Forget what happened at Nebraska. Adrian Martinez feels like a new QB at Kansas State

No one on the Kansas State football team was expecting Adrian Martinez to do much as he recovered from shoulder surgery last spring, so it came as a surprise to everyone when he showed up to the practice field one day and loudly challenged Phillip Brooks to a foot race.

“I’m lining up for a drill and I hear him yelling, ‘Phil! Where’s Phil at? I want to run next to you!’” Brooks said. “That told me right then and there he was a competitive dude. I didn’t even know him yet. The next day, he did the same thing with Malik Knowles. Then it was someone else. He called all kinds of people out.”

Martinez, a transfer quarterback who is poised to lead the Wildcats’ offense this season after spending the past four at Nebraska, was trying to show no fear. Brooks and Knowles are two of the fastest players on the K-State roster. They both line up at receiver and return kicks. Challenging them to a race is like trying to outrun a cheetah in football pads.

But there was a method to Martinez’s madness.

“I liked it,” Brooks said. “We learned pretty quick that he’s a fast dude. Not as fast as me or anything. I beat him. But he can run really fast for a quarterback. We were all impressed.”

Martinez would like to point out that he did, in fact, win a few of those races against Brooks. But it doesn’t bother him that Brooks says otherwise.

He was never trying to prove that he was faster than anyone else on his new team. Those races were about proving to his teammates that he refused to back down from anything. Hopefully, that showed them he was ready to be their quarterback.

“I always love stoking the competitive fire in guys,” Martinez said. “I feel like it’s a great way to connect with them and also find ways to gain respect. I wanted them to know that I’m a competitor and let them get to know me. I also just love anything where we are pushing each other to be better.”

All those spring races, followed by a summer of precise throws, eventually paid dividends.

Martinez has been named a team captain less than eight full months after he arrived on campus. The Wildcats are ready to play for him.

Now Martinez is eager to start loudly challenging Big 12 defenses.

New team, new quarterback

Ask a Nebraska football fan what he or she thinks about Martinez and you are bound to hear a wide range of responses.

When he was at his best, he was the guy who piled up 10,792 total yards and beat Big Ten teams with both his arm and his legs. Some people still wish he was in Lincoln. But he was far from a perfect quarterback with the Cornhuskers. He also threw 30 interceptions and lost 18 fumbles, with some of those turnovers coming at crucial moments. Nebraska never won more than five games in a season with Martinez. Some are glad he’s gone.

It’s unclear how another narrow defeat against Northwestern with a new quarterback at the helm this past weekend has Huskers fans feeling about him today.

But there are no mixed feelings about Martinez within the K-State locker room. The Wildcats are convinced that a change of scenery will bring out the best in him.

Few teams value the importance of limiting turnovers more than K-State. Offensive coordinator Collin Klein only threw 15 interceptions during his entire career when he played quarterback for the Wildcats. The passer he coached the past five seasons, Skylar Thompson, only threw 16.

Martinez is bound to see his turnovers drop in this system.

Question is: Will his big-play ability remain as high as it was with his previous team?

Chris Klieman isn’t worried about that. Now that Martinez is playing behind an offensive line that offers consistent pass protection and he has a dynamic running back like Deuce Vaughn to take pressure away, the Wildcats have seen lots of highlights from him without an abundance of errors.

“Has he made mistakes? You bet,” Klieman said. “But he’s owned those mistakes. He’s learning from those mistakes. It’s going to take some repetitions in games, but I see him playing so fast and so much faster from practice one to practice four to practice eight to now. He is getting more and more comfortable. He has all the talent in the world. We are excited to cut him loose. He is going to make plays. I know that.”

Martinez has made so much progress that senior linebacker Daniel Green was surprised to learn about his turnover-prone past.

He has made K-State’s secondary look silly during certain practices.

“Everyone talks about his running ability, but he can throw that thing,” Green said. “He is good at looking us off. He knows a lot of times we are reading his eyes and he will look one way and then go somewhere else with the ball. That is a veteran move. You see people in the NFL do that.”

Another knock on Martinez is his unsightly record in close contests. Nine of Nebraska’s games were decided by single digits last season, and the Huskers somehow lost all nine of them.

Martinez is tired of trying to answer questions about that bizarre statistic. All he can really say is that he expects things to change now that he is playing for a team that has won eight games in two of the past three seasons.

He is excited about the prospect of letting Vaughn handle the running game while he pads his passing stats.

“The biggest thing for me really is I just want to be efficient and effective and consistent,” Martinez said. “I want to be all those things for for this team. If I am, I think we’re going to win games.”

Martinez also says this is the most talented offense he has ever been associated with. Together, he can’t think of a reason why the Wildcats won’t accomplish big things.

“I have played in a lot of close games and I played in some of the biggest atmospheres there are,” Martinez said. “All that experience, I really feel like it’s helped ground me and become a very level leader. That’s something I can bring to Kansas State.

“I’ve also learned a lot about their culture and what they’ve done to win big games and just the amount of detail they put in to everything they do. It’s been mutual learning. Regardless of what happened at Nebraska, hopefully our guys know that I’m a veteran guy that’s been there before and that will bring confidence to our group.”

No looking back

When most Kansas State football fans think of a tough quarterback, they tend to picture Klein.

He carried the ball a school-record 317 times when he was a junior in 2011, and he never let injuries stop him from taking a snap. Even when he was too injured to practice between games, which happened quite frequently, he found a way to show up on Saturday and help the Wildcats finish 10-3.

Still, he chuckles if you suggest he was any tougher than Martinez was at Nebraska.

“I never had screws inserted into my mouth so I could play with a broken jaw,” Klein said.

Funny thing about that, Martinez doesn’t even mention the time he was hit so hard by a Michigan State defender last season that he suffered a broken jaw and spent the rest of the year on a liquid diet.

“I dislocated my left thumb once and played the Ohio State game with that,” Martinez said. “I had a torn labrum in my left shoulder and played through that against Wisconsin. I have had sprained MCLs and all sorts of different things.”

Seriously, no mention of the broken jaw or how much he despised drinking steak from a blender.

“I forgot about that,” Martinez said. “Wow, I guess when you have that many injuries they start to run together.”

Make no mistake, that hurt, too. After he is reminded of the jaw injury, Martinez flips through his phone until he finds a picture of the hit that sent him to an operating chair. It’s hard to look at. One defender is driving his helmet into Martinez’s facemask as two more drag him down from behind.

Amazingly, he left the field for X-Rays and returned to finish the game.

It wasn’t until he returned home to Nebraska that he realized he would need to have his mouth wired shut with screws and rubber bands to keep playing. Many, perhaps even Klein, would have sat out the rest of the season so his injury could heal naturally.

But Martinez wanted to keep fighting for his team. So he did, opting to keep most of the details private until after he transferred to K-State.

He eventually chose to share the injury information on his podcast. He’s not sure how many of his new teammates listened. Nor does he think that is important. His hope is to stay healthy in Manhattan.

Besides, Martinez never wanted to win the Wildcats over with Nebraska stories. He would rather look forward, even though that meant challenging some extremely fast K-State football players to a race.