Chapter 90: Eight-Man Football

Chapter update is here.

Find a quiet spot, turn the page, and let’s see what this story has been hiding ??

?

This time, Nolan finally won rock-paper-scissors.

He earned the first pick and looked over the players.

Flea seemed eager. Compared with the last time Nolan had seen him, he looked a little taller.

Ford stood beside him, rounder than before. Maybe "love" had been feeding him well.

After them came Reese, who kept nodding toward Nolan.

Finally, Nolan looked at Cooper, who had just returned to the team.

"I choose Cooper."

Nolan mainly wanted to test him as a teammate.

"Very wise choice."

Cooper stepped out of the group and stood beside Nolan.

Adam chose without hesitation: Boar first, then Flea, the receiver.

In the second round, Nolan took Matic, who matched up well for what he wanted, plus the sturdy corner Mont.

Adam immediately took Ford and the offense’s tight end.

The draft continued.

In the final round, Adam looked at the five remaining players.

"Reese..."

Reese let out a breath. This time, at least, he was not the very last person left.

In any team draft, the later you were picked, the less your teammates trusted you.

Then Adam tilted his head.

"Go to Nolan’s side."

Reese’s expression stiffened.

Nolan looked at the "gift horse" now added to his team and patted his shoulder.

The final two players naturally fell to Nolan as well.

Under this kind of draft rule, playing well mattered less than drafting well, and Nolan had not been chasing the strongest roster. It was also his first time dealing with this selection format, so the balance was poor. Mont and the other corner overlapped in role, and his team included two of the weakest leftovers.

The only players who could truly threaten the other side were Cooper, Matic, and Nolan himself.

Adam’s team, by contrast, looked complete. On defense he had Boar, the biggest body on the roster. On offense he had taken Flea and Ford, Nolan’s usual left and right hands.

"I am a little weaker," Adam said as they put on gear. "So my team should have the advantage."

Nolan had led BHHS to a championship and given the school its best result in thirty years. That alone made Adam feel he had fallen behind.

Still, his humility came from habit as much as fact.

Adam believed that even if he was behind Nolan, the gap was limited.

Nolan did not mind either way.

"You do not actually think you can win easily, do you?" Adam said, smiling back at Nolan.

"What are you two talking about?"

Cooper moved closer, his size obvious now that everyone was in pads.

He had once been about Nolan’s height, but over the past two months Nolan had grown almost two inches. The difference now showed.

"How to bring out your ability," Nolan said.

"Then do not bother," Adam said. "Cooper has one route. One. Thomas cannot teach him anything else."

’That was a thing?’

If a player could win a starting job with only one route, then he was a different kind of talent monster.

Nolan had considered himself lazy enough. He had not expected Cooper to be the one who truly did not learn what he did not want to learn.

"Exactly," Cooper said. "They call it the Cooper Route."

His hand moved like a fish, drawing a crooked, winding line through the air.

Soon both sides finished preparing, and the small-field eight-man scrimmage began.

Nolan’s side opened on offense.

No tricks.

He ran straight at Adam.

Adam had only recently returned from injury, and as a quarterback, he did not have the physical advantage. Nolan attacking him directly was the obvious pressure point.

Adam did not retreat. He stepped in and squared up in front of Nolan.

Just as Nolan prepared his usual quick change of direction, his movement stalled.

Whether by habit or design, Adam’s foot had landed exactly on Nolan’s intended path. If Nolan cut recklessly, he would hit Adam’s ankle again.

Against an opponent, Nolan would not have cared. He might even have hoped for another fracture.

But Adam was different. Adam had once stayed late to teach him passing mechanics. Forget repayment; Nolan at least could not ruin his ankle again.

That tiny gap was all Adam needed.

He hooked both hands over the ball in Nolan’s arms. He did not rip with brute force. Instead, he slipped his fingers into the crook of Nolan’s arm, braced the football, and pressed down with the other hand.

The ball lost its balance and dropped.

"Fumble!"

Behind Nolan, Cooper saw it and shouted so loudly his mouth opened wide enough to show the tremble in his throat.

For football players, few words sounded more apocalyptic than fumble.

In an instant, no matter which side they belonged to, no matter where they were on the field, no matter whether they had been covering or blocking, every player rushed toward the loose ball.

Nolan reacted quickly. He threw himself down and covered it with his body.

Then Boar’s massive frame landed on top of him, fighting for the ball. A second player followed, then a third. Soon a full pile formed, the kind that always appeared after a fumble when offense and defense both tried to steal an advantage in the chaos.

Thomas finally stopped the play to end the mess.

When the players peeled away one by one, Nolan was still on the ground, the football pinned beneath his stomach.

He stood and rubbed his lower back.

These guys had actually gone full force.

"Ever heard of the Thomas Bowl?" Adam asked with a laugh. Then he stretched his foot deliberately. "It is when you eat breakfast out of Coach Thomas’s bowl."

So it had been intentional.

After that contact, Nolan understood Adam’s playing style better. He was an intelligence-type player, relying on small techniques more than raw force.

On second down, Nolan seemed to repeat the same idea and charged at Adam again.

This time, Adam did not use the ankle trick. Unless he wanted another hospital visit, he stepped back as Boar and another defender closed in from the side.

Unfortunately for them, Nolan had already released the ball.

Adam’s teammates had no idea how he had passed it.

It was as if Nolan had made the football disappear.

"Woo-hoo!"

