,
pictures of USC immortals hang from
the peach adobe walls. Matt Barkley sits beneath them, picking apart
a sizzling skillet of chicken fajitas,
carefully scooping each one into a
flour tortilla and dressing it with green peppers.
“Did you really invent nachos?” he asks a waiter,
who nods wearily, as if he’s heard the question from
a thousand tourists.
“I love history,” Barkley says over the mariachi
music. He scans the full-color prints next to the
fireplace—Matt Leinart, Reggie Bush, the shiny Song
Girls—but his eyes settle on a ­black-and-white taken
more than 75 years ago, of a track star wearing a
determined expression and a cardinal singlet as he
glides along the perimeter of Bovard Field.
Barkley knows the man in the photo. As a freshman, he heard him speak to 160 students at USC’s
Annenberg School for Communication in a class
called Sports, Business, Media, and afterward the
professor arranged a meeting. What followed was
an improbable friendship, between a flaxen-haired
18-year-old from Orange County who could fire
a football through a cubby hole from 40 paces,
and a white-haired 92-year-old from South L.A.
who scampered a mile in four minutes and eight
seconds 16 years before Roger Bannister crossed
the threshold, roomed with Jesse Owens at the
1936 Olympics, flew a B-24 bomber that was shot
down over the Pacific in World War II, spent 47 days
avoiding sharks in a bullet-riddled raft and the next
two years wasting to within an inch of his life in
au g ust 20, 2012 | S p o r t s I l l u s t r at e D
college
football
preview
Matt
Barkley
At the end of last season Barkley had resolved to
move on to the NFL; three weeks later he presented
the Trojans with a 2012-changing Christmas gift.
S p o r t s I l l u s t r at e D | au g ust 20, 2012
Bird. Barkley thought about Zamperini
in June 2010 when the NCAA leveled the
Trojans with a two-year bowl ban and
stripped the program of 30 scholarships,
penalties imposed because of Bush’s relationship with a wannabe sports marketer.
“It’s not so bad,” Barkley told himself.
And he thinks of Zamperini again now,
with the masses predicting he will win
the Heisman and bring another national
title trophy to Heritage Hall. “Whatever
I do,” Barkley says, “I can’t ever measure
up to Louie.”
For all the recent problems with college
football, the sport has been rescued more
than once by its white-knight quarterbacks, and now here is Barkley, blending
the passion of Tim Tebow with the fastidiousness of Andrew Luck and the joy
of Robert Griffin III. He, more than any
coach or athletic director or university
president, oversaw the reconstruction of
USC football. And he, unlike the previous
coach and athletic director and university
president, could not bear to leave the job
incomplete. Without the sanctions, Barkley
would be in the NFL today, pulling down
about $15 million. But he is still riding
through campus on his single-speed bicycle, gray with red pedals, tires and rims,
because he wants to play in a postseason
game other than the 2009 Emerald Bowl.
He picks up the $15 tab at El Cholo, for fear
the NCAA will submarine any more of his
plans. “We got knocked down,” Barkley
says, “and we’re still on one knee. But we’re
ready to stand up and start jumping, and
I don’t want to miss that.”
Besides the shooting guard for the
Lakers and the CEO of Disney, there is
no loftier position in Southern California
than USC quarterback, and Barkley is the
position’s beau ideal: 6' 3", 230, with a
smile you’d see in a Colgate commercial, an
honor student who can play a guitar, build
a computer and deliver a sermon. “Matty
Trojan,” head coach Lane Kiffin calls him.
Barkley gives NFL scouts what they crave,
five-step drops and play-action passes and
deep out patterns, leaving the triple and
quadruple options to everybody else. His
style and pedigree are really no different
from those of the men who came before
him, from Carson Palmer to Matt Leinart to Mark Sanchez, other pro-style QBs
reared by powerful Orange County high
Matt Leinart met Paris
Hilton. Reggie Bush met Kim
Kardashian. Matt Barkley met
Louie Zamperini.
schools and influential private coaches.
But at USC, Barkley stands alone, an accidental archetype.
M
ri c ta pi a / I co n smi
Japanese prison camps. His story would
become the subject of a best-selling book,
Unbroken.
The leaders of L.A.’s de facto NFL team
are afforded stunning connections. Leinart met Paris Hilton. Bush met Kim Kardashian. Barkley met Louie Zamperini.
