6 rings: What winnable games are left for the Patriots this season?
When the Patriots signed quarterback Will Grier off the Bengals practice squad at the end of September, the name likely rang a bell. Especially for college football fans.
If you spend your Saturdays in the fall glued to the couch watching NCAA football, then you’ve likely come across your share of Grier highlights. The former Florida Gator and West Virginia Mountaineer put together a decorated collegiate career from 2014-2018, ending in a Heisman trophy-contending senior season that was highlighted by an off-platform dime and a subsequent two-point conversion run to beat their conference rival Texas Longhorns.
Now 28 years old and on his fourth NFL team (his third in three months), Grier has handled one of the more unique balances of fame, family, and football you’ll ever come across.
“One would say I was groomed to be a quarterback,” Grier told WEEI.com in an exclusive sitdown interview. “From a young age, I watched football, I loved football. I loved sports in general when I was younger and obviously my dad was a big part of that.”
Grier’s father, Chad, was a Division I college football player. A quarterback himself for the East Carolina Pirates from 1989-1990.
“We bought him a jersey, the plastic helmet, pants,” Chad said as he talked about Will’s love for the game. “He wore that literally every single day of his life. Like, we'd have to pry it off. When he had to go to sleep we would take it off of him and then wash it to put it back on in the morning.”
Chad chalked both this, and the fact that Will cried as they tried to leave a Charlotte Hornets game early when they were down 50 points, up to just another boy loving ball and didn’t think anything of it. Eventually, he began to realize that Will was different:
“At three years old it was, ‘Play catch with me, shoot with me, pitch to me, hit with me, throw.' He shot and made 10-foot baskets… He started dunking a basketball in the seventh grade. I mean, he could 360°.”
“I didn’t realize until I had another kid,” Chad explained, “that that's not normal.”
As Will grew older, the Griers decided to see what they had in his athletic prowess and enrolled him in some camps and clinics closer to the city. Chad wanted to see how his son stacked up against kids outside of their small, Davidson, North Carolina community.
“The better the competition got, the better he got,” Chad explained. “We were at these camps and he takes a three-step drop and rifles a slant and everybody's like, ‘Oh, it's great’ and I'm like, ‘Maybe he's all right.’”
At one camp was Mark Richt, the long-time head coach at the University of Georgia who also just so happened to be Chad Grier’s offensive coordinator at East Carolina.
“Your boy is really good’," Richt told his former quarterback of his son, Will. “I think he's got a real chance.”
At this point, rather than taking the conventional training route, the Griers decided to work in-house using the tips, tricks, and techniques Chad was able to poach from his former stops, to develop a plan for his son.
“He bought into that,” Chad said of his son’s attitude toward it all. “You know the thing about Will is, the only thing that matches his competitive nature is his work ethic. He is a grinder. So, whatever we did, he did it to the, you know, nth degree.”
Fast-forward to high school, and the goal was to find a safe, high quality, school where Will could compete at a high level.
They never imagined that the small, private, Davidson Day School in their tight-knit community would become not only Will's, but his father's haven for football.
Davidson Day didn't even have football, but they were looking to start a program and all of a sudden, after a nationwide search, a candidate dropping out, and some begging, Chad wound up as the head coach.
“We want you to do it,” the Davidson Day athletics director told him after their top candidate couldn’t take the gig.
“I'm like, ‘I can't do it, I’ve got a job. I've never been a head coach at a high school,’” Chad said he told the AD. “Seven times I had to have said no. I'm a biblical guy and that's a biblical number, seven, but [around] seventh time… I'm still not sure why, I said yes.”
They didn't have pads, sleds, footballs, a schedule. Nothing. But he and some of his best friends wound up making it work. Now the head coach at Providence Day High School in Charlotte, Chad spent seven years coaching the Davidson Day School, and the first four with Will at quarterback.
The father-son duo, together starting the football program, won three North Carolina state championships in 2011, 2012, and 2013.
None, however, may be more impactful than their playoff win against Harrells Christian Academy. A game that area referees still talk about 10 years later.
“It was freezing cold,” Will explained as he took me back to the day. “It was a playoff game and the team we were playing had one of the best running backs I've ever seen… Russell Washington was his name. He ran for like 500 some yards, couldn't tackle him. I mean, he was incredible. But that's why I threw for so many yards, we had to outscore him.”
Grier passed for 837 yards, to this day a national record for the most in a single game, and 10 touchdowns in a 104-80 victory over Harrells.
