A Kansas City homecoming: How Drew Lock and his parents are planning for his biggest NFL test yet

April 24, 2024

Sunday afternoon in Kansas City, a contingent of some 40 or 50 once-Chiefs fans will show their new allegiance as they fill the northeast corner of Arrowhead Stadium.

Instead of a sea of red, one of the loudest stadiums in the NFL could feature a broad swath of orange, thanks to the Drew Lock Fan Club, a group of friends, family members, former coaches and college teammates from his home state of Missouri.

“Yeah, I know it’s going to be different,” Lock said. “I hope if they walk in there with a Broncos jersey that’s got a (number) three on it that they only cheer for the Broncos. Because I would appreciate that a lot. It’s going to be loud as it is, so many (that) if we can turn over 50 of the Chiefs fans that would have been there, it’ll help us out in the long run.”

Lock would know because he used to be one, a born-and-raised Chiefs fan out of Columbia, Mo., who even has personal ties to the team. His father, Andy Lock, was a former offensive tackle at the University of Missouri and his positional coach his last season was Andy Reid.

“Great athlete,” Reid said of Andy. “For an offensive lineman — he played tight end, he played quarterback, but he was a really good athlete. I coached him his senior year, so he was, at that time, an All-Big 8 player.”

The Locks attended Chiefs games annually and watched many more on television, their interest growing stronger when Reid took over as head coach in 2013. Drew was a big fan of receiver/returner Dante Hall, “The Human Joystick,” and he can still remember watching Peyton Manning with the Colts and Joe Flacco with the Ravens coming into Arrowhead.

“It’s kind of crazy to think those two were in two of the biggest games I remember there,” he said. “Now, I’m kind of tightly knit with them.”

Drew also remembers his days at Lee’s Summit High, some 15 miles southeast of Arrowhead, where he was a well-recruited shooting guard in addition to the school’s star quarterback.

“We had an Applebee’s right across from our school,” he recalled from his basketball days. “Half-priced appetizers after 9. By the time you’re done playing your game, you and a couple of buddies that stayed after to wait for you to come out of the locker room and you go over there, get a little kiwi lemonade and go to town.”

(For the record, Drew has since ditched Applebee’s from his postgame routine.)

Since April, the family that is Missouri through and through has become diehard Broncos fans, a notion that might have seemed blasphemous a year ago.

Over the last few weeks, Andy and his wife, Laura, have stood among crowds of 70,000-plus to watch their son restore hope to Broncos fans on the brink of despair. Fans who watched their team tumble from Super Bowl champion in 2015 to perennial losers in the years after with no quarterback and no solution in sight. Before Lock, six others tried their hand at succeeding Manning, but none lasted. None was the answer.

Although it’s been only two starts for the 23-year-old, Lock showed glimmers of what the Broncos have been missing, with his play and more so his confidence under center.

But his biggest test to date awaits him back home.

In only his third game as an NFL starter, he’ll play the team he once idolized in the town where he has a strong following. He’ll have plenty of distraction and the inherent — and perhaps inescapable — pressure of not just playing for his fans, but also living up to the high bar he set for himself the last two weeks.

In an upset win in Houston, Lock became the first rookie in NFL history to throw for 300 yards with three touchdowns in his road debut. With an upset win in Kansas City on Sunday, he can become the first rookie quarterback in Broncos history to begin his career with three consecutive victories.

“The win was exciting, as it should have been,” he said. “Once you went and watched the film — I watched it with (quarterbacks coach) T.C. (McCartney) and (Rich) Scangarello — after that, it was on to Kansas City and start prepping for that. I did my normal routine last night, I did my normal routine Monday and just trying to keep things normal this whole week.”

Laura Lock got stuck with the planning. She’s the one who secured dozens of tickets for The Drew Lock Fan Club at Arrowhead. She’s the one ensuring there will be plenty of beer and hot chocolate for their tailgate amid freezing temperatures beforehand.

