Canadian running back Tyler Varga watched three days of NFL Draft coverage hoping to hear his named called, but 256 selections went by without that dream coming true.
However, that didn’t derail his goal of playing in the NFL.
The Yale grad was quickly signed as an undrafted free agent by the Indianapolis Colts minutes after the 2015 draft ended, and now he’s vying for a roster spot in training camp.
Varga takes us inside an NFL training camp and details his efforts to earn a job with the Colts:
Every year I would come into camp at Yale really, really nervous and for some reason I wasn’t nervous this time.
I got there and the first thing I had to do was a conditioning test and I was pretty confident in my ability to complete that. It wasn’t a big deal for me and I knocked it out pretty handily on the first day. It was 150-yard sprints, so you run to the 25-yard line and back three times and that was one set. You do that six times with a timed minute break in between each one.
Our Yale conditioning test was a lot harder than this one, in my opinion. Nobody failed it. Here, you can’t practice until you pass the test. [LeGarrette Blount failed his conditioning test in New England]. Every team does their tests a little bit different.
These NFL players are living in multi-million dollar mansions, so moving back into dorm rooms for training camp is definitely a huge step down. You look at a guy like me — right out of college — and I’ve been living in a dorm room for the last four years so it was normal. I was training at Yale for a month before I came here and living in a small room with no air conditioning. It was really humid so I was sweating my butt off. Then I come here and get put back in a dorm room, so I picked up where I left off.
It’s wild because there are so many people that come to (watch) training camp. At practice, there are like 20,000 people who show up. People are camped out here from sunrise to sunset and are lined up outside the stadium all day long. We practice at the stadium at Anderson University and it’s full every time. You could literally sign autographs forever after practice. I usually sign for an hour, but you could keep going.
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True two-a-days are a thing of the past. What we do is a walk-through in the morning and a three-hour practice in the afternoon. We go four days on and one day off and we keep doing that throughout training camp.
It’s a very physical game at this level and (there are) some really big dudes so you have to pick your battles because if you try to go blow everybody up you’re going to get your ass kicked. You have to be smart and a tactician.
I got a little look at the playbook back in OTAs, so that helped. They have the playbook on an iPad – that’s what a lot of teams do now. It’s a big mess of PDFs. On offence, we have 10 different installs and each section is around 30 pages long – a total of 300 pages. And there are another 100 pages for special teams. I’m more of a paper guy, so I’ve been working on writing meticulous notes.
It’s a complex offence and I’ve done a decent job of picking it up. I feel like really being able to put what you know in your mind to muscle memory is a whole different matter. It’s part of the job as a new player you have to go in and get it right on the first try, which is definitely challenging.
You can know what you’re doing, but the NFL game is played at another speed. It’s difficult to gauge that speed and incorporate it into computing the actual play call. You’re used to a certain speed in college and you’re programed muscle memory-wise to operate and go through your progressions at that speed. But in the pros everything is so much more accelerated. You can go too fast too and blow your read too. You have to have that gauge built in that only comes through experience. That’s been the most challenging part to operating with limited reps.
Additionally, you have to play a role on special teams. That’s the only way you can make the team as a rookie unless you’re a first-round pick. Right now I’m on the depth chart for punt, punt return, kick and kick return. That’s another thing that’s been a learning curve for me because I don’t have extensive special teams experience.
A lot of the guys (on the team) are pretty normal and down to earth. Andrew Luck is a really normal dude – he still has his flip phone. He’s making how many millions a year and he’s approachable. He’s on another level in terms of his knowledge of the offence. He’s got a great arm and he makes some pretty amazing throws.
Our running back, Frank Gore, has been in the league (for) 11 years. He’s got a natural ability at the running back position. A lot of the stuff he does is second nature. His body does things without thinking about it because it’s programmed into him.
At receiver, T.Y. Hilton is fast and (rookie) Philip Dorsett is really fast. They are just like blurs across the field – it’s crazy the amount of speed that they have. Andre Johnson is a great receiver, too. We’ve got a lot of receivers across the board that can make plays. People are saying the 2015 Colts have a lot of weapons in the passing game and I can tell you that’s true.
Being a professional is a lot different than being a college football player. You have to take a lot more onus on yourself and if you don’t want to do that you’ll be shown the door pretty quickly.
I want to establish myself in this league. People get shuffled out and cut without warning, but I’m not thinking about that because you’re never going to be able to control that. I just focus on my performance on a daily basis and execute the reps that I’m in on.
I was thinking about it – I’m in the NFL and it feels normal. It doesn’t feel like anything crazy, I don’t know why but maybe it’s just because I’m here now. It doesn’t seem as far fetched as it did when you were a little kid.
Now that I’m here I’m sitting here thinking that I’m just one of the guys.