They grab lunch a couple of times a year,
along with Jeff Fellenzer, the adjunct who
introduced them. Barkley has been to Zamperini’s house in the Hollywood Hills. He
has invited him to practices at Howard
Jones Field. In 2009, when Barkley became
the first true freshman to be named USC’s
opening game quarterback, Zamperini sent
him a note with a verse from Timothy 4:12:
“Let no man despise thy youth; but be thou
an example.” Barkley asks the USC football
office to separate Zamperini’s letters from
the rest of his fan mail.
The two seem to have little in common,
other than that they both played a sport at
USC, seven decades apart. They’ve talked
about the raft, where Zamperini atrophied
to 60 pounds but recited poetry to sharpen
his mind, and the camps, where he was
singled out for regular beatings by a sergeant his fellow prisoners nicknamed the
att Barkley grew up on
a cul de sac in a gated
community in Newport
Beach, and MTV might
have tabbed him for one
of its sun-kissed reality shows if he weren’t
so precociously functional. He walked when
he was eight months old, rode a boogie board
when he was one and conquered a bike without training wheels when he was three.
He taught himself to read at five, the same
year he met a cute kindergartner named
Brittany Langdon, now a soccer player at
Seattle Pacific and still his girlfriend. The
only people to keep them apart were their
parents, who did not let them date until they
were 16. “We’ve got some pictures that will
be good for the wedding montage,” Barkley
says, making a rare telegraphed pass. He
went to The Pegasus School for the gifted in
Huntington Beach, broke apart old televisions and remote controls to see how they
worked, and built model planes and cars.
He did not play football until sixth grade,
but it came as naturally as everything else,
and he has been his team’s starting quarterback in every game he’s dressed for over
the past 10 years.
Orange County is a USC stronghold and
a QB haven, dating back to the days of Todd
Marino­v ich and Rob Johnson. The Barkleys were an SC family—Matt’s father, Les,
a partner at an investment firm, was an
All-America water polo player there—but
not the kind that went to football games on
Saturdays. They were puzzled when Matt,
at eight, promised his grandmother on a
videotaped birthday message that he would
throw touchdown passes for the Trojans.
He was still five years away from taking
his first snap, and when he finally joined
the Newport-Mesa Seahawks of the Junior
All-American League, his mother didn’t
understand why he had to leave the field
every time possession changed.
But Beverly Barkley wanted to support
her son, so she called the head coach at
Mater Dei High School in nearby Santa
Ana, which she heard had a strong football program. Mater Dei produces a college
quarterback every other year, including
Marinovich and Leinart, but in the early
2000s would-be signal-callers were scared
off by three vaunted brothers already in
the pipeline: the Forciers, Jason, Chris and
Tate. The Barkleys, who might have been
the only family in Orange County unfamiliar with the Forciers, were not fazed. And
au g ust 20, 2012 | S p o r t s I l l u s t r at e D
Matt
Barkley
S p o r t s I l l u s t r at e D | au g ust 20, 2012
piece of paper. Football allowed him to
meld his physical gifts with his mental
ones, because all the relevant information is in a playbook and on a projector.
“I process things like a computer,” Barkley says. “I love math because you can use
a function to produce a correct answer.
That’s how I treat football. You study the
­situation—somebody­is blitzing, the corner
is creeping—and then you look at the angles,
go through the matrix of possibilities and
figure out the right pass to throw.” His top
receiver at Mater Dei was his cousin Robbie
Boyer, who lived down the block. They’d run
plays in their gated community, on a field
that always seemed to be mowed, under a
sky that always seemed to be blue. “It was
pretty perfect,” Barkley says.
About a year ago he was approached by
the Christian organization I Am Second to
film a video about his life. Other athletes
and celebrities, ranging from Josh Hamilton
to Kathy Ireland, had recorded segments,
and when Barkley watched them, he heard
riveting accounts of drug addiction and
violence. “Sorry, I don’t have much for you,”
he told the producers. “I’ve never even had
a relative die. It’s been very PG.” Barkley
thought hard about what, if anything, he
could muster. “I ended up doing it,” he says,
“because we’ve all got a story.”
A
“I process
things like a
computer.
I love math
because
you can use
a function
to produce
a correct
answer.
That’s
how I treat
football.”
