Being an elite athlete requires mastery of mind, body and, occasionally, some unorthodox skills. As part of the December 2024 Total Athlete issue, SI explores how today’s complete competitors are expanding what’s possible with new fitness frontiers, cutting edge technology, mental training and more—from the behemoths of the NFL’s offensive line, to a versatile WNBA veteran, to a special group of athletes who forgo the fundamentals and go against the grain.
In a Week 2 game against the Cowboys, the Saints called a screen pass near midfield with a little less than 10 minutes to go in the second quarter. Alvin Kamara, the team’s 5' 10", 215-pound running back, caught the ball and, after guard Lucas Patrick jolted Dallas defender Eric Kendricks backward, began sprinting toward a large swath of open space.
Kamara ran a 4.56 40-yard dash at the 2017 NFL combine and is one of the game’s most athletic rushers. As he hit the 30-yard line and peered to his left, one of the few players in his line of vision still keeping up with his high-throttle pace was guard Cesar Ruiz, who’s listed at 6' 3" and—perhaps generously—316 pounds.
A chip in Ruiz’s shoulder pad used to generate data points for the league’s Next Gen Stats tracked him at 17.2 mph. He was, quite stunningly, matching Kamara nearly stride for stride. He was moving faster than the average pace of an Olympic-level 5,000-meter runner.
“I was trying to find someone to block, and I just kept thinking to myself, I’m running past everybody,” Ruiz says. Later, in a film session, he was jokingly criticized by teammate Cam Jordan for not making contact with anyone on the play. Ruiz responded, “Didn’t need to.” He enjoyed the commentary on social media, which paired the video of him barreling downfield with comments like, “When Mom tells you the dinner’s ready.”
It made him recall his freshman and sophomore years at Camden (N.J.) High. Weighing 280 pounds, he would try to race the hurdlers after he was done with shot put and discus practice.
“I always wanted to do the stuff the smaller guys did,” he says.
That ethos is not just an added bonus for offensive linemen in 2024. It’s an absolute necessity. The need for athleticism has never been more integral to the success of the offense.
At the core, there are the conventional physical demands of the position: shuffling backward and anchoring into a pass-blocking set against elite edge rushers; exploding up out of a three-point stance, pivoting laterally and breaking into a full-out sprint to “pull” block; or shedding a blocker to get deeper into a defense and track down players barely half their size. But as umbrella-style defenses and heavier situational blitzing schemes continue to kneecap a quarterback’s ability to throw vertically, linemen are called upon to perform increasingly balletic and exotic maneuvers, and deliver more physically taxing blocks during complex running plays. They are more involved in screen passes, balls thrown behind the line of scrimmage and downfield blocking on short-yardage passes.
Through the first seven weeks of the 2024 season, there was nearly a 19% increase in the rate of rushing plays of 10 or more yards compared to last year, along with a steady clip of scoring plays that were born from passes of 10 yards or less in distance traveled.
“When you see an offensive lineman run a 4.7 40-yard dash—think about that,” says retired guard Damien Woody, a 12-year NFL veteran, two-time Super Bowl winner and, according to famed offensive line coach Dante Scarnecchia, one of the most athletic players ever to play the position.
“These are crazy times at 300-plus pounds. That is far more ridiculous than a wide receiver who weighs 180 pounds running a 4.21. The evolution of these guys is next level.”
Prior to the 2006 NFL draft, teams across the league debated and ultimately passed on selecting Andrew Whitworth in the first round. Then 6' 7" and 322 pounds, the LSU lineman was thought by scouts to be too stiff, unable to bend and move with the fluidity necessary to combat elite edge rushers.
The Bengals picked Whitworth in the second round knowing full well that the scouting reports were incorrect. How? They had researched his history as an elite youth tennis player. He went on to make four Pro Bowls, play 16 years in the NFL and will almost assuredly be enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
“He ended up being a steal,” says then Cincinnati O-line coach Bob Surace, now the head coach at Princeton.
Since that moment, Whitworth has evolved into an unofficial spokesperson for the hidden athleticism of offensive linemen. During his career, he developed a mastery of yoga—he can easily perform a flow that ends with his body tucked into a pigeon pose, a hip-opening movement in which one leg is positioned at a 90-degree angle in front of the hips, while the other leg is extended straight back, like a slightly unwound pretzel. He also picked up golf and has multiple top-25 finishes at the American Century Championship, an annual celebrity tournament in Lake Tahoe.
Whitworth has placed a great deal of thought into the idea of offensive linemen as prized athletes and has artfully connected the two most important job descriptions of the position to specific skills in other sports.
The first, run blocking: “The equivalent of playing basketball, driving to the hole and dunking,” he says. “The same explosive drive phase you have to be in [as an offensive lineman.] In baseball, it’s the equivalent of stealing a base. In tennis, a massive forehand.”