“We were just clicking,” Grier continued. “It was one of those deals where, like, I threw a 99-yard touchdown, everything was just kind of working and the yards were like stacking up… it didn't feel like I threw for that many yards. It felt like a normal game, you know, we just had to kind of keep scoring.”
“I remember my dad, I was having a pretty good game but I missed a throw or missed a read or something and, my dad's gotten a lot softer recently but back then, I missed a throw and I'm coming off to the sideline and he's like freaking out and he rips his call sheet or whatever and he's like, ‘We're throwing that play out!’”
While his father, even admittedly, has softened up, Will said the tough love was exactly what he needed.
“He's a great coach and he just expected perfection, and it really prepared me for the next level.”
——
All the while, as Grier's path to quarterback prominence was being paved, his two younger brothers were becoming skyrocketing social media stars by, quite literally, the minute.
It’s likely that the last name ‘Grier’ rings a bell for another reason outside of college football Saturdays. If you’re a millennial who spent the early 2010s watching the six-second, attention-grabbing videos on the now-defunct social media app “Vine”, then there’s no doubt you’ve come across Will’s younger brothers, Nash and Hayes.
Yes, the three are all brothers. All cut from the same cloth.
At the ages of 16 and 14, Nash Grier and Hayes Grier became internet sensations thanks, in part, to, as Will told me, “being good-looking kids making really funny videos.”
“I remember sitting in my car,” he said as he reminisced on this time in their life. “I drove [Hayes] to school and we were sitting in my car and he was just refreshing his home page on Vine and his follower count, every time he refreshed, it would go up like by the thousands. He was like, literally Michael Jackson famous for the first couple of years of that. Both [he and Nash] were. It was crazy.”
By 2015, Nash became the second-most followed user on Vine and Hayes was the youngest contestant to appear on Dancing with the Stars.
“I don’t know where to start even,” Chad said when I asked if he could take me through how they became so famous. “We bought one of those big Mac computers and we had it in our kitchen and Nash would go make these videos. He'd do anything, and Nash is a funny kid.”
Nash's passion for creating would eventually turn into making videos on Vine with not only himself, but his brothers and his father too.
“You’d have six seconds real time,” Chad explained of the app, which went defunct in 2017. “You couldn't edit it. You could start/stop, but there's no way to edit it. So you had to be really talented and most people didn’t know what they were doing. [Everybody else] was just doing things of shock value, you know, six seconds of just doing something crazy or whatever. Nash was telling stories in six seconds… I mean, he just had this real gift for doing this thing.”
“I would go to work,” Chad continued. “I mean, there'd be grown men sitting around saying ‘You see Nash's video last night?!’ I'm like, I ain't even seen it yet, man, let me look at it. It appealed to everybody and it was wholesome.”
When Nash hit nearly 20,000 followers on the platform, it became exponential and the thoughts of monetization begun.
“My brother starts calling me,” explained Chad. “He's like, ‘Hey man, you got to monetize this and I'm like, ‘No, he's having his 15 minutes of fame and it’ll be gone before you know it.”
“Then he just keeps creeping up, creeping up and then he got 100,000 followers on Vine… and I said, Nash, you know, man, here's the deal bud. It's crazy what's happened. There are 100,000 people they're watching what you put out there. Imagine if you did something positive with that? Don't waste the platform that God gave you, go do something with it.”
He then made a video, with his four-year-old half-sister Skylynn, asking her “What’s wrong with America?”, to which she answered with: “They need Jesus.”
“It went from like 100,000 to 350,000 like this,” Chad said as he snapped his finger. “And then from there it, it was just like on a rocket ship, it just everything he put out just started getting more and more and more. And then, you know, he got about a half a million followers and my brother was like, are you gonna monetize it? And I said, ‘Yeah, we probably should be thinking about, you know, let's figure out how that works, right?’”
Nash, who some have called the “original influencer” wound up moving to Los Angeles at the age of 15, soon followed by his younger brother Hayes, at the same time Will went off to college to continue his football journey.
Now 26, Nash is married with two children and continues to create content on YouTube and Hayes, 23, is making his way as an actor. Both are still in LA.
The three brothers always keep in touch, whether it be a group chat or, as Will showed me at his locker, over a group FaceTime.
“Every day,” he said. “Every day.”
——
After winning the aforementioned three state titles at Davidson Day and becoming a four-star recruit along the way, Grier had an itch to play SEC football and, with offers on the table from Auburn, Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Wake Forest, would eventually commit to play quarterback at the University of Florida.
