BILLS: Edwards is still a little brother, big-time QB

By Erik Brady
Gannett News Service

September 26, 2008 12:23 am

— Trent Edwards remembers the day his sister Shelby offered to move with him to the city of whatever NFL team drafted him.
“Even Buffalo?” he asked.
“Yes, absolutely,” said Shelby, who hates cold weather, “even Buffalo.”
Sure enough, months later, the Bills picked Edwards in the third round. And his big sister shuffled off to Buffalo to be his shoulder to lean on and biggest fan.
When the 3-0 Bills play the 0-3 Rams on Sunday, she will be in St. Louis to cheer him, keeping a remarkable familial attendance streak alive.
“Every game I have ever played — high school, college and NFL — someone from my family has been there for me,” Edwards says.
Shelby, 31, is there for him at road games and home games — and at home, mere minutes from Ralph Wilson Stadium.
“I’m here,” she says, “to let him know he is loved.”
Most everyone in these parts lets Edwards know that these days. Few athletes inspire communal love like a winning quarterback in Buffalo. Jim Kelly took the Bills to four Super Bowls in the 1990s and remains a prince of the city. Jack Kemp won two American Football League titles in the 1960s and got elected to nine terms in Congress.
Edwards, 24, is a long way from their sainted status. But he has the Niagara Frontier in a tizzy with his early-season play. The Bills are one of the NFL’s surprise teams. They’re alone in first place in the AFC East this far into a season for the first time since 1996, when Edwards was in seventh grade.
Kelly was the Bills’ quarterback then. Seven others have started for the Bills since he retired at the end of that season but it is Edwards, at long last, who has the look of Kelly’s true successor.
The last two weeks, Edwards has brought the Bills from behind to win the kind of close contests they have often lost in recent years. And he has been at his best in crunch time: His fourth-quarter numbers are 24-for-32 for 284 yards, two touchdowns, no interceptions and a 122.4 passer rating. He ranks in the top five among AFC quarterbacks in eight categories.
All of which means no one makes fun of him for living with his sister.
“They’re ready to give Trent the key to the city,” quarterbacks coach Alex Van Pelt says. “But I think he’d put it away somewhere and not use it. That’s how Trent is. He’s so focused on what he has to do.”
Offensive coordinator Turk Schonert says that’s rare in a second-year player. “A lot of younger guys get off track,” he says. “But Trent is like talking to the CEO of a company. I mean, he has a good sense of humor, but he’s a very serious, very bright guy.”
That was evident in the Bills’ 24-23 victory against the Oakland Raiders. Edwards took a big hit as he tossed a 14-yard touchdown pass to Roscoe Parrish with four minutes to play, pulling the Bills within 23-21. On the sideline he sat briefly on the bench, then got up and exhorted his teammates, pacing animatedly in front of where they sat.
“I just said we were going to get the ball back and we were going to score again and win,” Edwards says. “The team needs to see me engaged in the game, that the guy leading that huddle wants to win. ”
That sort of thing does not come as naturally to Edwards as it did to Kelly. Edwards didn’t show it much last season as a rookie, when he took over from incumbent J.P. Losman.
Guard Brad Butler says Edwards led mostly by example last season: “That’s why it works now that he’s more vocal.”
Edwards seems almost a little surprised.
“A lot of these guys are older than me, are married and have kids,” he says. “And who am I? I’m just a California kid who came out here in the third round last year. Why should they listen to what I have to say?”
Sister runs the house
Some words often used to describe Edwards: calm, poised, unflappable.
“Trent never gets rattled,” offensive tackle Jason Peters says.
But if he’s so mature, how come Edwards needs one sister to keep the home fires burning and the other to watch over his money? (Megan, 29, owns a financial planning company in northern California.)
Shelby says that isn’t the right question. She says she needs him as much as he needs her. She’s not here to arrange the furniture and the tickets and the family travel — though she does all of that. She is here to be her baby brother’s best friend.
“Pro football looks glamorous, but a lot of these kids are going home to play video games by themselves,” she says. “As great as it can be, it can be very lonely. And I didn’t want Trent to have to go through it alone.”
Shelby remembers reading a story about how Tom Brady’s sister came to live with him in New England when he was a rookie.
“I can’t even take credit for the idea,” Shelby says. “I remember thinking that if Trent ever got to that point, I would go with him.”
Edwards bought a house in Buffalo’s southern suburbs. Shelby runs it. She puts the home in home-cooked — often having some of the team’s other young stars to dinner, including running back Marshawn Lynch and linebacker Paul Posluszny, fellow second-year players.
She is Wendy, keeping house for the Lost Boys.
“My cooking skills are limited,” Posluszny says, laughing. “Shelby takes good care of us.”
Late-comer to football
Fran Edwards, their mother, is a middle-school physical education teacher in their northern California hometown of Los Gatos. “I miss them terribly,” she says, “but I feel better knowing they are together, supporting each other.”
Fran and her husband Andy plan on seeing Trent play eight regular-season games, four at home and four on the road. They’ve attended both home games this season.
Shelby works in fund-raising for Kids Escaping Drugs, a suburban Buffalo in-patient residence home for adolescents with alcohol and drug dependencies.
“She knows me better than anyone else in this world,” Edwards says. “It’s just a relaxing, nice feeling to come home and have a conversation that doesn’t have to do with how we’re going to block the Oakland Raiders’ blitz schemes.”
Shelby could carry such a conversation. She was her family’s first sports star, captain of a state champion volleyball team at Los Gatos High School who earned a scholarship to Oregon, where she played four years.
“Trent got dragged to all of Shelby’s and Megan’s games when he was growing up,” says Andy Edwards, who works for the FAA.
That’s how Edwards got discovered at about age 8. He was at one of Shelby’s volleyball tournaments, throwing a black-and-red Turbo football between games when Los Gatos football coach Butch Cattolico spotted him.
“His form was perfect,” Cattolico says. “I said to my wife, ‘Who is that?’ She said, ‘Shelby’s little brother.’ I said, ‘I’ve got to keep coaching until he shows up.’ ”
But when Edwards got to high school, he didn’t want to play football. He never had. Basketball and volleyball were his sports.
“I was adamant about it,” Edwards says. “Football wasn’t really in our blood. My dad played one year in high school and didn’t like it. And my mom worried I would get hurt.”
Edwards’ former T-ball coach, Scott Downs, coached the freshman-sophomore team and persuaded Edwards to play quarterback. By his sophomore year, Cattolico had him on the varsity. As a junior, Edwards completed 78.1 percent of his passes, a national record. Los Gatos went 26-0 during his junior and senior years, and he papered his bedroom in college recruiting letters.
Edwards chose Stanford, 30 minutes from home.
Edwards played through injuries and losing seasons at Stanford. Five other quarterbacks were drafted ahead of him in 2007. Bills fans are happy with the one they got.
“It’s a really bad cliche, but this position you get all the credit when you win and all the blame when you lose,” Edwards says. “Right now we’re winning, obviously. We’re sitting here doing interviews and I’m busy meeting people.
“It’s more so that the team’s playing better. It’s frustrating for me to be compared to all these guys and get anointed as the next player and yet there’s still plays in these last three games that I made personally that could have lost us these games.”
That’s the brother Shelby knows so well: humble, soft-spoken, uneasy with adulation.
“Nothing changes him,” she says. “It’s a wild ride. And I’m going to ride the wave with him for as long as I can.”

Copyright © 1999-2008 cnhi, inc.