How Cam Ward built his unshakable confidence: ‘He has a boulder on his shoulder’

In 2020, on his first day at the University of the Incarnate Word, Cam Ward walked into the office of head football coach Eric Morris and told him he was going to be his starting quarterback. Not eventually; that year, despite the fact that the Cardinals returned a freshman All-American passer who led the school to a conference championship the previous season.

A zero-star recruit coming out of high school, Ward got up and left after delivering the message, shutting the door behind him. 

"I didn’t say a word. … That was the whole conversation right there," Morris, now the head coach at North Texas, told FOX Sports. "This kid had never taken a shotgun snap when he said that to me."

But he had time. Ward joined UIW — the only Division I program to offer him a scholarship — in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, which postponed the Cardinals' season. He got more than four months of practice without game preparation. He became comfortable in the offense — so much so that when UIW scheduled Arkansas State for late November that year, Morris declared an open competition at quarterback between Ward and the incumbent for their scrimmage ahead of the game.

Ward proceeded to play "lights out," according to Morris. 

"It was obviously a hard conversation for me to have with our freshman All-American that he wasn’t going to start that game," he said. "But our whole team was [for Ward]. The most evident thing was that Cam was the best player on this football team.

"Unfortunately, we were about to get on a plane for that game and our whole D-line was contact traced out for a positive COVID test and we didn’t get to play," he continued. "But that was the first time for us as a coaching staff to say, ‘Hey, this kid’s different when he