Barkley (with girlfriend, Langdon, below) has started at quarterback in every
game for which he has dressed, first at
Mater Dei (above), then at USC.
s a member of Rock Harbor church in Costa Mesa,
It is hard to identify a player who has
Barkley played guitar in the
suffered more from the fallout of ­college
worship band and took hufootball’s mercenary behavior than Barkley.
manitarian missions with
“He got here when USC football was bighis family during holidays. They helped
ger than it’s ever been, maybe bigger than
build houses in Haiti and Mexico, volunanybody has ever been,” says Kiffin. “And all
teered at orphanages in Nigeria and South
of a sudden. . . .” In an eight-month span in
Africa, and saw images Barkley never forgot:
2010, when everybody but Barkley saw the
slums, mass graves, boys playing on soccer
NCAA sledgehammer rising and falling in
fields covered with rocks and glass. At Mater
slow motion, USC became the site of a highDei he and his parents founded Monarchs
powered exodus: Carroll bolted for the Sefor Marines, an organization that raised
ahawks and took along offensive
$300,000 in educational bonds
coordinator Jeremy Bates; athfor the children of fallen soldiers
letic director Mike Garrett was
from nearby Camp Pendleton.
si.com video
fired; president Steven Sample
Barkley visited the base with
resigned. In early January 2010,
teammates every year to landwhen Barkley was still a freshscape the youth center and meet
man and USC seemed to have
the kids. “I’m grateful that I saw
no coaching staff, he watched
more than Newport,” Barkley
the U.S. A rmy A ll-A merican
says. “Otherwise, when everyStarting with
Clemson’s Tajh
Bowl on television and counted
thing started going on at USC,
Boyd and the ACC,
the players who had made verI could have been like: Why is
Andy Staples and
Stewart Mandel
bal commitments to Carroll.
this happening to me?”
preview each BCS
conference at
SI.com/cfb
J o se Luis /C a l Sp o r t M ed i a (ba rk l e y ); S t ree t er L e c k a /G e t t y im ag e s (SI .co m)
before Matt’s freshman year, the Forciers
unexpectedly moved back to San Diego
because the commute to Mater Dei had
become too exhausting, leaving a 14-yearold atop the depth chart. “Matt Barkley is
the kind of person the stars line up for,”
says Monarchs coach Bruce Rollinson. “He
lies in a bed of roses.” His first pass was a
48-yard touchdown, and Kiffin, then USC’s
offensive coordinator, drove down Interstate 5 in the spring to see him practice.
A week later Kiffin was back with head
coach Pete Carroll, to offer a scholarship.
Barkley would not take an official visit to
another college.
The connection between USC and Mater
Dei, both private schools in urban areas, is
long-standing. Rollinson played receiver
and defensive back for the Trojans, and
when he took over the Monarchs 22 years
ago, he implemented a system similar to
the one he had learned from John McKay.
High school and college programs switched
to the spread, but Mater Dei and USC stuck
with their pro-style offense, which requires
a pocket passer who can look off two receivers and knock the wind out of the third.
A Mater Dei QB spends his lunch break
watching film, learns how to analyze cutups on his laptop and recognizes defensive
fronts by his junior season. Free time comes
on Saturdays at noon, when players are
let out early to watch USC—or UCLA if so
inclined. “Mater Dei is a mini-SC,” says
Trojans center Khaled Holmes, who has
protected Barkley since ninth grade.
Monarchs quarterbacks looking for extra
tutelage are steered to nationally known
passing gurus. Leinart worked with Steve
Clarkson. Marinovich worked with Bill
Cunerty. Barkley worked with both. On
Tuesdays he met Clarkson at Area H outside
the Rose Bowl, with a stack of five-by-seven
index cards detailing his reads. “You don’t
want to be outside this stadium,” Clarkson
told him. “You want to be in it.” On Sundays
he met Cunerty at Saddleback College in
nearby Mission Viejo, where they shortened
his delivery and loosened his grip. “If the
safety is reading what I’m doing, could I
show a high spine angle and then throw
low?” Barkley asked one day. “College players don’t even ask me questions like that,”
a beaming Cunerty replied.
Barkley is a visual learner, so much so
that when his mom wants him to take out
the trash, she has to write the task on a
Kirby L ee / US Pre ss w ire
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“They’re all left hanging,” Barkley thought.
