The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

1: Tomorrow We Change the Game

2: Magic Men

3: The Pageant World for Boys

4: DQ

5: The QB Whisperer from Dime City

6: The Mad Scientist

7: QB Heaven

8: Manningland

9: Off Script

10: Grad School

11: The Comeback Route

12: The Draft

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

 
Prologue

I came up with the
idea for this book while listening to Trent Dilfer talk about quarterbacks during the 2013 NFL Draft. Dilfer wasn’t simply analyzing the QBs; he was romanticizing their performances and detailing what they were responsible for, beyond merely sizing up who they were. More than anything, though, he was decoding and deciphering what a quarterback actually must do in ways I’d never heard anyone speak about football.

Everything in football, of course, operates through the quarterback, now more than ever in a game that went warp speed in the twentieth century, long after it lapped baseball in popularity and meaning in American society. Therefore, there is no position in all of sports that is quite like the quarterback. Not even close. Quarterback is not only sports’ most complex position but the most important to a team’s success, too. It’s also the hardest to evaluate.

The riddle of that, however, was easy to demonstrate through the years: College and NFL teams repeatedly failed at a stunning rate in their evaluations of the QBs they selected, and it cost them millions of dollars in the process. In the twenty NFL Drafts prior to 2013, fifty quarterbacks were selected in the first round, and about 40 percent of them proved to be busts, while only six of those fifty ever started—and won—a Super Bowl. The level of futility and development in the college game was equally eye-opening. The 2010 recruiting class was a reminder of that: Of the 31 QBs ranked as blue-chippers deemed four- or five-star prospects by the online recruiting analysts only four (13 percent) won starting jobs, while 22 bolted to try and play somewhere else (71 percent).

An entire industry had sprung up in the 2000s to nurture quarterbacks in an attempt to cash in on sports’ ultimate lottery. For a while, private coaching was kind of a sketchy subculture in football. Former-UCLA-coach-turned-Pac-12-Network-analyst Rick Neuheisel told me it was “interesting to see how all these guys [private coaches] became gurus,” and that it looked “greasy,” but he also marveled at what an exploding arena it was.

“I have half a mind to jump in[to] it myself,” he said, “but I don’t wanna be one of those guys that is chasing these dads.” Those “dads” he refers to are the fathers of the young QBs vying for elevated star status in the online recruiting world and for spots in the Elite 11 camp on the Nike campus in Oregon. The overweening fathers often muck up the process even more, though Steve Clarkson, the godfather of the now-booming private-coaching business, has made a cottage industry of courting the dads.

I knew that Dilfer, as the “head coach” of Elite 11, had become a part of that world. He had essentially been beta testing his research via Elite 11 the previous two years while programming the next generation of QBs through his TV show. What I didn’t know was just how much more involved he was about to get.

He said he hadn’t made one penny off his dive into the private-QB-coaching business. Never charged a parent anything for all the private coaching sessions he did on the side. In fact, he told me he’d probably lost about $250,000 the previous year on the QB-training business, if you factored in the money he’d paid out to his coaches for their expenses and the public-speaking opportunities he’d passed up.

When Dilfer and I first spoke about my book idea a couple of days after the draft, he explained that he was about to launch a new high-tech venture that he vowed would “change the game,” starting at the grassroots level. In reality, the business—fueled by his connections, commentary, and ESPN bandwidth—would permeate football at its highest level, too; TDFB [“A Holistic Coaching Ecosystem That Unites Coaches & Expands Their Influence”] would take hold from the top of the game and work its way down as much as it would the other way around. It sounded intriguing. The game had already changed, but how, exactly, would Dilfer’s new QB-training-and-evaluation model work? What would make it so different from what already was out there? How distinct would his version of QB Heaven be from the Mannings’ version that Archie and his boys put on every summer down in Louisiana? What were the nuances that determined whether a quarterback shined or sank on game day? More specifically, what, exactly, was it that made Aaron Rodgers, a guy who had zero college scholarship offers out of high school, into a future Hall of Famer, or made Peyton Manning so unique? Better yet, why did so many lifelong football recruiters keep screwing up their evaluations of these guys? And, back to Neuheisel’s point, what does a quarterback guru actually
do
?

