GEORGETOWN, Ky. -- With his lengthy tenure as a player, assistant coach and head coach in the league, Dick LeBeau has more than four decades of experience examining up close and personal the inconsistent gestation periods for NFL quarterbacks.

The Cincinnati Bengals coach has watched instant success stories like Peyton Manning and quarterbacks like Steve Young, a future Hall of Fame member but a guy who served a protracted apprenticeship and didn't become a full-time starter until after his 30th birthday.

So when LeBeau caucused a few weeks ago with third-year quarterback Akili Smith in a pre-camp meeting, he reminded the 1999 first-round pick that patience is often a key virtue at the game's most critical and demanding position.

	Akili Smith (middle in orange) knows the Bengals are tired of waiting for him to improve.

And, for the first time since LeBeau succeeded Bruce Coslet three games into a miserable 2000 season, Smith turned a completely deaf ear to his coach's advice.

Smith reiterated after the first full practice of training camp on Saturday that he will not take a Job-like approach to becoming a top-shelf quarterback and that his third season in the league, at least in his mind, had better morph into a charmed existence. The waiting game, he declared, is over. If it isn't, Smith acknowledged, his career might soon be.

"I know what (LeBeau) told me, that I can't take this as a make-or-break year for me," Smith said. "No disrespect intended, but I don't agree. I took three years away from football to play baseball. And maybe people don't realize it, but I'm going to be 26 years old next month. That doesn't make me an old man or anything but, look, I know the clock is ticking. I know I hear it."

Selected as the third overall choice in the '99 draft, after fellow quarterback prospects Tim Couch of Cleveland and Philadelphia's Donovan McNabb, the athletically gifted Smith was supposed to have exploded into the NFL's consciousness by now. Instead he has lobbed up more duds than bombs. His quarterback rating for his first two seasons was a microscopic 53.8, his 52.8 efficiency mark in 2000 being the lowest among QBs with more than five starts.

Smith is in the middle of a potentially incendiary situation, battling not just for the starting spot but for a job, period. The unofficial depth chart released on Saturday by the Bengals listed Smith, Jon Kitna and Scott Mitchell tied at the top, but the suspicion exists the three haven't necessarily broken from the gate in a dead heat, as LeBeau insists they have.

It might be little more than a footnote but, in Saturday's only practice in pads, the Bengals ran 40 plays in 11-on-11 drills. Kitna logged 15 snaps, Mitchell 13 and Smith 12. While it's difficult to postulate any hard conclusions after one day of drills, both Kitna and Mitchell, who has slimmed down to a relatively svelte 239 pounds, were sharper than Smith, whose impressive arm strength still is neutralized by scatter-shot accuracy.

Asked following the practice if he was pressing a bit, Smith shrugged, and two coaches allowed they didn't view his erratic performance as any manifestation of nervous energy. "I thought all the quarterbacks had some ups and downs today," said new coordinator Bob Bratkowski, who has installed a West Coast-style offense that will feature plenty of three-receiver sets.

Said wide receiver Darnay Scott: "Akili can still drill it and, let's face it, on the first day of camp, the timing isn't there yet for anybody, you know?"

	“	This is my team. I am a franchise player. ... As far as I'm concerned, there's no more waiting game. I want the (starting) job and I want to have it now. ”
		— Akili Smith, Bengals quarterback

But the former Oregon standout, just a one-year starter in college who skyrocketed up draft boards with a strong senior season, was mostly too long with the deep ball and too high with intermediate passes. Far too often, receivers had to reach back for errant passes, a recurring theme in Smith's brief tenure.

There is no denying Smith's eye-opening ability in the art of simply throwing a football. Put him on the sideline and let him cut loose leisurely and he is a human JUGGS machine, a laser thrower with plenty of RPMs on the ball. The problem is, Smith to date has not been able to transfer that wondrous throwing ability to the field. If you are Cincinnati management, which has doled out roughly $11.5 million in two years to Smith, you can be forgiven if you have begun to question whether your would-be franchise player is instead another first-round flop.

Such a frightening possibility hasn't even occurred to LeBeau yet, at least not publicly. For 42 seasons, he has scrutinized quarterbacks from the other side of the line of scrimmage. His 62 interceptions are the sixth-most in league history, the most by a player who is not in the Hall of Fame, so LeBeau knows what it means to look into the eyes of a quarterback and see through to the passer's soul. And when LeBeau looks into Smith's eyes, apparently what he observes staring back at him is a player the coach believes can still fulfill his potential.

Even if the quantum leap doesn't come this season.

"Do I want him to have a sense of urgency? Yeah. Sure, I do," LeBeau said. "Because we've got some people at his position who want to play just as badly as he does. And he better outperform those people if he wants to start. ... But I've been in the league long enough to know that players at every position, but particularly at quarterback, develop at different rates. Akili is a tremendous physical talent, but he can't rush himself."

There is an old NFL adage that, if you claim to have two starting quarterbacks, you actually have none. Cincinnati can do that one better with three guys who have been starters in the league. LeBeau smiled when reminded of the axiom, insisted the Bengals "will disavow that old notion" but conceded the difficulty in trying to script sufficient preseason playing time for all three.

There is no timetable, he said, for determining the starter. Save, of course, for not wanting to go into the regular season facing a revolving door at the position. Somewhere midway through the exhibition games, the consensus here seems to be, the staff will settle on their guy.

In the mind of Smith, the decision is a no-brainer. He is, he insisted, a more mature player now, a veteran steeled in part by having to deal with the adversity of an offseason DUI charge. Ever since he missed 27 days of training camp his rookie season, while agent Leigh Steinberg and Cincinnati officials haggled over his contract, Smith has been playing catch-up. He is tired of being on a treadmill to nowhere and anxious to disprove the skeptics who feel he's just a thrower with a great fastball but one who can't find the strike zone.

Or, in his case, the end zone.

"This is my team," Smith said. "I am a franchise player. When a team spends as much money on a guy as the Bengals spent on me, everyone wants you to be the savior right then and there. So, it didn't happen that way, all right? But now it's going to happen.

"As far as I'm concerned, there's no more waiting game. I want the (starting) job and I want to have it now."

Len Pasquarelli is a senior NFL writer for ESPN.com.