He started calling recruits from his
apartment, and when he needed more
numbers, he went to the football office and
set up a makeshift phone bank. “I’m still
here,” he told them. “I’m going to stick it
out. We’re going to make it happen. USC is
bigger than one person, one coach.” Among
those he reached was Robert Woods, now
his primary receiver. “He was the spokes-
man for the university,” says Trojans punter Kyle Negrete, “and
he was 19.”
Barkley felt uncomfortable
talking in public, so his parents
role-played interviews in their
living room, pelting him with the
toughest questions they could
conjure. When the sanctions were
announced in June, Les told him:
“This is going to end. You’re going
to come out the other side. Do you
want to mope or do you want to
lead?” Barkley drove to Heritage
Hall and faced the cameras. Two
days later he held a barbecue for
the team at his parents’ home in
Newport. “They were so resolute,”
Beverly says. “You feel like, ‘It will
be great, we’ll stick together, and
we’ll show everybody.’ You don’t
realize how dark the cloud is
going to get.”
Six players transferred, two recruits decommitted. Practices,
which used to be like block parties, were closed to fans. Barkley
couldn’t even invite Zamperini
anymore. Beverly keeps a journal
in a spiral notebook, and during
2010 she was filling about a page a day. She
titled it Year of Trials. In the last two months
of the season, the Trojans lost five games.
They used to go three years without losing
five games. USC accepted its bowl ban immediately but was ­a llowed to delay scholarship reductions for two years, a small
victory that proved significant. The Trojans
would land a top five recruiting class, which
included Max Wittek, a decorated quarterback from Newport Beach who starred
at Mater Dei and studied under Clarkson.
Barkley prayed for brighter days. He
remains deeply religious, the player who
used to lead the team mass at Mater Dei,
and still returns to address the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. When he broke
his collarbone in high school, during a
quarterfinal playoff game, he calmly told
­R ollinson, “It’s O.K. It’s God’s plan.”
The coach cracked, “Well, I wish He had
planned a different protection.” Barkley’s
faith prompts inevitable comparisons to
Tebow, but Barkley is more understated.
“They are polar opposites,” says a friend.
“Matt doesn’t preach to anybody. He’s not
in the huddle saying, ‘Praise the Lord,
now let’s score a touchdown.’ It’s all inside him.” Barkley did praise God in a
postgame interview as a freshman, after
USC beat Ohio State, and the backlash was
startling. “I love to share my faith, but you
have to know the time and place,” Barkley
says. “I’ve learned that people don’t always
want to hear your thoughts on religion and
politics. You don’t need to shove it down
their throats.”
He is no Hollywood scenester, but he
is no recluse, either. He line dances and
strums his Taylor guitar and DJs at parties. “It’s always a unique mix,” says Trojans safety T.J. McDonald. “House music,
hip-hop and Christian rock.” When renowned DJs swing through L.A., Barkley
catches them at mega clubs like Avalon
and Greystone Manor. “I’ll have a beer
or two, but I don’t drink hard alcohol,”
he says. “I’m there for the music, to jump
around and go crazy to the music.” The
next morning, he might be at the Getty
Center, staring at oil paintings and listening to recordings about each one on
museum headphones. “I’m fine by myself
in a room looking at art all day,” he says.
The brushstrokes on a canvas, and the
scales on a sheet of music, are like X’s and
O’s on a well-conceived game plan.
The USC playbook expanded midway
through last year to include more singleback and three- or four-receiver sets, a break
from the Trojans’ traditional I-formation.
While Luck was hailed for making his own
calls at the line of scrimmage, Barkley did
the same, completing more than 69% of his
passes and throwing for 39 touchdowns,
both school records. “He’s impossible to
prepare for,” says Utah defensive tackle Star
Lotulelei, “because he’s changing plays all
the time.” Barkley rediscovered his sunny
equilibrium, and when USC throttled UCLA
in the season finale, he stayed in the game to
hit Robbie Boyer, his cousin and neighbor.
As Barkley hugged his parents and younger
­siblings—twins Sam and Lainy are USC
sophomores; Sam is a 400-meter hurdler
on the track team and Lainy works in the
football office—he thought, Great ending.
I’m ready. It’s time to go.
