An instant star three years in the making: The secret to Isaiah Ford’s breakout success.
How do you learn humility when you have only known success?
How do you learn patience if you never had to wait?
Isaiah Ford’s professional career has tested the limits of both virtues.
Until recently, here has been the scouting report on Miami’s young receiver: Tons of ability. Very little realized on the professional level.
A two-sport phenom in high school, Ford looked like a can’t-miss prospect. He decided on football and drew more than two-dozen offers from Division I schools, including the University of Miami.
Ford picked Virginia Tech and played from the moment he walked on campus. During the next three years, he rewrote the program’s record book.
Then came the NFL, where life got a lot harder for him. And a lot slower.
He shed tears of rage and relief on draft weekend. His pain since has been equal parts physical and emotional.
That’s why Sunday’s breakthrough game was so rewarding for Ford. Thrust into a prominent role after DeVante Parker and Albert Wilson left the Jets game with head injuries, Ford caught six passes for 92 yards. Both were career highs by a mile.
Put another way, Ford was an instant star — three years in the making.
“It was fun,” the always-engaging Ford told the Herald after practice Thursday. “It was kind of the time I’ve been waiting for for quite some time now. It’s an opportunity to really get out there and showcase what I can do. I’m not really big into moral victories. The end result is we wanted to win and we didn’t win. But it was a step in the right direction for me personally.”
Ford is a guy who has been around the Dolphins organization for what seems like forever, but never really been a part of their plans.
A slow 40 time at the 2017 Scouting Combine caused Ford, a declared underclassman, to fall all the way to the final round of the draft, leaving him a cauldron of anxiety and anger before the Dolphins finally took him with pick No. 237.
He spent six weeks on crutches and endured a frustrating rehab after a damaged meniscus cost him his rookie year.
He has been cut three times in the past 15 months, spending twice as much time on either the practice squad or injured reserve as he has Miami’s 53-man roster.
And after all that waiting, his big break came only after the Dolphins traded one receiver (Kenny Stills) and lost three others to injury (Parker, Wilson and Preston Williams, who is out for the year).
Ford’s 55 plays from scrimmage Sunday were just five fewer than he had combined in his career up to that point.
“Any time you get released or something like that, at this level, everyone’s competitive, so a little bit of your pride is touched,” Ford said. “But mentally, I’ve matured so much and I’ve grown in my faith. I feel like trust in Him, trust in His plan, and I’ll be able to get through anything.”
Ford, still two months shy of his 24th birthday, is wise beyond his years. He grew up fast in a split family in Jacksonville.
Both mom, Jocelyn Mitchell, and dad, Aaron Ford, worked long hours and multiple jobs to provide for Ford and his two older brothers.
He learned the power of work from his parents. He learned the importance of discipline from his siblings, who like Isaiah, were gifted athletically in high school but “didn’t really have grades to get past that point. I kind of learned from their mistakes.”
But perhaps the most important lesson — the one that helped him keep part of the Dolphins’ plans all these years — didn’t come from his family. And it didn’t come until his freshman year at Virginia Tech.
In college, everyone could tell he was good enough to beat most any player he would line up against. But Ford would need to rely on more than just his physical gifts to succeed the next level, Aaron Moorehead, his position coach in Blacksburg, told him.
“The more you know the bigger commodity you are to a team and an offense,” Ford recalls Moorehead telling him. “If you can play inside and out, and still be comfortable. If you can learn multiple spots and not just focus on your spot but everyone else and know what everybody’s job is, on top of honing your craft, perfecting your routes and catching the ball.”
Ford listened. While he barely played the last three seasons, he has studied plenty. And he now knows Chad O’Shea’s offense so thoroughly, even Dolphins quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick — who went to Harvard, you might have heard — occasionally turns to Ford when he has a question about a play or formation.
“His biggest strength is his ability to play multiple positions and be a very smart player,” said Dolphins offensive coordinator O’Shea. “He’s a guy that has done a great job of despite not being on the active roster, has really prepared like he is and he’s stayed ready at all positions. He’s a conceptual learner, so he can line up anywhere and that happened in the game.”
Conceptual learner? What’s that?
“If I’m looking at the play on the screen when we install it, he’s just not looking at his route,” O’Shea added. “He doesn’t have blinders on. He sees the big picture of the route, and he looks right and left to understand what everybody has on the pass route because I’ve been around some guys that truly just study their route, and then what happens is when they have to adjust and play the position next to them, they don’t see it because they didn’t learn it from a conceptual standpoint.”
That knowledge allowed him play every receiver position last Sunday, and do so at a high level.
Which was important not just for his present, but his future. The 2019 Dolphins season has been one extended tryout for the dozens of players the front office has cycled on and off their roster. General manager Chris Grier and coach Brian Flores don’t waste time, often cutting new additions after just a week or two of evaluation.
Ford knows how it feels to be told, essentially, he’s not good enough. And yet he keeps finding ways to get better and back in the team’s good graces. That persistence finally paid off Sunday.
“When you want to be good at something, you want to put in that work,” Ford said. “And once you start to get that success and see that stuff you’re working on come to fruition, you want to continue to chase after that feeling of being successful.”
