The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks (16 page)

That game was more significant than even the Super Bowl win, which is why Dilfer aligned the game ball above the replica Lombardi Trophy. But there is something even more meaningful than that Ravens–Titans game ball. Above it is a framed picture of a smiling little boy, Dilfer’s only son, Trevin. In 2003, the five-year-old boy began to feel sick on the second day of a family vacation to Disneyland. At first, doctors thought it might be asthma or bronchitis. Then other doctors thought the boy might have hepatitis, so they sent him to a children’s hospital, but en route Trevin’s heart failed in the ambulance. Doctors revived him. They stabilized Trevin and put him on a heart-lung bypass machine. They needed to transport him to the hospital at Stanford University. He required a heart transplant, but they couldn’t put him on a waiting list until they could prove he still had brain activity. One day, Trent put his finger in little Trevin’s hand and started talking to him. A tear rolled down the boy’s face, and he squeezed his daddy’s finger, which gave doctors enough proof to put Trevin on the list. That led to twenty-five more nerve-wracking days
of hoping, but before the family could get more good news, they were told that Trevin appeared to have a systemic infection. On April 27, 2003, after a six-week battle, Trevin Dilfer passed away.

Over two thousand people, including dozens of NFL coaches and players, came out for a “Celebration of Trevin’s Life” at People’s Church in Fresno three days later.

That picture of Trevin perched near the top of the wall means everything to Trent Dilfer. Trevin would now be almost the same age as many of the high school quarterbacks Dilfer was grooming.

“I get to have a second chance,” he said. “I get to pour out everything I have into young men’s lives. I now have a bunch of sons. I get to do what I would’ve done with Trevin. I wouldn’t have been the overbearing dad, but I betcha I woulda been close. I mean, good thing my daughters are strong.”

Dilfer also had become a big brother and father figure to some of his Elite 11/TDFB staffers as they set out on their own coaching careers. “I think I like the coaching more, but I’m better at the mentoring,” he said.

“He is [as] emotionally connected to these kids as anyone I’ve ever been around,” said Yogi Roth, who has a Master’s degree in communications management and who, before going into coaching, worked in the Pittsburgh mayor’s and state representative’s offices. “That’s a combination of 1) the loss of his son, 2) his unapologetic, pure love of the game of football, and 3) for his desire to prove that he’s the best in the world at understanding the quarterback position.

“I’ve watched him truly grow. He has gone through the process of self-discovery of how he coaches, how he speaks. His awareness of how he challenged the [players]. The greatest thing he brought to the Elite 11 is, he raised the standard. They [think they] can’t handle more than twenty-five plays. What do we have? Eighty-three? Eighty-seven? Their minds can expand. He’s raised the stakes. I watched him grow so much as a head coach. When Jameis [Winston] stood up [at the 2011 Elite 11 Finals] and said, ‘Hey, we know you lost your son, but you’ve got twenty-five sons in here’—I still get a chill thinking about that right now. I think that’s when he realized not only the power he has in shaping young men but also in shaping young men who then
have the opportunity to shape lots more people. These are the crème de la crème, right? These are the CEOs. The BMOCs. They’re the Dudes. They are going to take some element of what they learn from Trent and carry it on in life. And it’s the same with his coaches, who not only look up to him as a player who won a Super Bowl, but also for where he goes philosophically. The thing is, he doesn’t miss what he gets back from this, either. Other coaches I’ve been around—they don’t take a moment to recognize that, because they don’t have the time. This is one of those jobs where it’s not thankless. It’s thankful. I think that’s why he really loves it.”

 
5.

JUNE 5, 2013
.

