DETROIT — As soon as he gets caught up on his sleep, Joey Harrington will get started on his to-do list.
No. 1: Get an apartment and a bed.
No. 2: Buy a refrigerator.
No. 3: Get his very own Ms. Pac-Man game.
Harrington, the Lions’ first-round draft pick and quarterback of the not-too-distant future, arrived in Detroit at 5:30 a.m. Monday after an all-night flight from Los Angeles. Two hours later, he was on his way into workouts and meetings at the Lions’ practice facility in Allen Park.
Two days later, he still is getting caught up on his sleep, but he is settling into the off-season workout routine, getting familiar with the area and putting together a plan.
“I want to get settled,” Harrington said Tuesday. “That’s the biggest thing for me right now. I’m very unsettled because I don’t have a place to live yet, I have to get my stuff out; it doesn’t feel like home yet. But I’m excited now that I’m here. I want to get a place, get my own bed, get my own refrigerator and start getting acclimated with Detroit.”
And, of course, the Ms. Pac-Man game — the tabletop model that provides exactly the combination of challenge and escape that Harrington appreciates.
“Ms. Pac-Man requires such thinking on the fly, peripheral vision, quick reflexes,” he said.
Although he’s 23, Harrington is still a kid — as he noted himself the day after the Lions drafted him last month — but there is nothing simple or shallow about him. And he is not a one-dimensional person.
There is Harrington, the All-American quarterback and the third player taken in the draft.
He grew up admiring Joe Montana, Dan Marino and John Elway, but said he didn’t even consider the possibility of playing professionally until about a year ago.
“So few people get a chance to even be in an NFL camp, it wasn’t realistic,” he said. “If I did everything I could to be the best college football player I could, then all that stuff would take care of itself.”
In two seasons, Harrington was 25-3 as a starting quarterback at Oregon. During that time, he orchestrated 10 fourth-quarter comeback victories, a skill shared by the three former NFL quarterbacks he most admired.
“Those were the guys I watched,” he said, “because those were the guys who performed in the clutch.”
Harrington is eager to get into the Lions’ playbook, anticipating the competition and the pressure that go with it. He went through the same thing when he was battling for the starting job at Oregon.
“If you’ve got the eyes of an entire city watching your every move, that’s what it’s all about. Sitting there in the fourth quarter with 70,000 people staring at you, that’s the fun part.”