FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — He was the lone NFL assistant to visit in Lubbock, Texas, that afternoon to meet the too-small linebacker. He asked to watch the linebacker’s worst game with him, worked him out and then did something that surprised the draft prospect.
“I didn’t do 24 bench presses like you wrote — I only did 22,” Zach Thomas told Miami Dolphins assistant Mike Westhoff.
Maybe that’s the moment it started, the first of several dots you can connect to Jimmy Johnson making the draft pick with the greatest value in team history for any player not named Dan Marino.
It’s a story worth the telling as the Dolphins latest draft class gets indoctrinated in June workouts. As last year’s draft class reassembles with a year’s knowledge. And the first year’s class in this rebuild returns as veterans.
The rebuild is done now. The big sacrifice given. All the players are here, all the clay there to be molded — the three draft classes in this makeover who will define if it works or not.
At the center of it all, beyond the analytics and quantitative numbers, deeper than the draftnik ideas and inner-team discussions, the truth comes down to a simple equation that hasn’t changed even if so much has through the years: It takes talent to find talent.
No one in the last few decades found talent like Johnson. It’s why sports leaders still make the trek down the overseas highway to his beloved Keys to pick his fertile mind.
But Johnson needed help gathering information. He built a network of smart scouts and assistants. Hall of Famer Jason Taylor? Washington coach Norv Turner, a Jimmy aide in Dallas, said the skinny defensive end from Akron was the best player on the Senior Bowl team Turner coached — but Washington’s execs didn’t like him. Jimmy liked him.
Thomas’ journey to the Dolphins started with Westhoff’s meeting. Westhoff was an innovative special-teams coach — crazy, fun and cutting-edge innovative — and Thomas seemed a possible fit. The visit to Lubbock was to see who Thomas was.
Even in watching Thomas’s worst game that year for Texas Tech, he displayed traits beyond the scope of coaching.
“I saw tremendous body control — tremendous,” Westhoff said. “And he made every damn tackle. Now you had to play him in a 4-3 so the defensive tackles would protect him. He couldn’t be in a 3-4 taking on 300-pound guards every play. But, man, the talent.”
What happened when Westhoff worked out Thomas is part of Dolphins lore. It’s certainly one of the stories Westhoff will in the soon-to-be-released book of his career, “Figure It Out.”
As Westhoff went to the bathroom before leaving, Thomas’s eye wandered to the sheet of written times and numbers of repetitions for the various drills he performed in the workout.
“Coach, I didn’t do this,” Thomas said, pointing to that bench-press total.
Westhoff shrugged. He exaggerated that number. Why he did went back to his meeting Ohio State coach Woody Hayes in 1974. Westhoff was Indiana assistant then and was asked to drive Hayes around during his visit for the funeral of a longtime Indiana coach, Howard Brown.
They talked. Hayes talked, mostly. Football. History. Life. At one point, Hayes said, “I never saw a weightlifter who was a football player. But I saw a lot of football players who learned to lift weights. Don’t let a number be the deciding point in picking a player.”
That stuck in Westhoff’s hungry mind. He put it to practice. So two decades later when he didn’t want anyone to see Thomas’s questionable size underlined by an unimpressive bench-press number. He bumped it up a little.
Did it matter? Who knows? Like Westhoff, Johnson saw the playmaking ability of Thomas. He also saw a 5-10, 226-pound middle linebacker who might be available as a bargain late in the draft.
That’s how Johnson took him in the fifth round. Two weeks into camp, Thomas was such a talent Johnson called veteran linebacker Jack Del Rio into his office. Del Rio thought he was going to be named captain. He was cut instead.
All these years later, as Johnson’s delayed induction in the Hall of Fame approaches in August, it would have been fitting if Thomas went in with him. Maybe next year.
And maybe there’s a back story like that on the Dolphins field this summer. Maybe a scout no one knows was as irrational as rational. Or maybe this draft class where the first four picks — Jaylen Waddle, Jaelan Phillips, Jevon Holland and Liam Eichenberg — were exactly who this team wanted become exactly who they hope.
Westhoff, retired on the Florida west coast, fished for shark the other day when he said over the phone, “Sometimes you see a player and you just know.” Jimmy knew. Westhoff know. Sometimes fudging numbers is the right thing to do.
