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Riled up: Why West Virginia QB recruit Garrett Greene plays with an unrelenting edge
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — On a Wednesday afternoon in late October, the football stadium at Chiles High School is empty, save for some cross-country runners gathering in the bottom rows of the metal bleachers for a team photo.
Moments later, there’s the faint click-clack of cleats on cement. Garrett Greene, the quarterback, the West Virginia commitment, fronts a trickle of players exiting the locker room. He goes straight to the sideline bench and meets an athletic trainer to have his right wrist taped. Then he’s the first player on the turf, stretch-lunging as he awaits an assistant coach to arrive. When that happens, Greene launches into a battery of warmup throws, utilizing rollouts and various arm angles, incrementally increasing the distances from 5 yards to 50.
He won’t stand still. Even during water breaks, he’s jabbing the shoulder pads of teammates or hacky-sacking a football. And when an offensive lineman loses his temper with a defender at the end of a running play, Greene bounces into the scrum — not to break it up, but to rile them up. He loves the conflict. He doesn’t want to see anyone cooling off.
“He’s been that way since he came out of the womb,” said his dad, Charlie, who’s watching practice from his usual spot beneath the awning of the concession stand. “So competitive.”
At the close of a 90-minute practice, Greene’s not finished. He and an athletic young linebacker are side-by-side on the goal line, crouched over in sprinter’s stances. Teammates are counting down — on your mark, get set, go!
They blast off, and barely 10 yards along, Greene surges ahead. By the time they reach the 40, Greene’s looking over his shoulder with a comfortable lead, taunting “Come on!”
“He kept saying he was faster than me,” Greene said. “So we had to end that talk.”
But in truth, Greene will only find a new reason to trash talk. He can’t embrace being even-keel, tamping down emotions. The fire is essential, part of a balls-out mentality that, if muted, would minimize him.
“Being undersized, you have to be fiery, you have to be energetic,” said Greene, who’s generously listed at 6 feet. A three-star prospect, he’s the nation’s 20th-rated dual-threat quarterback in the Class of 2020, per 247Sports. He even earned a spot in the Elite 11 quarterback finals. Yet he was passed up by an ocean of college recruiters along the way, including the Florida State coaches whose offices sit 12 miles away.
After Greene committed to West Virginia in the spring, he said there was occasional outreach from the Seminoles’ staff, which had a pledge from four-star quarterback Jeff Simms of Jacksonville. In the wake of coach Willie Taggart’s firing, however, Simms decommitted.
With newly hired coach Mike Norvell trying to fortify Florida State’s recruiting haul before this week’s early signing period, Greene reemerged on the radar last week. But he told FSU upfront that he was loyal to West Virginia and that no school could flip him.
“FSU had three years to offer me and never pulled the trigger,” Greene said in late October. “That kind of pissed me off.”
If he idolizes any QB, it’s Baker Mayfield — not just for the cocky-cool persona, but for that stick-it-to-the-nonbelievers attitude.
“Baker’s always been the second-tier guy, wasn’t highly recruited,” Greene said. “And even when there’s no outside noise, he creates some in order to get his teammates fighting so much harder.”
Recalling Mayfield’s Oklahoma flag-planting antics at Ohio State, Greene said , “Aw, man, I loved it!”
His dad, the in-house role model, understands the conundrum of raising a kid with such an oversized chip. Having appeared in parts of five seasons as a major-league catcher and now serving as a farm-system instructor for the Milwaukee Brewers, Charlie has seen and studied a couple of generations of athletes whose engines run hot.
“Praise doesn’t get Garrett going, but you get some hate, some woofing, and that’s his juice,” Charlie said. “He’d play all road games if it was up to him.
“He just plays with such an edge. I know he’ll never switch that off entirely, but maybe sometimes he needs to use a dimmer.”
The ejection initially carried a six-week suspension, which would’ve spilled over into his senior year of football. After an appeal to the Florida high school athletics association, however, Greene only missed Chile’s spring football jamboree and three baseball state playoff games.
“I’m an emotional player, and when you play too close to the edge, sometimes you get burned,” he said. “But that’s not what leaders do — they don’t get suspended.”
As for Neal Brown’s reaction when he told West Virginia’s coach about the suspension? “He just wanted me to watch my mouth,” Greene said.
After a breakout season playing catcher, one in which the strong-armed Greene all but eliminated baserunners trying to steal, watching the state playoffs from the bleachers proved difficult. Between innings, when Greene counseled the freshman who replaced him behind the plate, they were forced to meet outside the fence because the suspension prohibited Greene from stepping foot in the dugout.
That separation gnawed at Greene, who knew he’d miss his senior season of high school baseball in order to enroll early at West Virginia. Before putting that whole tag controversy to bed, he remembers it. “The video came out and showed I was safe,” he said
Though several baseball scouts told Charlie his switch-hitting son would emerge as a draftable prospect in 2020, Greene’s priority is playing quarterback. That’s been the case since the spring of eighth grade, when he convinced his dad to sign him up for training at QB Country in Mobile, Ala., about three hours west on Interstate 10.
“That was his Christmas present,” Charlie said. “I mean, I know baseball and throwing mechanics, but playing football is a different animal.”
Thus began Greene’s tutelage under David Morris, the former backup to Eli Manning at Ole Miss whose academies have trained NFL quarterbacks such as Daniel Jones and Gardner Minshew and college QBs including Georgia’s Jake Fromm, North Carolina’s Sam Howell and Ole Miss’ John Rhys Plumlee.