She’s the one compartmentalizing for Drew so he can stick to that routine that has served him well so far.

“You can turn off the phone and you can do whatever, but the people that know you and that you trust — your family, your close friends — they know not to blow you up about coming home and ask you for tickets, ask you this and ask you for that,” Drew said. “They know you have something going on, that you’ve got a game to play and that you need to stay focused to that.”

So Laura and Andy also know that while they hope to see their son for maybe 30 minutes Saturday evening, they’ll probably only get a few minutes after the game Sunday, just before the Broncos board a bus to the airport and return to Denver that evening.

Yet, there’s no one to really shield them from the nerves or distraction.

Andy and Laura watched multiple training camp practices at Dove Valley and typically began their mornings sitting under a tent reserved for family members of players and coaches. But when team drills began, Andy would migrate to the nearby bleachers to stand on the top row and watch every snap, every throw from Drew.

Where Drew goes, they go. Where Drew throws, Andy’s attention goes.

“I think after preseason when he went on (injured reserve), it was the first time in probably five years that Andy and I actually took a deep breath and went to a game, had a couple of beverages and just relaxed,” Laura said. “But by probably Week 5 or 6, we were looking at each other going, ‘OK, I want to be nervous again, you know?’”

The Broncos activated Lock off IR in Week 13, following a disappointing start with veteran Joe Flacco that ended in injury for him too. A three-game tryout for backup Brandon Allen ended in disappointment too as calls for Lock intensified from a fan base that had grown frustrated by the team’s play and lengthy search for a quarterback.

They wanted to see the kid play.

They wanted to see him play after eight weeks, which was the earliest he could have returned from IR, but the Broncos had a plan, and they let few in on the actual details.

“I do think — well, I know for a fact — that there was more communication with him about the plan maybe than a lot of people know,” Andy said. “It wasn’t an accident the way it all played out I don’t think.

“If you were to ask me eight weeks ago if I felt like it was necessary, I would have said no. But just seeing the results of the last couple of weeks, I do feel like through the process he got better.”

Drew agreed, telling reporters after the win in Houston last weekend that the timing was “perfect” and that, while he might have been physically ready to play weeks earlier, he was more mentally prepared to handle the task by Week 13.

The Broncos didn’t want him to start after zero practice time, which he would have had he been activated in time for the Browns game in Week 9. They didn’t want him to take his first start on the road against a tough defense, which he would have had he played in Minnesota in Week 11 and in Buffalo in Week 12.

So, after three days of practice, they gave him the Chargers game with no guarantees beyond.

“Coming into that Chargers game, Andy and I are restaurant owners and foodies, and I think we were on a 40-hour fast at that point because we were so nervous,” Laura said.

After Drew’s first touchdown — a 26-yard pass to Courtland Sutton, who dove into the end zone for the one-handed catch — the cameras turned to Andy and Laura in the crowd at Mile High, jumping and hugging each other in celebration.

“Before the game we were like, ‘OK, let’s act like we’ve been here before.’ We lost it a little bit,” said Andy, as Laura yelled in the background: “We lost our minds!”

By the second game, the nerves settled slightly as the expectations changed. They arrived at NRG Stadium expecting the Broncos to get throttled by a Texans team that had just defeated the Patriots.

The last time Drew played at NRG, Missouri lost to Texas in the Texas Bowl and Longhorns coach Tom Herman was caught on the sideline mocking Drew’s “secure the bag” touchdown celebration.

This time, however, the only outside chatter Drew created was about Buzz Lightyear and whether the Broncos indeed found The Guy on the seventh try.

With his father, however, the postgame talks are typically always a rehash of the game, of his reads, of what happened on certain plays and, lately, what is said to opponents.

“He loves to talk about that,” Andy said. “He said last week he told a guy, some guy he threw a pass over, and the D-back was standing there and he goes, ‘Man, I used to play as you in Madden and you were great, but you’re terrible in person.’”

