Cam Ward could be the most unlikely No. 1 NFL draft pick ever

To Steve Van Meter, it seemed obvious that the high school sophomore had every quality a college coach would want in a quarterback. 

Academically, Cam Ward was near the top of his class. Athletically, he was his high school’s leading scorer in basketball and a naturally accurate passer in football. When Van Meter, a retired coach who specialized in coaching quarterbacks around the Houston area, asked him to tweak his throwing mechanics, Ward could process the information and make the change by the very next rep. 

And then there was his explosive right arm. The first time he watched Ward throw, the battle rotated so fast that it whistled.

“I was a head Texas high school head coach for 28 years, and coached 38 years in high school and I’ve had Division I quarterbacks,” Van Meter said. “The ball didn’t come out of the hands like that on anybody I’ve ever coached.” 

Yet when Van Meter evangelized about Ward’s skill set to the network of college coaches he’d cultivated over the decades, all he heard was pushback. Ward played in a small town and in an offense far from the norm and that offered few opportunities to pass. It was enough to scare off recruiters. He entered the summer of 2019, just weeks before his final high school season, without a single college scholarship offer.

“It got to the point where I was just kind of questioning myself,” Van Meter said. “I was like, ‘Do I even know anything about this? Why aren’t these people seeing this?’ I know no one throws it like this kid does.”

Nearly six years later, Ward, now 22, is projected to walk across the stage Thursday at the NFL draft as the No. 1 selection — and in the process become perhaps the unlikeliest top pick in the league’s modern history. It’s not just that Ward began his college career at a lower rung — it’s that he barely had the chance to play college football at all. It’s why many close to Ward believe the biggest question about him was never about his talent, but whether any college program would take the risk to recognize it.

“I’ve had numerous coaches tell me how much they loved him, and they just couldn’t take a chance,” said Eric Morris, who offered Ward his first and only college scholarship when he was the head coach at the University of the Incarnate Word, a private Catholic school in Texas. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah — whatever. Of course you do now that he’s had all that success.’”

From Baker Mayfield, who turned down Division I scholarship offers to walk on at Texas Tech before finding fame at Oklahoma, to offensive lineman Eric Fisher, who was unheralded when he signed with Division I Central Michigan, overlooked recruits have gone on to be selected No. 1 in the NFL draft. Quarterbacks Josh Allen (Wyoming) and Aaron Rodgers (California) also went from being lightly recruited high schoolers to earning NFL MVP honors.

Yet these are exceptions in a draft in which recruiting rankings have been shown to correlate to future NFL draft selections. Five-star recruits hold a much higher chance of becoming first-round picks.

When Ward showed up at Incarnate Word’s campus in San Antonio for a football camp in the summer of 2019, he was not an unknown commodity among Texas college coaches. The previous year, Ward and his father had attended as many college camps as possible to gain the exposure he’d lacked as the starter in high school in West Columbia, a small city an hour south of Houston. There, Ward’s team ran a “Wing T” offense that primarily ran the ball, a style that was an anachronism in a state in which the spread offense was king, with quarterbacks throwing sometimes 50 times a game to four or five receivers. 

Brent Mascheck, Ward’s high school coach, said he felt it was a “cop-out” for recruiters to cite the Wing T as a drawback in assessing Ward’s talent, rather than trusting their own projections.

From Austin to Dallas, Ward crossed the state hoping that displaying the arm that was rarely unleashed on his high school tapes could earn him a scholarship. Yet, at a time when it has never been easier for a recruit to be noticed — thanks to athletes’ own social media posts and the booming media coverage around high school football recruiting — Ward held zero scholarship offers only weeks before his senior season. On a five-star recruiting scale, Ward had zero.

Texas A&M, like a handful of other schools, was close to offering but ultimately never did, Van Meter said. To Mascheck and Van Meter, several college coaches expressed a sentiment that goes far beyond the case of Ward — that it was too politically difficult to vouch for an unheralded recruit over a four- or five-star, even if a coach was convinced the lower-rated player was a better fit. 

“If you try to bring that kid to that head coach, you better know what you’re doing because if you don’t, if that kid doesn’t pan out, then guess what? You’re looking for a job,” Van Meter said. 

With less than 6,000 undergraduates in 2019, and playing in the NCAA’s second-highest division, Incarnate Word was a speck in the hierarchy of big-time college football and wasn’t competing for five-stars.