Dilfer’s presence in “this space,” as he often calls it, was unlike that of the other football veterans in the private-QB-coaching business. He was already entrenched in the elite NFL culture, and through his TV work and his personal relationships with the big-name players and coaches, he had already established a new, multidimensional football lingo that had become a part of how they spoke. Common “Dilferisms” are “throwing the receiver open” or “playing off platform.” Arm strength became the more qualified “arm talent,” because arm strength merely spoke to how hard a guy could throw the ball, not whether he was also adept at feathering a pass over a linebacker and in front of a defensive back, too. A quarterback wasn’t just “accurate” anymore. Instead, there were five different variations of accuracy, ranging from the basic “rhythm accuracy” to the more nuanced “second-reaction accuracy.” By the time, I pitched the idea for
The QB
, I realized how so many of the key figures in the quarterbacking world were actually interconnected by one person or another. In Dilfer’s vernacular these were the mapmakers of a very unique genre. Among them were a group of men, who, like Dilfer, were haunted by personal failures and shortcomings. They were the marketing whiz, the mad scientist, the QB Whisperer, the brain guy, the magic men, and the Mannings. At the core of it all was the debate whether elite QBs were a product of more nature than nurture.

For my recruiting book,
Meat Market
, I had a chance to go behind the scenes for a real inside-perspective at how the recruiting process actually works in big-time college football. With this book, I figured I would have a similar opportunity to explore the world of the QB in a way it had never been shown before by telling it through Dilfer, the tortured former Super Bowl–winning quarterback; one of his protégés, George Whitfield; and through Whitfield’s protégé, Johnny Manziel, who had become the hottest commodity in football. The book would have exclusive access to all three, so the reader would be alongside Johnny Football, whether that meant he was in Dime City with Whitfield, assisting Dilfer’s Elite 11 crew in Oregon mentoring high school quarterbacks ranked a lot higher than he ever was, or hunkered down in College Station with his Texas A&M coaches as he took the next steps in his development after becoming the first freshman to ever be awarded the Heisman Trophy.

Manziel had blossomed under the tutelage of Whitfield and the coaches at Texas A&M, who managed to polish the undersize quarterback’s raw skills without bogging him down with so much that it’d hamstrung his rare improvisational wizardry. Such a balance can be tricky, where nature and nurture often collide. Exactly how does the twenty-year-old thrive in this setting, much less survive? It was a question that often bewildered his own coaches, but it got at some of the same vexing issues that had been tripping up NFL brass for decades.

As it turned out, the book would unfold in what proved to be the most significant year in QB development in the sport’s history. Five-foot-ten-inch Russell Wilson became the shortest QB to lead his team to a Super Bowl title, forcing the NFL establishment to reexamine its own prejudice against shorter quarterbacks. And then, Manziel became the first sub-six-foot QB to get drafted in the first round (or even in the top two rounds) by an NFL team in sixty years. Another freshman QB, Jameis Winston—an Elite 11 product—won the Heisman and led Florida State to the national title. It was also a year in which Whitfield, “the QB Whisperer,” became a bonafide TV presence after ESPN hired him to become a regular on its high-wattage Saturday series
College GameDay
, and was the year that Tom House—the professorial biomechanics guy who saved Drew Brees’s career—finally leapt into the quarterback development business by debuting his 3DQB brand after claiming he “fixed” Tim Tebow, and was the year when Steve Clarkson, the marketing whiz and the de facto godfather of the private QB coach business, was profiled by
60 Minutes
and the
New Yorker
, and appeared on
The Colbert Report
, ironically as a sub for Whitfield, who had to start up his NFL draft camp. Such was the reach of this new business.