Despite an unexpectedly short stint in Gainesville, he described his time there as “invaluable”:
“The couple of years I was there,” Grier explained. “It was crazy, but it laid a foundation for me. As a freshman I was playing against some of the best defensive players. Like a lot of the guys that were on that team on defense are still playing in the NFL. It was the competitiveness of practice, and the looks I was seeing on defense there was invaluable to my development because the speed, everything, it was like NFL level stuff there. So as a young freshman, I really learned how to play the game there.”
His second season at The Swamp, however, was a different story. Following a 6-0 start where Grier threw for 10 touchdowns to just three interceptions while Florida became the 8th ranked team in the country, disaster struck when the quarterback found out he failed a PED test and was given a one-year suspension.
“I was playing really well and we were a really good team and that was really disappointing,” Grier said of that time. “I mean, it knocked me down. I was at the lowest of all lows.”
Back in 2016, Grier wrote a story with Bleacher Report detailing the incident, explaining that he took a substance called Ligandrol that he and his roommate had purchased from a nutritional store in Gainesville. After researching the safety of the substance on his own, he discovered it was not listed on the NCAA’s banned substance list.
Come to find out, as Grier wrote, Ligandrol wasn’t on the list of banned substances, but it was added in August of that year. He blames no one but himself and said he should have contacted team trainers.
Grier was then essentially squeezed out of Florida and had to look for a new place to play football.
And then, while looking for his next stop, he found out his girlfriend (now wife) Jeanne was pregnant.
“As I'm trying to find a new home, I'm like, obviously lowest of all lows,” he said. “My girlfriend at the time got pregnant, which was just, it was a blessing in disguise but at the time it felt like I was getting beat up from all angles.”
While certainly a challenge, Grier credits this for helping him out of a dark place. “I needed that, that kind of helped pull me out of the ditch that I was in.”
He ultimately decided to transfer to West Virginia and play under head coach Dana Holgerson, where he put together two dominant seasons totaling 71 passing touchdowns, over 7,000 passing yards, and a fourth-place finish in the 2018 Heisman Trophy race.
“The coolest thing about having a brother who is a Heisman candidate and should, by all means, be the most popular in the family,” said Nash, jokingly an ESPN feature during Will’s senior season. “Is that he’s not.”
“I was excited to play in that offense, you know, throwing it a million times,” Will said as he looked back on his time with the Mountaineers. “I really kind of found a home there and I loved my time there, man. I had my first kid and, you know, she was raised in a townhouse in Morgantown, West Virginia. My wife [Jeanne] was like, just rock solid through the whole thing. That was obviously a lot on her too. I mean, she's from Florida and it was like, she had to move up to Morgantown and, you know, have a kid in Morgantown and raise her in Morgantown. All just kind of believing in me and what I was doing.”
“West Virginia really took care of us. [They’ll] always have a special place in my heart, and Dana for believing in me and trusting me in the way he kind of took me under his wing and gave me an opportunity.”
Grier parlayed said opportunity into a chance at the NFL. He opted out of the Mountaineers appearance in the 2018-19 Camping World Bowl, a decision he said wasn’t well received by fans, in to get healthy and begin training. For the NFL Draft.
“I understand why,” he said of the pushback from fans. But I felt like I kind of needed to, in the position I was in, just try to heal my ankle [which he has injured that season] and go make us some money.”
Grier’s training and rehab wound up turning into a longer-than-expected wait to be selected. He shared that he thought there was a chance his current team, the Patriots, would select him in the first round:
“I was talking to the Patriots,” he said as he went back to draft night. “I was talking to the Giants, the Redskins, at the time, the Commanders and, yeah, just kind of, I mean, just funky, the Giants picked Daniel Jones at six…, Washington picked Dwayne Haskins, and then the Patriots picked N’Keal Harry. So I was like, ‘ok, well, now I don't know where I'm gonna go because those are like the three teams that I was talking to probably the most.’”
And then finally, lo and behold, towards the end of day two, his hometown team in the Carolina Panthers called to select him with the 100th overall pick.
“Awesome. I got to stay home.”
Though it wouldn’t be long before Grier’s thought-to-be-cleared football path became rocky once again. After his rookie season back in Charlotte, Panthers head coach Ron Rivera was fired and Temple coach Matt Rhule was hired. Before he knew it, Grier was out the door.
“After the preseason,” he explained. “They decided that they wanted PJ [Walker, who played for Rhule at Temple] to be the two.” They supposedly wanted to get Grier back on the practice squad, but the Cowboys claimed him on waivers.