The second, pass blocking: “Playing center field in baseball,” he says. “Someone hits a line drive to the gap and you not only have to break for the ball, but you have to balance yourself in a way where you have total body control. In tennis, it’s like when you’re at the net and someone hits a lob over your head. And in basketball, it’s like being a power forward defending the basket, having to stay in front of a guy you cannot let get a dunk or a layup.”
Of course, most of the time, offensive linemen are doing these movements backwards or sideways, while the people they are charged with blocking are able to go forward. This sets them apart because they are performing an “open” skill, which is an unpredictable movement that has to be changed constantly based on external factors, versus a “closed” skill, which is a more dependable, perfectible movement option.
Understanding this marriage of power, agility and body awareness is a critical component to digesting some of the tales of big-man athleticism displayed in the wild. For instance:
• “[Former pro quarterbacks] Matt and Tim Hasselbeck used to play basketball against me at Boston College in the rec center,” Woody says. “They used to see me do all sorts of crazy things, like 360-degree dunks. I’d get breakaways and people thought I was gonna lay it up. I loved that I was able to surprise people. If you sleep on me, I will catch you.”
• “I had a tackle who played 12 years in the NFL and is now a captain flying 757s and 767s for Federal Express. It takes [serious] hand, eye and foot coordination to land that equipment,” says former NFL line coach Bob Wylie. “[Hall of Fame tackle] Joe Thomas skis. I coached a center in the CFL who used to play handball.”
• “I remember wrestling with Lane Johnson and Richie Incognito at a gym in West Hollywood,” says former Bears guard and current CBS Sports analyst Kyle Long. “We would all do a warmup, this series of glute-activation exercises, like single leg hops. And then you go wrestle. Stand-up, Greco-Roman pummeling. Fighting for leverage and trying to snake your hands underneath their arms. Imagine a bear hug in which you get complete control. You’re dog-tired. Using your full body. Not trying to show any weakness. Then every minute and a half a buzzer goes off and your partner changes.”
Perhaps the most impressive of them all? The viral video of the behemoth who literally jumped out of a swimming pool, catapulting himself out of the water and landing on the pavement upright like a dismounting gymnast.
Jason Licht, the Buccaneers’ general manager, shares a picture on his phone. The former college lineman turned executive is being effortlessly swung in the air like Baby in Dirty Dancing. Around Licht’s back are the Kodiak bear-sized arms of franchise left tackle Tristan Wirfs—a joyous embrace to celebrate the news of his contract extension being finalized. Licht was asked the best way to describe the big man’s athleticism.
“The incredible strength it took to pick my ass up like this,” he joked.
In high school, Wirfs, a star wrestler, shot putter and discus thrower, would gather some of his fellow lineman-sized friends to run consecutive 100-meter sprints around the track at the end of meets. Instead of passing batons, they would hand off bottles of Mountain Dew. The exercise was lovingly called the “Four by Fat Relay.”
“We loved it,” he says. “It was kind of for sh--- and giggs, but we were trying to fly around that track.”
Of course, this was a prelude to the moment that is most often associated with the 25-year-old tackle, currently the highest paid offensive lineman in the NFL ($28.1 million per season).
One day back in June 2017, Wirfs and a few of his Iowa teammates went to a city pool. Wirfs was wading in water three- feet deep when Hawkeyes running back Ivory Kelly-Martin mentioned a challenge that had been making its way around social media. Each of the teammates took a turn, attempting to leap out of the pool and onto the deck, but all failed.
“I got up there the first time but I didn’t land it—I fell back into the water,” Wirfs says. “I said, Go get my phone. I’m going to land this. Everyone thinks I practiced. I mean, why would I try and do that for any other reason?”
The result is a video that maintains its shock factor, even as the bar for virality continues to rise nearly a decade later. With a handful of bystanders nearby, Wirfs explodes out of the water, as his hands shoot above his head and then quickly snap down as he lands on the pool-side pavement. A wave of white, upturned water arches toward the sidewalk and from this obscured view we suddenly see two cement-post legs jut out of the pool and swing underneath his more than 300-pound frame. The video has been viewed more than 50,000 times with comments in several different languages. Wirfs would go on to break the vertical jump record—36 inches—for offensive linemen at the NFL combine eight months later.
“I tried to do it from four-feet deep when I got to the NFL, but I scraped my shin, so I was like, Nah,” Wirfs says. “Three and a half is the max.”
This raw skill set has translated to in-game moments where Wirfs has picked up loose fumbles and carried the ball with the natural gait of a running back (afterward, pumping his arm like a truck driver blowing the horn on a semi). Or, he’s backpedaled into his passing set and thrown two defenders to the ground in a series of quick, judo-like hurls.
