Watch the pass the whole way through. Look at where the feet are pointing, watch the lower body drive as the shoulder and arm come forward, watch the arm continue on line after the pass is gone, the wrist fold into a full finish.
See if you can tell the difference between a 10-yard out during warmups or a 20-yard post on third-and-eight in the fourth quarter. If Daryll Clark is doing his job right, you won’t be able to.
“Each and every play, it’s a ritual I go through in my head,” Penn State’s junior quarterback says. “Before coverages, before blitzes, anything like that — make sure you step through every single throw. Bring your back hip through, stay on them toes. And follow through.” The follow-through, as Clark well knows, is the important part.
Tonight, Clark will lead his undefeated Nittany Lions into the Big Ten schedule. He will make the fifth start of both the season and of a Penn State career he once doubted would ever begin. He will strive to make every throw count, to extract the most out of every play and every second. The patience he never thought he had is at long last paying off.
“It’s been a long time coming,” he says. “It’s something that I wanted, but there were hurdles thrown up in front of me all the time, and it’s just something that I had to hurdle over.”
Clark’s battle with sophomore Pat Devlin for the starting quarterback spot, which he won five days before the start of the season, was the story of the spring and summer. The story of what Clark went through to even join that battle started years ago, though it’s difficult to pinpoint the beginning.
The second of Daryll and Sheryl Clark’s three sons, Clark was born and raised in the suburbs of Youngstown, Ohio, a place he discusses with a mixture of pride and sadness.
“There was a lot of crime in the area,” Clark says. “I think what kept us out of trouble was our parents and football.”
Clark’s father handled the football part. He was Clark’s coach from little league football all the way up until high school. His mother handled those nervous hours just before dusk. Clark and his brothers, Keith and Darnell, were told to stay together, to cut short their backyard football games and ride their bikes home when the street lights came on.
“Those two are the greatest people I’ve ever known,” Clark says.
Sheryl, who worked two jobs, constantly talked to all three boys, as much to find out what they were doing as to warn them about what not to do.
“They used to tell me, ‘There goes Mom again,’” she says.
His parents — and hours of video-gaming with his brothers — kept drugs and violence away from Clark, but they were hard to ignore in Youngstown. During Clark’s junior year of high school, a pair of Penn State assistant coaches — quarterbacks coach Jay Paterno and offensive line coach Bill Kenney — went to a game between Clark’s school, Ursuline High, and a rival city school. There were fights in the stands and on the field throughout the evening, and a school administrator approached the coaches near the end of the game.
“I don’t want to alarm you guys,” she said, as Paterno later recalled, “but we heard from the police there might be some gun play after the game.” Paterno and Kenney were at the game to see tight end Louis Irizarry, who would go on to play at Ohio State and Youngstown State. Ursuline’s quarterback, a tall, relatively skinny kid, also intrigued them.
“You couldn’t help but notice Daryll,” Paterno says. “He could really throw the ball. He just didn’t know where it was going.”
The Nittany Lions were already recruiting Chad Henne and Anthony Morelli, but Paterno liked Clark’s potential.
There was one problem — his grades.
“I really didn’t do well in school, I’m not ashamed to say,” Clark says. “It’s not that I couldn’t do it, I just didn’t put effort into it. My parents always told me to take care of my marks, but it went in one ear and out the other. All I really cared about was doing well on the football field.”
Paterno told Clark he would only be offered a scholarship if he chose to attend The Kiski School, a small preparatory school in Saltsburg, for a year. Many of the other Big Ten schools that were recruiting Clark had backed off because of his grades, but he still had offers from Nebraska, West Virginia and a handful of other schools.
When Clark had his first face-to-face meeting with Joe Paterno, he told the head coach he was willing to spend that year at Kiski. “I knew at that point that he was taking it seriously,” Jay Paterno says. “We threw a challenge out and he took it.”
It turned out to be the challenge of Clark’s life. He needed a score of 21 on the ACT to qualify for enrollment at Penn State. He got 19s and 20s the first three times he took the test.
“All these crazy thoughts were entering my head,” he says. “Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be anymore.”
Daryll would call his mother, sometimes in tears, and tell her he had his bags packed. Sheryl would calmly tell him two things: Quitters never win. And, more importantly, quitting was not an option in this case. Sheryl was not going to allow it.
On his fourth try, Clark recorded another score of 20. He was devastated. Once again, his mother pulled him out of it.
“She was like, ‘You got one more chance, you’re gonna get it this time, and once you get it, we’re gonna sit back and laugh about everything you went through,’” Clark says.
The fifth and final test result was a 22, and Clark was a Nittany Lion.
“I could have easily quit, and just hung it up, hung up the cleats and came back home and got a nine-to-five or something,” he says. “But my mom was the one who stayed on me and made sure that I finished it.”
“That’s my personality all my life,” Sheryl says. “I’ve always believed if you work hard at something, if you were patient, you would always receive some type of reward. It might not be what you wanted, but it would always end out in the good.”
When he wasn’t studying at Kiski, Clark found time to add about 15 pounds of muscle. But his waiting wasn’t over. He watched Michael Robinson lead Penn State to a breakout season in 2005, then watched Morelli lead the Nittany Lions through two seasons of ups and downs.
When Morelli graduated, Clark still had to beat out Devlin. And he had to defeat the thought that he was a run-first quarterback who wasn’t a polished passer.
“I feel like first impressions go a long way,” he says. “When I first got here and I got a chance to play, you didn’t see a lot of passing, you saw a lot of running.”
That, of course, was a limited sample. The lasting images of Clark on the field were the 5-yard touchdown run against Notre Dame at the end of the 2006 blowout loss and his 50 yards on six carries in the Alamo Bowl win in December.
Clark, a capable runner and scrambler, doesn’t deny that his feet are important. He would simply prefer to use them to throw more than to run. “If you don’t have feet, you’re really not going to be a successful passer,” Clark says. “It’s not all arm — it’s everything. You have to bring everything through if you want to have a precise pass.”
Many of Clark’s most impressive throws so far have come on third down, and many of those have come in the face of pressure that he seems to ignore.
“He will tell you it’s ‘Youngstown tough,’” Jay Paterno says, laughing. “Even when he first got here, we would marvel at how he would stand in the pocket when it was just disintegrating and throw the ball.”
The 6-foot-2, 235-pound Clark can stand in and take hits. As good as his offensive line has been so far, he knows more hits are coming as the schedule toughens. That’s when his pre-snap ritual will matter most.
“When the pocket breaks up, and you have to do something, what happens is the quarterback panics, starts moving around, somebody pops open, he gets rid of the ball real fast,” Clark says. “His feet wasn’t in it, his hips wasn’t in it, the ball sails.”
Clark has come too far and waited too long to have his passes sail off-target now. Teammates describe him as “methodical” on the field. He still gets nervous before and at the start of games, but has thrown just about every one of his 78 passes when he was ready, not a millisecond before.
“He matured a lot at Kiski in a lot of ways,” Jay Paterno says. “He’s been through a lot of things in his life, lot of ups and downs, and they’ve got him to the point where he’s very calm.”
Clark has had his chances to give in. To make the throw with his arm and not his feet. To step aside and let Devlin take the reins of the offense. To let the ACT get the best of him. Instead, he’s followed through, every time.
“I’ve seen a huge improvement in Daryll,” his mother says. “I think over the last few years, he has acquired the patience, he’s seen what the reward was. I always told him, ‘Your story could help somebody else that would be ready to give up.’
“When I came to the first game and I saw him come out onto the field, I got teary-eyed, I cried a little bit. He had worked so hard. I felt like he just deserved it.”