"That's just not me," Josh Rosen says of the designer labels on offer for his recent photo shoot for this story. Nah, the ex-UCLA signal-caller and projected first-round pick in the 2018 NFL draft is perfectly fine, thank you very much, with his standard wardrobe of tee, jeans and maltreated Chucks. "I'm just a regular dude," Rosen says several times at an LA studio, seemingly forgetting (or remembering all too well?) that roughly half of draft-loving America feels he's a future franchise QB, while the other half fears he's a crap-stirring, system-disrupting locker room poison pill.
After the shoot wraps, Rosen and I commandeer the studio's kitchen table and begin a conversation that will veer wildly from his tangents du jour -- interplanetary colonization, climate change, the existence of God -- to the only slightly more pressing matter of his volatile draft stock.