Grier spent the last two seasons in Dallas, a place he said became a second home for him, Jeanne, and their (now two) daughters. Outside of football, he has become quite the family man, with his crew rarely leaving his side.
“We have a home base in Charleston, South Carolina,” Will said of their situation as he navigates the NFL. “So they'll go back and forth, but for the most part they're with me. I don't like being away from them. I’ve become very much a dad, like family man. So I don't like being away from them for very long.”
“I have so much respect for him and the man he's grown up to be,” Chad said of Will’s relationship with his family. “He loves those girls. I mean, I've seen him, you know, he's off for a day, and he’ll fly from Dallas to Charleston for 18 hours just to make sure he got to see them and go back. I mean, they had his big plan to leave, leave the girls there. They’d do the offseason, then come home. Nope. They can't be apart for more than a week. That's too much. So they worked it out now. They've got a home base and AirBnB’s or whatever. But he loves those girls, man.”
He continued: “It's hard to even get him on the phone when he's home with the girls. Like he calls me from the car. He'll answer the phone in the facility. But if he's home with the girls, 50-50 whether he answers the phone or not, I mean, he just, he's just all in on his girls and, and I love and respect that about him. He's a great dad and a great husband.”
When the Cowboys had to make, what Grier knew was, a business decision this summer in trading for former No. 3 overall pick Trey Lance, his time in Dallas was coming to an end, which meant another move for he and his clan. But not before one of the cooler moments the NFL saw this preseason.
The Cowboys had decided they were going to release Grier following the acquisition of Lance but still had one more preseason game left to play. A home contest against the Raiders. The team spoke with Grier, and before releasing him wanted to allow him the chance to play the whole game as a way to get him 60 minutes on tape for the other 31 teams to see.
Grier, the competitor he is, of course said yes to the opportunity.
“Jerry [Jones] came and talked to me before I went out there,” he said of what became an incredibly emotional day. “Everybody I mean, I was very much, you know, felt like family with a lot of those people. Everybody was pulling for me and even Jerry said a lot of nice things and I know I made that decision hard on him, especially after that last game. Those guys know that I can play and they think really highly of me and sometimes the NFL is just numbers, you know.”
He completed 29 of 35 pass attempts in his de facto tryout, for 305 yards and two touchdowns. Grier added 53 yards on the ground and two rushing touchdowns as well, as he led Dallas to a 31-16 win.
“Bittersweet. Just close to a lot of these guys, that’s the hardest part,” he said, choked up, following the contest. “It’s been tough, but I’ve been through tougher stuff. I’ve got a lot of respect for this organization.”
Grier shared that his experience behind starter Dak Prescott and backup Cooper Rush helped him get “leaps and bounds better” as a football player. Grier remains close to Prescott, who he called one of the best people he’s been around.
From his fathers perspective, this gets even cooler.
“I'm watching, he scores a touchdown,” Chad explained. “He runs one in and I watch the lineman come behind him and grab him and, like, he's pointing the crowd and then they show him and he goes to the bench and all the starters are coming over and, and I'm like, ‘man, they seem to really care about him.’ I keep watching the reactions of other guys around him and they're, you know, whether it's Dak or, and they just genuinely seem to be really happy for him. And I thought, man, you know, as a dad, not as a football coach, that's really cool. He’s not just some guy out there, they really seem to care about, you know, about your son.”
Following Grier’s release from the Cowboys on August 29th, he signed with the Bengals practice squad, a decision both he and his father attributed to a chance at winning.
“I wanted to go be around success,” said Grier of his decision to sign with Cincinnati. “And a good team, good offense.”
“He thought they had a chance to win the Super Bowl,” Chad said.
His stint with them only lasted around a month as, on September 22nd, the Patriots signed Grier to their active roster off the Bengals’ practice squad.
Now in Foxborough, he still has a win-first mentality.
“When he got to New England,” Chad said, sporting a Patriots hat. “I said, well, how’s the [quarterback] room there? And he goes, ‘well, you know, I'm the oldest guy, and I'm the most experienced guy here all of a sudden. So I'm really just trying to help these guys be better. I want to help us win games.’ I mean, that's just who he is.”
He’s also, however, with Jeanne and his two girls by his side, still waiting on his chance.
“At this point in my career,” Will said, “I think I'm playing good ball and the NFL is just about timing and opportunity. I'm just kind of waiting on that opportunity.”
Make sure to follow Mike on Twitter @mikekadlick, and follow @WEEI for the latest up-to-date Patriots and Boston sports news!
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