Or he can do what he did against the Texans last November in the first quarter of a 39–37 loss. In the box score, the play is listed as a benign 1-yard run by Ke’Shawn Vaughn. The assignment on the play called for Wirfs to perform the nearly impossible task of beating Houston linebacker Denzel Perryman in an angular sprint to the hole through which Vaughn was trying to run.
Perryman, a 240-pound Pro Bowler with 4.78 speed, recognized the play and took a shuffle step toward the gap opening up for Vaughn. Then he flipped his hips into a complete downhill sprint toward contact. However, Wirfs beat Perryman to the gap with a few quick, diagonal steps and shoved him so violently that the linebacker’s body momentarily went airborne and he soared out of the play.
Wirfs says the NFL is full of outliers. Bucs receiver Mike Evans is 6' 5", for example, but Wirfs says the wideout can “run like a deer.” Wirfs’s linemate and offseason training partner, Luke Goedeke, is 6' 5", 312 pounds and once ripped off an unannounced 360-degree dunk to a group of stunned onlookers at former teammate Donovan Smith’s house. A locker room is a collection of super-humans, each just a costume away from requiring an origin story.
After practice a few years back, Wirfs looked over at Smith, then the team’s other starting tackle, and the two began sprinting against one another toward the facility. As they got inside, a mounted screen posting the top performances from practice that day logged the moment and measured Wirfs at 18.1 mph. Had he been running through a school zone while classes were in session, he could have been pulled over for speeding.
“You get me down to 220 pounds,” he says, “and I could do some crazy stuff.”
Duke Manyweather calls up a play from that Saints-Cowboys game earlier this season. Manyweather is the trainer behind some of the top offensive linemen in the sport. As quarterback-specific coaches gained popularity in the early 2000s, other position groups began to gravitate toward their own gurus. Manyweather has more than 40 clients this year. He has worked with some of the top offensive tackles in the league, including Penei Sewell (Lions), Rashawn Slater (Chargers), Terron Armstead (Dolphins), Charles Cross (Seahawks) and more.
On film, Saints quarterback Derek Carr tosses the ball to Kamara, running out of the shotgun. By the time the back receives the ball, two of Manyweather’s clients, Ruiz and center Erik McCoy, are three to four yards into Dallas’s defensive backfield. McCoy bodies a defender and throws him to the turf while Ruiz continues chugging upfield.
Manyweather juxtaposes that with film from a handful of private training sessions. He believes in movement-specific workouts—also a popular trend among top quarterback trainers—and the linemen here are taking the same explosive, angular steps on the nearly empty practice field that Ruiz and McCoy do in the game against the Cowboys. In the drills, linemen start from a static position and accelerate, gauge the situation and then decelerate abruptly.
“It trains them to get themselves into position to make a block in space,” Manyweather says.
Another piece of Manyweather’s training involves drill work in which a player is purposely starting in an awkward position to mimic the reality of down-to-down life as an offensive lineman, which normally includes someone diving at their knees, sticking hands through their facemask or clubbing them in the chest.
In one drill, an offensive lineman puts their hands over the top of the shoulders of a training partner—think middle school slow dance posture. The training partner has their hands jolted into the chest of the lineman. This recreates a situation where the offensive lineman has missed their block and a defensive lineman is bull-rushing them, a power technique where the defender is trying to push the lineman backwards into the quarterback.
In others, linemen are asked to start with one knee on the ground before they pop up and sprint laterally, back and forth. Devoid of context, the drills may look like some kind of drug-addled interpretive dance. But a glimpse of the modern NFL shows that each and every repetition is an absolute necessity.
One last play to hammer home the point: Opening night of the 2024 season, Ravens at Chiefs. Kansas City has the ball, first-and-10 at the Baltimore 21. Most of the world sees Chiefs rookie wide receiver Xavier Worthy take a reverse handoff into the end zone. What we miss from K.C.’s heaviest players was something more reminiscent of a West Side Story dance sequence than a football play. The right guard pulls to the left—standing up, pivoting laterally and sprinting across the line before crashing into a free defender. The right tackle bursts out of his pass set and fakes as if he is blocking left, then rhythmically swings back to his right just as a motioning tight end behind him changes direction and starts running the same way. The right tackle, center and left guard all find one another with Worthy a few yards behind them and form a phalanx that mows down one Ravens defender after another.
Pull action. Screen action. Downblocking. Fake pull action. Shuffle stepping. Sprinting. Mauling.
It’s less powerful, more beautiful. It’s big men like Ruiz and Wirfs living out their track and field dreams. It’s doing everything the little guys can do—and more.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as How the Nimble Behemoths of the Offensive Line Became the NFL’s Best Athletes.