TGS Chapter 96 Locker Room Politics (Patreon)

The training table had the crinkling paper typical of all physical therapy tables, and the physical therapist was working Wyatt's left trapezius with the sustained pressure of someone who knew exactly where the knots were before even looking for them. Wyatt lay face down, arms at his sides, eyes closed, as the hallway noise reached the room muffled through the closed door. There came a point where the pressure crossed from discomfort into something that wasn't quite relief, but rather the recognition that the muscle had been tense longer than Wyatt had consciously registered.

The physical therapist said he was done, and Wyatt raised his head.

He sat on the edge of the table and rolled his neck to the left, then to the right. His shoulders felt different than they had two hours ago when he walked off the field—better, though not entirely loose. A full first day of practice left behind things a thirty-minute massage couldn't completely undo, and Wyatt knew it. He slid off the table, grabbed his t-shirt from the wall hook, and pulled it on.

"Same time tomorrow," the physical therapist said without asking.

"Yeah," Wyatt said.

He stepped into the hallway, and the first thing he registered was Case Keenum leaning against the opposite wall, arms crossed, posing like someone who had been waiting a while and had used that time to decide what he was going to say. Wyatt looked at him, and Case pushed off the wall, taking two steps toward him.

"We need to talk," Case said without any pretense.

"Alright," Wyatt said.

Case began walking down the hallway without waiting for confirmation that Wyatt was following, and Wyatt walked behind him, as there was no obvious reason not to. The two walked parallel down the corridor toward the cafeteria, where everyone was heading at that hour. Between the morning session and the afternoon film study, the training camp schedule listed a window marked as lunch—and during training camp, lunch meant all eighty men on the roster converged in the same space at the same time.

Case didn't speak again until they reached the end of the hallway. There he stopped for a second, not looking at Wyatt, but staring at the wall across from them, before turning to face him with the look of a man who had decided to start where things needed to start.

"Don't think you impressed anyone today," he said.

Wyatt said nothing.

"The throw to Austin," Case said. "Anyone can make a throw when they have the edge. That doesn't make you the starting quarterback of the Rams."

"I didn't say it made me anything," Wyatt said.

"The job is mine this season," Case said. "Fisher drafted you to be the backup and learn the system. The best thing you can do is understand that before the preseason starts and save yourself unnecessary trouble."

Wyatt looked at him for a moment without changing his expression. "Everything depends on what Fisher says."

"Fisher already said it," Case replied. "He just hasn't said it to you yet."

There was no answer to that, because Wyatt wasn't going to give an answer to that. Case knew it or processed it somehow, because he didn't wait for one—he turned and continued down the hallway. Wyatt followed behind him, and the two walked down the stairs and pushed open the cafeteria doors, greeted by the full intensity of eighty men packed into an enclosed space at lunchtime.

Case went straight toward the far right end of the room without looking back. Wyatt stood still for a second at the entrance while trays, tables, and already established groups passed before him like data that needed processing before deciding where to go. What Case had said in the hallway lingered somewhere between his mind and his chest, not having quite settled yet.

He was about to grab a tray when he heard his name.

"Sterling!"

The voice came from a table in the middle of the room. When Wyatt looked over, a six-foot-two man in team gear was pointing at an open seat beside him, wearing a smile with no strings attached. It took Wyatt a second to match the face with the number, because on the field a helmet alters a person's scale, but it was Todd Gurley. Wyatt grabbed a tray and walked over to the table.

"Todd," he said as he reached them.

"Have a seat," Gurley said. "About time."

Wyatt sat down. At the table were four other men whom Gurley began naming with the gesture of someone making introductions, but with no intention of lingering too long on each one—because introductions were a formality, and what came after was what mattered. Wyatt matched faces with names and positions while picking up his utensils, finding the hardest part to be the speed at which Gurley moved, speaking with the rapid pace of someone who always had something else to say and saw no reason not to say it.

There was a safety named Lamarcus Joyner, leaning his arm on the table with the expression of a man who evaluated before speaking, currently evaluating Wyatt with the calm of someone who had plenty of time to do so. There was a linebacker named Alec Ogletree, the first to shake his hand with the firm grip of a handshake that wasn't trying to prove anything, but simply being what it was. And there were two offensive linemen whose names Wyatt logged and whose faces he had already seen on the field that morning—because offensive linemen are the most present figures in a quarterback's line of sight, and while one doesn't always have time to memorize numbers, bodies are learned long before names.

"How was it?" Gurley asked, picking up his fork. "First day."

"Good," Wyatt said.

"The throw to Tavon," Gurley said. "Saw it from the other end of the field."

Wyatt said nothing.

"Hayes flattened you before that, though," Joyner chimed in from across the table without changing his tone. "Gave it right back to him after, though."

"Hayes was gonna flatten anyone on that first possession," Ogletree said. "Anyone. The rookie always gets it first."

"It's not personal," Gurley told Wyatt. "It's just Hayes."

Wyatt nodded and kept eating his meal, letting the conversation be what it was without forcing it in any direction.

Gurley chewed for a moment, set his fork down, and leaned forward slightly over the table—as if what he was about to say required a lower voice, though the noise level of the cafeteria required no special adjustment to keep a private conversation among six people.

