The boys had been in a car accident. It wasn’t good. That’s all they knew.
“I look back,” Ryan says, “and I knew they were dead. It was that kind of accident. I swore they were gone.”
Ryan is the father of three sons, all football players. Seven years ago, two were in a serious car crash — a Jetta colliding head-on with a military fuel truck. Matt Ryan was in the passenger seat. His brother, Michael — who goes by Motts — was driving.
Motts, the eldest, was the backup quarterback at Pennsylvania’s Widener University. Matt was the star sophomore passer at the Penn Charter School in Philadelphia.
Motts had the technique; Matt had the build that would take him to Boston College and make him a star. They all knew Matt had the brighter future on a football field. Motts was fine with that. Still, he loved to play. He was going to be the starter at Widener in a year. All he had to do was wait his turn.
Then the call came, the one that told Mike Ryan to get to the hospital.
He hurried in with his wife, Bernie, and found the boys in a hospital room. Matt was sitting on a chair, his ankle and foot bandaged. Around the partition lay Motts, whose right elbow had been crushed and his head gashed.
They were OK, doctors told Mike. But Motts wouldn’t be a football player anymore. His arm wouldn’t be the same.
Matt Ryan became one of the nation’s best quarterbacks at Boston College. He’s around 6 feet 5 with a powerful right arm. Saturday, he could be one of the top five players selected in the NFL draft. He probably will sign a contract that will pay him millions to play the game all three of Mike Ryan’s boys played in their backyard in Exton, Pa.
A year or so after the crash, Matt was riding with his mother to a game. Matt had been quiet for a long time. He had been quiet for months. Then, a few miles from the Penn Charter campus, he finally had something to say: Why?
Why had football been taken from his brother but not him? Why was he getting all this attention and hearing all this talk about the future, when Motts was sitting around, making attempt after failed attempt to play again, trying to stay close to a game that suddenly had no more use for him?
“Growing up,” Motts says now, “football is your life. Just like that, I was done. It just kind of is what it is.”
•••
The Ryan boys were outside again, getting into who knows what. Maybe throwing the ball. Or yelling about who was stronger or faster. Or terrorizing the youngest brother, John.
On many days, they were playing the role of NFL quarterback. Matt was Brett Favre, and Motts was, well, Brett Favre. They wanted to be like the Green Bay Packers star, making the big throw in the impossible situation.
They threw the ball, one trying to outdo the other. Motts had developed almost perfect form, flawless footwork and a tight spiral. But Matt, three years younger, was showing the same knack and making the same throws — and still growing.
“Every time he looks at me,” Mike Ryan says of his 6-foot eldest son, “he gets angry that Matt is 6-5. He just needed a little bit of that.”
Sometimes Motts and Matt ganged up on John, who was three years younger than Matt. He was too small to run with the big boys, so they playfully bullied him.
The older brothers were close. Matt went to Motts’ games, and Motts went to Matt’s games. Motts walked on at Widener, a Division III school, when Matt was a sophomore at Penn Charter. He was supposed to take over as starter after a year on the bench.
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