But I started by asking him what he'd been doing.

"Well, I've been working out a bunch," he said. "But if you're just focused purely on football, and that's all you do, and that's all you can do, it'll burn you out. Even some of the veterans will say it, so I've just been trying to relax a little bit in the time off we do get, and see the area, find out where everything is around here."

See anything notable around here?

"Not really. We went to the movies the other night in a really nice area around here and we explored over there. There's some pretty big houses out that way.

"I've been to DC a couple times, though, been to the Air and Space Museum. It was awesome, one of the coolest things I've ever seen. I'd never been, so it was awesome. Went to see the Lincoln Memorial, we went to see the White House. Just all the tourist things I'm sure everyone did when they first got here as well."

I'm not really sure that everyone does, actually. Anyhow, which of those places really stuck out to you the most?

"I think you've gotta see the Air and Space museum, without a doubt. It's just...How massive and how big it is. And how they get those planes in there. Just the time and effort getting that stuff ready for us to see is pretty amazing."

When we used to go the on school field trips growing up, the big thing was to buy the astronaut ice cream in the gift shop. Did you try that?

"I didn't want to do that, I'll leave that up to the astronauts. I actually heard it wasn't really ice cream -- I watched a thing on Food Network the other day, and they said it was just hardened cotton candy that just melts in your mouth"

Another childhood memory ruined. How was Baltimore?

"Never been to that area before. We went down to ... the Inner Harbor, I think it was, and Fells Point and everything down there. So I'm trying to learn the local lingo and the places to go and just see some things. I went up there with two of my buddies and one of their dads, and saw all that stuff, and went to the ESPN Zone down there, which is massive. Then we went to the Orioles game and had a great time."

Did you try hard-shell crabs?

"I haven't had hard shell crabs, yet, but I think I've had pretty much everything else. I like seafood, so I went down to Wegmans the other night and got some fresh salmon and it's just insane, because in Texas the beef aisle is as big as this building, but here the seafood aisle is pretty big as well, so I took notice of that."

On the field, how have things been going?

"I feel comfortable with it. Coach Zorn is just trying to tweak certain things in my drop, and having me play at one level and not popping up, so it's just going to take muscle memory for me to learn it. It's not hard to learn it, I've just been taught a different way all my life. Of course you want to do it the way Coach Z wants it. You know it's taken some time, but its getting better every day I feel like."

You were the ... sort of the test case in an article by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker, about what he calls "the quarterback problem," examining the difficulty of predicting who would be successful in a particular position. What'd you think of the piece?

"To be in the New Yorker, to have him pick us -- and me -- to write about is obviously amazing in its own right. It's a testament to how far Missouri has come as a program. . He's a very intelligent author, obviously, and he really pulled it all together at the end. It was an interesting piece, very well-written. I liked it."

Did you feel like he gave you a fair shake?

"Well, I think he came to one of my worst games of my career. We lost that game, and, you know, I would have loved him to come to the Nebraska game instead, but it's just .... Every writer, every author, and every guy that is in to sports is gonna have their own opinions and in this case, it's a big voice. But it was a good article, a good thing."

Well, the article pointed to some of the questions about you coming into the NFL, and there have also been doubts because of your height. And -- I know you've always played at this height, obviously, but does it feel any different on an NFL practice field?

"I mean, we had 6-foot-7, 6-foot-8 tackles at Missouri, so I found a way to throw over there. You've got to have the knack for the position; you've got to know that your guy is going to be there when he is there. In this league especially, you've gotta anticipate it, and it's throwing through windows. You very rarely throw over guys, so ... I mean I haven't had any balls tipped so far in drills."

So you still feel completely confident?

"Yeah, no doubt about it. I think that it's just hard for me to come in and soak up everything that they throw at us as quickly as I want. I've talked to Coach Zorn and Coach Meidt, and they said this is day and night for us as a team compared to last year with the amount of stuff we're putting in.

"Coach Meidt was saying today that last year they put in 60 pass plays through four practices the first week. They put in 110, 120 this time around. I'd been thinking, 'Man, am I that dumb?', but he was like, 'No, you're actually further ahead than we thought you would be, so just keep on and keep after it.'"