“It was a little bit easier to take a chance on a kid,” said Morris, now the head coach at North Texas. Success hinged on finding good players who were hidden in plain sight. Ward’s performance at the school’s camp was “phenomenal, as good as a camp workout as I’ve ever seen,” said Morris, who had coached future NFL quarterbacks Mayfield, Patrick Mahomes and Case Keenum in college.

Yet even then, the school’s coaches were “second-guessing ourselves,” said Mack Leftwich, then offensive coordinator under Morris, to understand why they were seemingly alone in recognizing Ward’s potential. 

Said Morris: “We’re all scratching our heads, kind of, ‘What are we missing here?’ As a college coach, I think you’re starting to look for all the negatives. What are the negatives about this kid? And just as we kept doing research, there were no negatives.”

Said Leftwich: “In that situation, you have to just be able to trust your evaluation and trust your instincts on a kid.”

That summer, the staff was still intrigued by Ward’s potential when Morris, during a staff meeting, called Van Meter and put him on speakerphone to ask for his impressions. That no one else had offered made the school cautious to be the first.

“I said, ‘Well, Coach, don’t take offense to this, but if Cam was in my offense, or in any spread offense that let him throw the ball 25, 35, 40 times a game, you guys wouldn’t have a shot at him,’” Van Meter said. “And everyone on his staff started laughing. But [Morris] said, ‘Coach, that’s exactly what we’ve been talking about — we think we got a steal.’ I said, ‘Coach, I promise you, you got a steal.’”

Ward’s throwing mechanics needed polishing and there was the question of how consistent a quarterback who had attempted just 267 passes in three seasons in high school could be when throwing 40 or more attempts per game in college. Mascheck said one college coach was critical of Ward’s frame, which at the time was about 6-foot-1 and around 240 pounds, about 20 pounds heavier than he weighed at February’s NFL Combine.

What sold Incarnate Word was partly watching Ward’s basketball tape. Ward had been raised around the game — his mother coached at the high school — and he played with his eyes up in traffic, anticipating open teammates and driving lanes, a job not dissimilar from playing quarterback. The staff loved that he hated to lose, drawing inspiration from Kobe Bryant. It also didn’t hurt that Incarnate Word wasn’t asking Ward to be its savior.

The school already had an All-American-caliber starter at quarterback whose presence would allow Ward at least two seasons, in Leftwich’s belief, to learn a spread offense as a backup with little pressure. When Covid canceled Incarnate Word’s fall 2020 season, Ward had even more time to learn the spread offense’s nuances during practices.

That extra development time proved critical. Ward walked into Morris’s office on his first day on campus as a freshman and declared he would win the starting job not in two seasons, but that fall. It came true, just three months later, after he’d made “about one or two plays a day where you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, this kid has a chance to be special,’” Leftwich said. 

“His confidence in what he does on a day-to-day basis, and not getting nervous or scared no matter who’s across from him, is one of the strongest qualities,” Morris said.

In one practice, Ward somehow curved a pass around an oncoming blitzer perfectly into his receiver’s hands. Leftwich, now the offensive coordinator at Texas Tech, said that hours later, Incarnate Word coaches had gathered to rewatch the play at least 15 times. 

Ward was an anomaly. His rise was helped, however, by enrolling in college at a time when NCAA rules changes no longer required transfers to sit out a season, giving players who started at smaller colleges more upward mobility. With the transfer portal open, Ward transferred to Washington State in 2022 (after Morris left to be the Cougars’ offensive coordinator) and then in 2024 to Miami, where he increased his draft stock by replicating his big production against more difficult competition. Along the way, Ward has drawn praise for his coolness under pressure and an outward confidence that puts teammates at ease — traits that were on display in high school, too, if anyone was looking.

While at Incarnate Word, Ward and his offensive coordinator, Leftwich, spoke about the possibility of him one day playing in the NFL. In fact, before Ward had even played a game for Incarnate Word, Leftwich was spending Thanksgiving in 2020 with his family when he told his father and brother, another college coach, that tiny Incarnate Word had a future NFL quarterback on its roster. 

This week, Ward will make that prediction come true. And it may never have happened without the willingness to offer Ward what no other team would.

“Holy cow, we just coached a potential No. 1 overall pick at the University of Incarnate Word,” Leftwich said. “It’s pretty unbelievable, honestly.”