"Case talk to you already?" he asked.

"In the hallway," Wyatt said.

Gurley nodded without surprise, as if that was precisely what he had anticipated. Joyner let out a short sound that wasn't quite a laugh, but contained a similar piece of information, while Ogletree glanced at the ceiling for a second before returning to his plate.

"What'd he say?" Gurley asked.

"That the job is his," Wyatt said. "That Fisher drafted me to be the backup and I should get used to the idea."

A second of silence fell among the six of them—not the silence of surprise, but the silence of confirmation. Gurley was the first to break it.

"Case has that talk with everyone who walks in," he said. "Had it with Mannion last year. Had it with Nick Foles before that."

"Didn't work with either of 'em," Joyner noted.

"It's not that it didn't work," Ogletree corrected. "It's that neither of them was good enough for it to matter whether it worked or not."

Gurley looked at Wyatt. "You're different," he said, not as a compliment, but as a plain observation. "That's why he gave it to you even earlier."

Wyatt picked up his glass of water, took a sip, set it back on the table, and looked across the room. At the far right end, Case's table had six or seven men laughing with the intensity of a group sharing a long history and their own unspoken codes. Case sat at the center of that table with the posture of a man who, in that specific space, was what he had always been—with zero reason to believe that was ever going to change.

"Last year," Wyatt said, keeping his eyes on Case's table. "How was it?"

Gurley and Joyner exchanged a brief glance.

"Mediocre," Gurley said. "7-9."

"Case had four touchdowns in the last few games," Joyner added. "Combined."

"There are discipline issues," Ogletree said quietly without raising his voice. "It's not just on the field. Fisher tolerates it because he didn't have another option. But this year, he has another option."

"Maybe he does," Gurley said, eyeing Wyatt. "That remains to be seen."

Wyatt didn't respond to that either, returning to his food as the table moved on to other topics—preseason experiences from prior years, games remembered, players no longer there, new arrivals, and what each expected from the coming weeks. Wyatt followed the thread of each conversation with the focus one pays to things that construct the map of a new place, attaching names to stories and attitudes to positions. All of it settled somewhere in his mind as his plate emptied.

Gurley then went on to explain the cliques and internal groups within the Rams locker room, breaking down how the team's social structure worked, before shifting gears entirely to ask if the rumors were true that Wyatt's girlfriend was pregnant. Wyatt nodded in response, as there was no point in denying Blaire's pregnancy at this stage. Upon hearing it, Gurley remarked that his life was about to change.

"In what way?" Wyatt asked.

"In the sense that babies change everything," Gurley said. "The guys who have 'em know."

Ogletree nodded with his fork in hand.

Wyatt said nothing, but logged it alongside everything else he had taken in over the past two hours—far too much data to process all at once, with more guaranteed to keep coming. The first day of training camp was the day everything hit at once, leaving zero room to process anything before the next thing arrived.

At Case's table, a collective burst of laughter broke out. Wyatt didn't look over, but he registered it. Ogletree, seated at an angle that allowed him to see that table easily, glanced at it for a second and returned to his plate without saying a word—a gesture that said everything words would have said, minus the noise.

Minutes later.

Weinke opened the door to the film room, poked his head into the hallway, and announced five minutes. The men still lingering in the corridors and cafeteria finishing their meals began moving toward the room, which was filled with rows of chairs facing a large screen. The room carried the chilled temperature of air-conditioned spaces that, in contrast to the heat outside, always felt two degrees colder than necessary.

Wyatt found a seat in the third row, pulling out his notebook and pen. He had learned at Clemson that film study was where games were won—the field merely executed the plan. The difference between quarterbacks who understood that and those who didn't was a difference no one saw from the outside, but became blatantly obvious on the field the moment a decision had to be made in a second and a half, with eleven men moving in different directions.

Case entered and took a seat in the front row alongside two of the men from his lunch table, laughing at something one of them said before Weinke powered up the display.

Weinke turned on the screen.

"We're going to review the week thirteen game against Dallas," he said. "I want everyone to understand what's waiting for us and why the system we're working on this week is the exact answer to what we're going to see on this screen."

The display showed the first quarter of the previous year's preseason matchup. Weinke paused and rewound the tape with the remote in hand, stepping up to the whiteboard to draw coverages and route trees, detailing what Dallas's defense had done to them and how Fisher's system was designed to counter it. Wyatt wrote in his notebook with the speed required to follow Weinke's breakdown without losing the thread. In the front row, Case had his playbook sitting on his knees, but his pen never moved.

It wasn't new information, but it was far from irrelevant.

Wyatt looked at his notebook, then at the screen, then back at his notebook, and kept writing. In the darkened room, the glow of the screen cast the same flat light over everyone's faces—the universal look of film sessions, worn by men processing data without showing what they were processing until the time came to display it. That time wasn't now; it was out on the field, and the field was tomorrow morning. Tonight, there was still time for everything he had seen today, everything he had heard today—the throw to Austin, the talk in the hallway, Gurley's table, and Case's front row—to settle right where it needed to be before it all started over again.