Meet the next running quarterback following Baker Mayfield and Kyler Murray

[Glasgow]

At a high school football camp in Los Angeles last spring, the quarterbacks in attendance stood in two lines, throwing back-and-forth to warm-up.

Near the end of one of them, a 6-foot-1, 173-pound prospect wearing a red Oklahoma visor and gold cleats stood out. While the other quarterbacks looked around, sizing up the competition, the No. 1 dual-threat QB in the Class of 2019 showed off a few dance moves for the crowd in between tosses.

If there were a personality meter that placed Oklahoma quarterback Kyler Murray's smooth self-assurance on one end and his predecessor Baker Mayfield's boisterous trash-talking on the other, ESPN 300 Oklahoma commit Spencer Rattler would fall somewhere in the middle.

"I say I'm the most confident person whenever I step on the field, and you have to be," Rattler said. "I definitely have a mixture of both of them, because Baker's real confident, outspoken guy and leads well. Then Kyler, I feel like he leads by example, gets on his guys when he needs to and I feel like he's a little more humble.

"It's good to have both of those qualities, and I'm humble, but I'm also super confident. You have to be when you play quarterback."

Growing up in Arizona, Rattler thought maybe he'd be a wide receiver. His father, Michael, knew his son had a better arm than other kids, though, and got him under center, where he excelled immediately.

Rattler's youth football coach, Bill Phaturos, remembers seeing him throw as an eighth-grader and thinking even then that Rattler would eventually have college coaches lined up at his door.

"You know that special sound they say you can hear when pro quarterbacks throw?" Phaturos asked. "I'm not joking, it was like a whistle when Spencer threw it; it was insane. A whoosh, everyone has a different name, but you could just hear it come off of his hand."

Like Murray and Mayfield, Rattler was a multisport athlete, playing baseball, basketball and football up until high school. He dropped baseball his freshman year because he wanted to focus on basketball and football, knowing that football would be his eventual path.

"I truly believe he could have played any of these sports on the next level, but he was just special in football," his father said. "I told him, you know there's not a lot of kids that can play quarterback. That is really a special position and we started honing in on that and knew he was going to be special."

Rattler's quarterback coach, Mike Giovando, first witnessed his ability when Rattler was in seventh grade. Giovando told some of the local college coaches then that he was working with a kid who would soon be on their radar for college offers. Giovando, who has worked with quarterbacks for over 10 years, said he could understand why people say Rattler is a combination of Mayfield and Murray personality-wise, but more than that he sees Rattler as an excellent fit for the Oklahoma offense that ranked first in total yards per game with Mayfield and Murray at the helm the past two seasons.

"Nobody is as fast as Kyler Murray, that kid is pretty dang fast, but I think [Rattler] brings a little bit of both Baker and Kyler in what he can do," Giovando said. "If he needs to take off (and run), he can. If he needs to make a crazy, off-platform, sideways throw, he can make the throw, or if it needs to be on schedule in a tight window, he can do that. Those Oklahoma quarterbacks are all accurate and that's what you get with him."

Murray is one of three finalists for the Heisman Trophy being presented this weekend because he's been impossible to slow down this season. He leads the nation this season in total offense with 4,945 yards and broke the single-season passer efficiency record set last year by Mayfield, the 2017 Heisman winner.