Andy still laughs when thinking about it, both out of amusement and joy that others are seeing what he’s seen for 23 years.

“I just feel like everybody’s just starting to realize who Drew is, and not only as an athlete but as a person and as a teammate and all that stuff,” he said. “… He’s a kid that plays really well when he’s confident and feeling himself a little bit. I don’t think he could find that early on. I think it took him a while because there’s just so much to it — the mental piece of it, the calling the plays, learning his teammates, them learning him. There’s just such a big leap.

“He’s really never been a backup, and the minute he was brought into Dove Valley, the message to him was, ‘You’re at best a backup. You’re competing for the backup job.’ Well, that’s just not really his personality. That’s not who he is, and that’s not what he’s about.”

This one matters, but Drew has and will likely continue to say it doesn’t.

“I think we’ll all make a little too much of it. It’s just another football game,” he said Wednesday. “I’ve got to prep like I did the first two weeks and just be ready to go.”

Safety Kareem Jackson said the same last week ahead of his return to Houston, where he played nine years as a cornerback. His homecoming was a career performance and landed him AFC defensive player of the week honors.

Ideally, the Locks would love to see the same for Drew. Broncos fans would too. But weekly 300-yard, three-touchdown outings are not a reality in the NFL. And the team that once dominated the AFC West hasn’t won at Arrowhead in their last three trips there and has lost eight consecutive games overall to the Chiefs. The Broncos last beat the Chiefs in Week 2 of 2015

This game figures to be no easier for the Broncos.

“They do a lot of different things both from a pressure standpoint and a coverage standpoint,” coach Vic Fangio said. “He’s going to have to make some tough and correct reads, figure out where to go with the ball quickly and be able to decipher the pressures from the non-pressures and then the different coverages.”

But perhaps the biggest challenge for any young quarterback in his first trip home is overcoming the distraction away from the field. Lock has already been painted as a hero — a savior, even — for the Broncos, yet the spotlight seems to fit him well.

“I try to stay away from trying to get too wrapped up in all the media stuff,” he said. “I definitely feel like just from this building, there’s a good buzz. Guys are excited, we’re starting to play hard and have a little juice behind everything that we do, so that’s been fun. I try to stay in this building as much as I can.”

But as many Broncos quarterbacks over the last few years found out, playing that position for this team is a job few could ever prepare for. It’s a pressure-cooker, intensified by the fact that Elway — the greatest quarterback in team history — is pulling the strings as general manager and looking to replace Manning, the second-greatest.

Lock has played at Arrowhead once before, late in his freshman season at Missouri, when the football program was in the throes of a tumultuous week. Many football players threatened to boycott a game against Brigham Young University as part of race-related protests that ultimately led to the chancellor’s resignation. Shortly after, their coach, Gary Pinkel, announced his impending resignation, for health reasons.

The game against BYU was spared of cancelation and Lock threw the go-ahead touchdown for the win.

By the time his college career ended three years later, Lock had thrown for the second-most passing yards (12,193) and third-most touchdowns (99) in SEC Conference history and quickly became Elway’s favored quarterback in the class of 2019.

Lock’s first two starts left Elway impressed. But both know more is to come.

“I thought he played great,” Elway said in a local radio interview. “… I think he’s played very, very well his first two starts, he’s handled himself great. Obviously, he’s a young guy with two starts, but we couldn’t be happier with how he came out of the gate and know that there’s still going to be ups and downs. We’re going into Kansas City against a defense and he’s going to see a lot more looks than he’s seen the first two weeks. But you know what, we’re excited about where he is.”

(Photo: Troy Taormina / USA Today)

ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57kG1sbG5maHxzfJByZmpqX2Z%2FcLDRnq5mpJ%2BYuG6wxKetnqpdl7%2BwusKoqmajkaPAor%2BMnKCtsV2YtaqxxaxksJ2VoHpygY4%3D