Twelve year-old Chase Griffin was up before 5:00 a.m., dressed in his workout gear, waiting for his dad to make the two-hour drive from Austin to Bryan, Texas, on a steamy Wednesday. The Griffins were headed to see young Chase’s private quarterback coach, George Whitfield, the guy who in what seemed like just a fortnight had replaced Steve Clarkson as top guru in the private-QB-coaching world. In truth, young Chase was giddy because he was also going to see Johnny Manziel, the reason Whitfield had come from San Diego to Allen Academy, a tiny Christian school that played six-man football a ten-minute drive from Texas A&M. Whitfield was set to train Manziel, Griffin, and three other college QBs, including the starters at Syracuse and Memphis, in Dallas, but the Heisman Trophy winner said he needed to stay local for his workouts with his Aggie teammates, so Whitfield audibled—and the other college QBs scrambled to relocate three hours south on a day’s notice.

Manziel’s separate one-on-one with the thirty-five-year-old Whitfield was scheduled for 8:00 a.m., but the Aggies star was twenty minutes late. He arrived in a dark SUV, flanked by two of his buddies. Whitfield was already annoyed with the star for being tardy.
Watching Manziel’s pals each stroll up and snag a bottle of water from an ice chest set out for the half dozen high schoolers who had shown up to play receiver for the day only irked the coach even more.

“What’s up, playa?” Manziel said as he spotted little Chase, whom he had met two months earlier at the Dallas Elite 11 regional when he spoke to the high school QBs.

Whitfield handed Manziel two Chinese Baoding balls to maneuver through his hands before they trotted onto the field. They were the same kind of therapy balls Whitfield recalled from his childhood that his dad used. His old man said they helped regulate blood flow and that great Chinese warriors used them before they went into battle. Whitfield bought a set (price: $80) for all his QBs. In fact, he had bought so many online from a certain company that its owner called him to ask if Whitfield was re-selling them on his own. Whitfield explained that he was a coach who gave them to his athletes, and he asked who normally bought them. He was told that musicians and surgeons used them to help develop dexterity, which got Whitfield thinking about how most athletes grab and clutch things with their mitts but seldom hone skills with their fingers to have a more acute touch. He bought so many more sets since then that the guy gave him a deal for nearly half the price he had been paying.

As Manziel sleepwalked through Whitfield’s drills, one of the QB’s buddies, a twenty-year-old whom the A&M star called “Turtle”—just like the name of the pal-turned-gopher in the HBO comedy-drama
Entourage
—tried to explain the player’s mind-set.

“It’s his instinct to
not
listen to anyone trying to tell him what to do,” said Turtle a.k.a. Nathan Fitch, an old high school classmate who had just dropped out of A&M to manage Manziel’s life.

If anyone had Manziel’s trust, it seemed to be Whitfield. The son of two high school teachers in Ohio, Whitfield was the king of accessible metaphors; for example, he might coax a quarterback to use more of his body and less of his arm in his delivery by telling him, “The body pays the tab. The arm pays the tip. If the arm takes the whole bill, the arm can bankrupt you. The body can’t bankrupt you.”

If a quarterback was doing a drill and got too far up on his toes, Whitfield might tell him, “We don’t want you to go Michael Jackson
here.” To remind a quarterback to keep good posture, it was about “keeping your suit and tie on.” When he prodded Michigan State quarterback Connor Cook to pull his lead elbow (left arm) through in his throwing motion, Whitfield crouched behind the Spartan standout and told him, “Just imagine there’s a midget talking shit right here. You don’t want to decapitate him. You just wanna make him spit his gum out.”

One drill Whitfield created to fine-tune Manziel’s instincts or, more specifically, to retrain them, he called the Jedi. In order to get Manziel to work lower in his base, a tendency the A&M star worked against as his adrenaline revved, Whitfield said he wanted to “rob” the quarterback of his sense of vision by putting a blindfold over his eyes, so his instincts would kick in. His analogy was to the way someone wakes up in the middle of the night in a dark room and tries to, cautiously, be more anchored as they feel their way to the bathroom. “It put him in more of a controlled, predator position,” Whitfield said. In the Jedi, Whitfield lined up two receivers, one off to the QB’s left, the other to his right, and pointed for one of them to clap, triggering Manziel to plant his feet and get set to fire. Whitfield actually didn’t intend for Manziel to try to throw the ball. “I didn’t want him to throw, because I didn’t want the ball to dictate ‘success.’ ” Manziel couldn’t help himself, though. He connected on 26 of 28 throws while blindfolded.

