Jackson didn’t know if he could reach this point. Shortly after he arrived at Louisville in the summer of 2015, he picked up his playbook. It was huge. At Boynton Beach High coach Rick Swain had drawn plays on the board. Now Jackson was expected to memorize the equivalent of an encyclopedia volume. And, says Jackson, "It was a foreign language." He would call his mother and complain. Maybe he couldn’t do this. "This is too much like studying," Jackson whined. James would hear none of it. She told him he’d never digest the playbook if he tried to swallow it whole. If he broke up his study into 30-minute chunks, he could focus on one aspect of the offense at a time.
He began learning, but not fast enough for Petrino. The Cardinals used three quarterbacks in 2015—Jackson, then-sophomores Kyle Bolin and Reggie Bonnafon. While Petrino knew Jackson had the highest ceiling, he couldn’t reasonably expect that a freshman could master his playbook in two months. "We knew that his athletic ability and his ability to throw the ball were very unique," Petrino says. "The question became, what can you teach him in a short amount of time? So we put packages together for him. And he did a really good job of understanding those packages. But you couldn’t install the whole offense."
So Jackson relied on his instincts and athleticism. "There were times last year that we’d end up calling a play, and he wouldn’t know what the play was," says quarterbacks coach Nick Petrino, Bobby’s son. "You could see from film that he’d be looking at the wrong spot. We’d have guys wide open, and he wouldn’t even know where to look."
http://www.foxsports.com/college-fo...on-became-a-heisman-trophy-frontrunner-092016