A locomotive of a body burst into open space.

Cooper had the football tucked against his chest and rumbled forward like he owned the field.

Only after Cooper reached the end zone did the others realize how Nolan had done it.

Without turning his head, he had slipped the ball out behind his back.

’Does that guy have eyes in the back of his head?’

Adam found it unbelievable. He had seen Nolan throw blind from a side angle, but behind-the-back power was a completely different level of difficulty. Nolan’s arm had barely moved.

Then Adam saw Nolan and Cooper bump chests in the air.

He went to Nolan and asked how he had done it.

Nolan demonstrated it by hand.

Adam shook his head.

He could not learn it.

The motion itself was simple. Nolan used wrist power to loft the ball across. It had no speed and not much angle, but in that moment, everyone’s attention had been fixed on Nolan’s front, which made those weaknesses irrelevant.

Looking at Nolan’s hand, a full two sizes larger than his own, Adam understood that he had not lost to experience this time.

He had lost to physical gifts and imagination.

Then Adam’s offense came up, and Nolan had to defend.

Nolan’s defensive posture looked loose and casual. He did not even seem fully clear on the eight-man rules. Yet when Adam threw to Flea, Nolan sprang upward with his arms wide, almost like a basketball player going for a block, and batted the football out of bounds.

He could not claim to know defense deeply.

But he knew his teammates.

Flea’s advantages were speed and agility. Height was his weakness. A taller corner could limit him well enough. On offense, Nolan himself would never feed Flea a high ball like that. He would hit him behind the defense or throw at chest level.

Across the field, Adam understood the mistake as soon as the ball hit the ground.

When it came to reading teammates, he was behind Nolan.

The scrimmage continued.

After Nolan targeted him repeatedly, Adam grew more careful. After several probing drives, he found the weak spot on Nolan’s side: Reese at the edge.

"Shit."

After Flea beat him again on a switch, Reese looked furious.

"What is wrong?"

A familiar voice reached him.

Reese turned. Nolan was there.

Nolan called Cooper over and gave him a few quick instructions.

"Do not worry, boy," Cooper said, whistling as he swapped positions with the teammate beside Reese. "I will protect you."

The score climbed back and forth, but Nolan’s side gradually gained the upper hand, even with only three reliable players.

On the final offensive possession, Nolan openly handed the ball to Cooper.

In that compressed moment, Cooper looked at him with something close to panic.

His eyes seemed to ask, ’You don’t actually think I can get through this, right?’

The situation was difficult. There was no lead block, no disguise. Nolan had handed him the ball directly, and Adam’s side immediately squeezed toward the middle.

"Cooper Route," Nolan said softly.

He wanted to see exactly what that so-called route could do.

Cooper gritted his teeth and revealed the one route he knew best.

At a broad level, it resembled a normal fullback run, but the details were different. It felt like a hybrid of Ford’s style and Flea’s: flexible, quick, and driven by enough physical advantage to matter. At full speed, Cooper carried a little of Nolan’s presence.

Several offensive ideas involving Cooper immediately surfaced in Nolan’s mind.

The only problem was that the big man lacked initiative.

The Cooper Route lived up to its name.

Cooper almost challenged the entire defensive line by himself. By the end, defenders were pulling, dragging, grabbing, and hanging on so hard that his shirt tore before they finally stopped him.

He went down barely short of the end zone.

Nolan nodded again and again.

Cooper might be the strongest overall offensive player on the team right now.

On the next scoring play, Nolan used the same idea. He wanted to see how Cooper handled compressed space.

The instant Cooper caught the ball, he shoved it right back to Nolan.

With defenders already closing, Nolan took the ball himself and plunged into the line.

The moment he turned his back to Cooper, he became a hungry wolf thrown among sheep. He drove through Adam and two smaller defenders, dragging them several yards. Against the larger Boar, Nolan showed a more cunning side, ducking under Boar’s arm and finally stepping through defenders to dive into the end zone.

Only after Thomas blew the whistle to end the scrimmage did Cooper move from where he stood.

He had felt the force in Nolan.

A direct display of strength beat a thousand arguments.

Cooper walked over and pulled Nolan up.

"Your Cooper Route needs work," Nolan said, removing his helmet.

There was a split at the corner of his mouth. During the last drive, his face had made intimate contact with the facemask.

"How?"

Cooper took off his helmet too.

"Never refuse my pass."

"Got it."

This time, Cooper nodded obediently.

Not far away, Adam watched them. He actually understood Cooper better than Nolan did.

If Cooper were not so lazy, he would be a serious contender for best high-school fullback in California. Even Thomas had never known what to do with him. Cooper had practically been dragged from the baseball field to the football field.

He simply had no interest in football.

Yet now he was bowing his head to Nolan. Clearly, he had seen his own deficiency in Nolan.

Talent. Understanding teammates. Leadership.

Adam had been crushed in all of it.

He shook his head. He still remembered Nolan’s first night with the team, when Thomas had forced him to stay and practice passing with the new kid.

Back then, Nolan had known almost nothing.

In a blink, he had surpassed him.

"I will be waiting for you in the NCAA," Adam told Nolan. "When you get there, we will test ourselves properly."

’Another one waiting for me?’

Nolan’s smile froze.

?

?

?

Ready for more?

The next Chapters are already waiting on my Patreon, along with early access, previews, and extra story updates ???

/cw/TheBacklotFanfiction