Three weeks later, however, he called Kiffin to Newport and offered him a Christmas
ornament with a message on the back: one
more year. It was a dramatic shift but
not all that surprising, when you consider
who assisted in the decision.
au g ust 20, 2012 | S p o r t s I l l u s t r at e D
college
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Matt
Barkley
L
S p o r t s I l l u s t r at e D | au g ust 20, 2012
When the clouds loomed most ominously over the
football program, Barkley would think of the sacrifices
of good buddy and fellow Trojan Zamperini.
And Barkley thinks
of Zamperini now.
“Whatever I do,” he
says. “I can’t ever
measure up to Louie.”
perch­—credible title hopes,
the nation’s best recruiting
class and a new $70 million
training facility that covers
110,000 square feet—but
Barkley did not lift the Trojans alone. A resilient senior class, from
McDonald to Holmes to defensive end
Devon Kennard, stood with him. Barkley
thinks about what he would have missed
had he declared for the draft. He wouldn’t
have been able to go to Port-au-Prince last
spring with 15 teammates and help build
four houses. He wouldn’t have been able to
plan double dates this summer with Holmes
and their girlfriends. And in the first week
of August he wouldn’t be at Palermo, a redchecked tablecloth Italian restaurant in Los
Feliz, eating chicken Parmesan across from
a living history lesson.
L
ouie Zamperini is talking
about a race in the ’36 Olympics, when he faltered in the
5,000 meters but ran the final
lap with such fury that Adolf
Hitler insisted on meeting him. Barkley peppers Zamperini with questions. Zamperini
chides Barkley for not sampling the cannoli.
Employees approach Barkley—“It was all fall-
ing apart,” the manager gushes, “but you kept
it together”—and ask to take a picture with
him. Barkley asks to take one with Zamperini.
They stand up and sling their arms over each
other’s shoulders. Fellenzer, the professor who
brought them together 31⁄2 years ago, holds
the camera. He fits USC’s oldest and youngest living legends into the frame (above, left).
Whenever Zamperini comes to campus,
Fellenzer introduces him the same way:
“Greatest Trojan of ’em all.” He wonders
how he will introduce Barkley, assuming
this season unfolds as expected. He seems
to have been pondering it for a while. “What
I’d probably call him,” Fellenzer says, “is the
greatest Trojan football player of ’em all.” ±
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ast Dec. 12, the Seahawks
hosted the Rams, and Barkley
met Carroll at a hotel in Belle­
view, Wash. They talked for
two hours. “We picked up like
nothing ever happened,” Barkley says. Carroll did not admit what is evident to anyone
who watches the Seahawks—that life is a lot
more fun with the Trojans—but he was clear
about the benefits of a fourth year at USC.
“This is a way to max out my connection to
the school and the relationships I’ve made,”
Barkley says. “If I need a job someday, I’ll
probably be able to get one through a Trojan,
and that’s a securing thought.” Carroll had
brought Barkley to USC and, in the most
subtle way, eased him back. No one ever said
the guy couldn’t recruit.
Barkley lives with McDonald in an apartment nestled among fast-food joints near
the Coliseum, with both of their number 7
jerseys on the wall. They will host Thursdaynight barbecues this season to keep teammates out of trouble. Barkley doesn’t know
if he’ll even have time to visit ­Brittany at
Seattle Pacific. He is taking only one class,
Macintosh, OSX, and iOS Forensics, about
the infiltration of data servers and security websites. “I’m stoked about it,” he says.
Barkley is, in ­McDonald’s words, “a tech
geek” whose favorite sites include Gizmodo,
Lifehacker, Engadget and iMore. He recently
cracked open his MacBook so he could rebuild it with extra RAM and a solid-state
hard drive. He also put a brake on his singlespeed bike, which he used to have to stop
with his feet, a practice that made trainers
understandably nervous.
In a social media class last semester,
Barkley designed a free mobile app to promote USC through stats, chats and videos.
The athletic department wanted to name
it after him, a 21st-century way to launch
a Heisman Trophy campaign, but Barkley
resisted. The app, now called Project Tro7an,
features a series called “Matt Vs.” in which
Barkley competes against other USC athletes
in their respective sports. You can, for example, watch him suck wind in a water polo
match, which certainly won’t earn him any
Heisman votes. Even at Barkley’s childhood
home, self-promotion is scarce, with only
one small picture of him wearing a football
uniform. When a television crew recently
toured, the cameramen looked glum. “They
wanted to see the shrine,” Les says.
USC football has reclaimed its usual