James Tabary removes his shoulder pads 15 minutes after Thursday’s practice. Receivers Kent Shelby and Parker Orgeron remain on the field while offensive coordinator Landon Hoefer lingers behind.
The receivers run unguarded routes. Tabary, then in his third day as McNeese’s new starting quarterback, releases a tight spiral.
Shelby, an Archbishop Shaw product, catches the pass from a former high school rival with a smile.
“Got that little New Orleans swag to him,” Shelby says of his new quarterback, a Holy Cross graduate. “I love what he’s doing with this team. I love those other quarterbacks, but he’s just more vocal and he actually is around the team.”
Shelby watches the frequent dance battles in the locker room. Tabary’s always dancing, too, but the quarterback’s moves are not subject to judgement.
“Because he actually has the heart to do it,” Shelby says. “A lot of people wouldn’t even do it, they’d just watch.”
Instead, here’s Tabary in the center of it all — a 6-foot-2 quarterback who five months ago saw his meticulously mapped out life in Jonesboro, Arkansas, become a winding journey that’s brought him back home.
“James is a leader and not a follower and that’s his innate ability,” his mother, Ann, says.
Coaches in elementary school told her “where James goes, they’ll follow.”
***
Before the ambiguous Arkansas State dismissal, before rapidly ascending McNeese State’s depth chart and before he was Buddy Geis’ unnoticed gem as an unoffered, rising high school senior, James Tabary was throwing an NFL football.
Wyatt Harris never allowed Tabary to train with anything smaller than the ball with a 29-inch circumference. Harris’ clients at Sonic Boom Speed Conditioning and Strength Training Academy in New Orleans include former Saints Robert Meachem, Marques Colston and Mark Ingram.
Tabary came as a developing sixth grader who still enjoyed baseball and wasn’t yet cognizant of the physical abilities he possessed or, perhaps, the work it took to refine them.
It was on a Thursday in 2007, when future Super Bowl champion receiver Jacoby Jones was preparing for the NFL combine under Harris’ watchful eye.
Thursdays were “skillset days.” Jones’ task was to run a complete route tree. Four curls to the right, then four to the left. Four slants to the right and four more to the left.
Harris had one problem.
“I didn’t have a quarterback,” the trainer laughed Thursday.
His elite college passer, Scott Buisson, had gone back to school at Arkansas-Monticello, where he’d set 17 school records.
It left just Tabary.
“Jacoby Jones coming out of a break is like D’Anthony Thomas hitting the freeway,” Tabary said. “It was unbelievable … the ball never fit in my hand either. It was like throwing a Nerf ball, it looked like.”
It was a hard day, Harris recalls, that required number of re-throws. Tabary remembers the balls hitting dead in the dirt. Always his own harshest critic, Tabary turned to Harris in despair.
“Hey, you want this,” Harris told him, “so you’re getting it early.”
***
Buddy Geis estimates there were 17 Division I quarterbacks at the 2012 “Top Gun Showcase,” though Tabary, the rising Holy Cross senior who caught his eye, did not hold one scholarship offer. Five or six Division I coaches were there.
Tabary ranked No. 1 or 2 on each man’s quarterback list, says Geis, a 30-year veteran of both college and professional football. Troy Aikman’s quarterback coach while with the Dallas Cowboys and Calvin Johnson’s wide receivers coach at Georgia Tech, Geis invited Tabary to train in Jacksonville for a few days.
“I would tell him things,” Geis said, “(and) he took it in immediately and he regurgitated it right back to you. There were so many pluses about this kid.”
Tabary landed at Arkansas State.
“Always been the type of kid that has his whole life planned out,” Ann says. “There is no Plan B or Plan C.
Soon, Plan A was wrecked. Tabary, a three-game starter as a redshirt freshman, was dismissed from the team for, as Lance Guidry terms it, “getting advice from a former coach that used to be there,” breaking the team’s trust.
Tabary says the transgression was “somewhere along that path.”
“It was difficult, I’m not going to lie,” Tabary says. “That’s the team I went to out of high school and the team I was really committed to. But it didn’t work out. God has a plan and I ended up here at McNeese and I’m actually a lot happier.”
Harris analogizes the experience as a bad day, 24 hours long. Tabary only got 15 or 20 minutes to vent, he says, which the two friends did on the phone.
“Everything he needed to go through emotionally was on the phone that night,” Harris said. “‘That’s done. Now what’s the next plan?”
Tabary estimates he had nine offers in that first week — Ball State, East Carolina, Florida International and Northwestern State were among them.
“My thinking: Arkansas State, you don’t know how lucky you were to have him and you let him get away, that’s how I feel,” Geis said. “You don’t get a chance at Arkansas State to get a quarterback like James Tabary.”
Geis and Tabary spoke shortly after he committed to McNeese.
“You going to McNeese will be the greatest thing for you because you’re going to be in your type of offense where you’ll get to show yourself,” Geis told him.
“And he fell in love with that place.”
***
The differences in offensive schemes are hardly noticeable. Walt Bell, Tabary’s offensive coordinator at Arkansas State during his redshirt freshman, runs a frenetic system predicated on quick decisions, jet sweeps and screens.
The Red Wolves were 12th in the nation in scoring offense last season, where Tabary completed 65 passes for 788 yards across eight games with three starts. Bell was hired to the same position at Maryland in December.
Tabary was gone in April, 490 miles away to a similar system where Hoefer’s focus is getting the football to one of his five skill players — in whatever means necessary.
“I wouldn’t say anything’s more difficult.” Tabary says, “There’s just more freedom here. If I see something that me and (Shelby) can connect on, then I’m going to call it, and coach Hoefer has given me the freedom to do that which is absolutely awesome.”
Added Hoefer: “A lot of people today, they need a mobile guy, not necessarily a runner or a guy that can create his own space. However, we’re trying to get it to all five of our skill guys and it takes somebody with intelligence and the ability to process fast. And he can definitely do that.”
Tabary is Hoefer’s second transfer quarterback in two seasons, following Daniel Sams last season.
With a year’s hindsight, Hoefer regrets his early preparations with Sams. Sams wasn’t ready for two-a-days, Hoefer says, and the staff spent more time teaching than playing.
“And that was my fault,” Hoefer says. “I kind of learned from that and laid it out for James. It was an eight-week plan of ‘This is what you need to learn and this is when you need to know it by.’”
Tabary required four weeks. Then he began reaching for and drawing on Hoefer’s practice scripts, the product of Tabary’s type-A, obsessive approach to football. Ann calls him nightly at 11:30 p.m., at which time her son informs her he’s still at the football facility.
“He attacks everything, whether it’s out here or up there in the meeting room, he attacks everything with enthusiasm,” Hoefer said.
So a perfect fit?
“Pretty damn close,” Hoefer says with a grin.
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