FLOWERY BRANCH, Ga. -- When he’s on the field once a day warming up, catching passes from ball boys, or from someone only slightly older than those ball boys, (Falcons quarterback Matt Ryan) tight end Tony Gonzalez’s hands appear to be made out of glue.
On Tuesday during live hitting in full pads, Gonzalez caught a pass over the middle in a seam between three defenders, with Ryan’s pass flawlessly falling into his hands.
It’s the kind of stuff that has everyone surrounding the team ecstatic about its offensive possibilities. After practice on Wednesday, fans lining the fence at the team’s practice facility screamed his name for autographs.
However, for the Falcons fully to be able to take advantage of the 10-time Pro Bowler’s prodigious pass-catching talents, he first must learn the team’s playbook. It’s an arduous and time-consuming but essential task that Gonzalez has gotten a late start on, owing to the timing of his acquisition on April 23.
Gonzalez has not sugar-coated the time it takes to learn the new offense.
“It’s difficult,” he said. “It’s not an easy thing. It’s like learning a whole new language – well not a whole new language – I’ve always said it’s like learning the romance languages, going from Spanish to Italian or something like that.
“It’s one of those things where it’s up to me. I’ll get out of it as much as I put into it. I’ve been constantly trying to study it. I’ve got a long ways to go. I feel pretty comfortable with it.”
And while the coaching staff has made the prudent decision to tread lightly with the 33-year-old to preserve his body for the grueling 16-game regular season by exempting him from two-a-days, offensive coordinator Mike Mularkey said the flip side is that Gonzalez’s progress in learning the plays is not ideal.
“Physically, it’s excellent,” Mularkey said of Gonzalez’s one-a-days. “Mentally, it slows the pace of the learning process. Unless you do it -- I don’t care who you are -- unless you’re physically doing it, anybody can look in a book and study it and write it down, but can you go out and do it?”
Mularkey left his own implication hanging.
“…We’re also being smart,” he said. “He’s played a long time, he’s got a lot of snaps under his belt. He’s got to mentally run the play in his head. He’s got to do all of the ‘what ifs’ without doing the play.”
If there’s one factor in Gonzalez’s favor, it’s time. The Falcons started camp on Aug. 1 and their first game is not until Sept. 13, a whopping 44 days. It will give him plenty of time to do the theoretical (hitting the books) as well as the practical (running through the plays with pads on).
“… Preseason is long,” Gonzalez said. “Training camp is long. I feel I’m confident enough to know I can learn this offense before that first preseason game… It’s up to me to learn this offense. I don’t mind having that responsibility and I don’t take it lightly either because it’s going to help this team get better. The sooner I get on the same page as those guys, the better this team’s going to be.”
Coaches and teammates praise Gonzalez, the crown jewel of the team’s offseason moves, for his work ethic, his brains and for the willingness of a 13-year veteran to ask questions unabashedly.
Mularkey is a former tight end and tight ends coach who said he loves to be in meetings with those players and to coach the position. He described the process of educating his prize pupil.
“His is a little bit more rapid-fire since he wasn’t here for a lot of the OTAs when we got a lot of that introduced, so – he knows this, we’ve already had this talk – he’s got to catch up to the rest of the, even, first-year guys,” Mularkey said. “He’s behind even those guys from missing some time in the offseason. And he’s done a nice job.”
Tight ends coach Chris Scelfo said Gonzalez is “like a rookie.” On Monday, as the team took the field and Gonzalez caught passes to warm up, Scelfo quizzed Gonzalez on the names of plays. At times, Gonzalez responded with hand motions to think his way through the routes.
“Tony, he’s been in a lot of different offenses but this one’s totally new from the way we practice, from the way we meet, from the way we communicate, to the terms, I mean, everything’s new for him, Scelfo said.
Getting Gonzalez caught up is a responsibility that falls neither solely on the player himself nor on the coaching staff. His fellow tight ends and Ryan are in on the effort, too.
“We try to help him,” said tight end Justin Peelle, an eight-year veteran. “He asks us little questions. We do a lot of [situations where] you’ve got to know both positions – when we go two tight ends he’s got to know what both of them are doing – that gets a little tough on him, but for the most part he’s doing a really good job.”
Peelle said he thought the biggest obstacle for Gonzalez to overcome is getting the terminology down and “getting comfortable with some of the little details” that the Falcons do differently than what Kansas City -- Gonzalez’s former team -- did.
So at times when the team comes out to run plays, Ryan might motion for Gonzalez to move up a few inches or to go in motion.
“We’ve spent a lot of time talking about different things: What he sees, what I expect, what he’s expecting, so I think we’re starting to get a better feel for each other than we had in the past,” Ryan said. “We have four or five more weeks before the first game, hopefully we can get it ironed out before we get out there.”
Gonzalez owned up to his debt to Ryan for helping him figure it all out.
“He’s a smart guy,” Gonzalez said of Ryan. “Sometimes when I forget the play or whatever, he’s definitely going to tell me where I’m at. That’s a plus about a guy like Matt Ryan. He knows what everybody’s doing. That’s what makes him a great player.”
Day Five -- Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2009
1:30 p.m. Practice
@FalconsJMoore "Words of the Day"
- TRANSCRIPT: Head Coach Mike Smith talks about Douglas injury
- FEATURE: Gonzalez working hard to learn playbook
- NOTEBOOK: Douglas leaves field with knee injury
- RELEASE: Falcons release rookie receiver Lyons
- VIDEO: Head Coach Mike Smith | Gonzalez | Ryan
- BLOGS: J. Michael Moore's blog posts from Aug. 5, 2009
- PHOTOS: Images from Day No. 5 at camp (Flickr)