While Whitfield was best known as Manziel’s Svengali, the former small-college quarterback trained QBs on six of the top eight teams in 2013’s pre-season Top 25. This dynamic can make a lot of college coaches uncomfortable, knowing that an outside guy—a celeb coach—is tinkering with their school’s most important player. One college coach admitted he’s uneasy with the relationship and is skeptical of Whitfield’s creative teaching methods but is afraid to say no.

“The one thing I told [my quarterback] I never wanna hear is, ‘But George says …’ And the good part is, they believe they’re getting better, and added confidence is always a good thing.”

Regardless, that college coach said he cringed when he saw Manziel on ESPN’s NFL Draft coverage in 2013, a few months after winning
the Heisman. Manziel was asked on the set if he thought he might leave college (two years early) to go to the NFL, and he responded by saying, “Coach Whitfield will know when the time is right for me.”

“Coach Whitfield?!? What about his coaches at A&M?” the college coach groused.

GEORGE WHITFIELD JR
.
GREW
up in a football family with a defensive pedigree. His father, George Sr., was a linebacker at Wichita State before a successful run as a high school coach in Kansas and Ohio. His uncle, David Whitfield, played defensive end for Woody Hayes’s 1968 national championship team at Ohio State and was a captain on the Buckeyes’ 1969 squad. George Jr. was born in Wichita but raised in the football-obsessed town of Massillon, Ohio. Massillon loves to brag that it’s the place where all newborn boys are given a little orange football. The old rust-belt town (population: 32,000) fills its high school stadium, which seats 20,000, to root on the most storied high school program in the nation, the Massillon Tigers. The younger Whitfield’s first job was in football. He was in second grade; he served as the Tigers’ water boy. He was the eighth Whitfield to play football for Massillon but the first who wanted to play offense. The previous seven all were team captains and played on state championship teams. His dad, once the linebacker coach of future football great Chris Spielman, figured little George would grow up and become a linebacker, too, but his son would tell anyone who’d listen that he was a quarterback. The younger Whitfield imagined when he played with his buddies in the backyard that he was John Elway or Major Harris or former Notre Dame star Tony Rice.

His father, sensing how determined his son was, drove George four hours to Fremont, Ohio, three times a week the summer before his senior year of high school, just so he could learn the nuances of the position from Tom Kiser, a keen football mind who also worked as an engineer.

Whitfield went on to star as quarterback for the Tigers and
to spark Massillon to four fourth-quarter comebacks. He made honorable-mention all-state. Whitfield was offered scholarships by Iowa State and Indiana and several MAC schools and the Air Force Academy, he said. But every offer was to come to college and play defensive back. Whitfield didn’t want to hear that. His heart was set on remaining a quarterback. He signed with Youngstown State to play for Jim Tressel, then the coach at YSU. Whitfield redshirted his freshman season and then starred in the Penguins’ spring game, which gave him hope he might win the starting job. Tressel, though, had other ideas.

One day Tressel waved Whitfield into a staff meeting in a conference room.

“How many guys at this table would love to have George in their position room playing for them?” Tressel asked his assistants. The linebackers coach, defensive backs coach, and receivers coach immediately raised their hands. In fact, as Whitfield looked around the table, he noticed that every coach except for the offensive and defensive line coaches raised their hands. Whitfield reached down and playfully pulled up Tressel’s hand, too. Tressel doubled as Youngstown’s quarterbacks coach.

“Your vote’s bigger than theirs,” Whitfield said, smiling at Tressel before ducking out of the room.

Tressel later told Whitfield that he couldn’t give the keys of his offense to a nineteen-year-old.

Whitfield thought about transferring to Ohio State as a walk-on but instead opted for Division II Tiffin University, in large part because he would be down the street from Kiser, so he could continue working with him. “He taught me that results aren’t always the reality of what happened after he deconstructed it,” says Whitfield, who went on to become the school’s all-time leading passer.