The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks (27 page)

The final selection of which of the eighteen quarterbacks made the actual Elite 11 was announced in front of a lake on the Nike campus. It was a made-for-TV moment, as all the campers were outfitted in matching neon yellow
Elite 11
shirts with black shorts and neon yellow socks. They all stood shoulder to shoulder in front of an elevated platform as Dilfer addressed them. He got choked up talking
about what the group meant to him before he approached each QB individually to tell which to stand up on the platform, which ones had made it. That day also happened to be a very emotional one for Dilfer beyond the happenings in Oregon. It was his twentieth wedding anniversary. On top of that, his wife, Cass, was in Texas with all three of their daughters, as his two oldest girls were competing at the USA Volleyball Girls’ Junior National Championship. Dilfer later said he would’ve loved to be with his family, but he’d already committed to the Elite 11 and that his wife understood how important that was to him.

He recalled the day at his home about five months earlier when he and his wife discussed his scheduling dilemma, “the defining moment when I knew I was in my sweet spot,” he said.

“As painful as it was, it was so defining for me that I knew I was exactly where I was supposed to be. That I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. I think they know I’m better as a husband and father, and as a man, when I’m whole. Now, I think I’ve learned what makes me whole. They have [also] identified what makes me whole, and this is part of it, so I think they’ve embraced it, because they know this is part of my wholeness.”

 
8.

JULY 11, 2013
.

An hour before the eighteenth annual Manning Passing Academy began, ninety minutes north at LSU, Tommy Moffitt, with his barrel chest and Parris Island voice, was getting nostalgic. Asked about Peyton Manning, the Tigers strength coach took a big gulp of air before reaching into his desk and pulling out a bright orange folder with the name
MANNING
scribbled across the front.

Moffitt, the strength coach at Tennessee when Manning was the Vols star QB in the mid-’ 90s, had shown all Tiger freshmen when they reported to school this frayed old folder that contained pages of the workouts he’d prescribed for the quarterback during the summer going into his senior season. Inside, the printed sheets of paper were covered with notes Manning had jotted down, showing the player’s attention to detail and indefatigable level of preparation. There were some crossed-out poundages of prescribed workout routines where Manning pushed himself to do five or ten pounds more than Moffitt had anticipated. Everything was accounted for and documented with check marks and pluses along with margin notes such as
Threw good outside 1 on 1
 … 
7x Hills Threw
 … 
Agilities/Sand.

Moffitt told all his newcomers at LSU that he had never—in
twenty-five years—seen anybody as meticulous in their preparation as Peyton Manning. The weathered orange folder was Exhibit A, an artifact worthy of its place in Canton once Manning took his place in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

“I tell them all, ‘Right now, you’re a better athlete than Peyton Manning ever was or Peyton Manning ever will be,” Moffitt said. “But this—
THIS!
—is what makes him so special. His preparation and his attention to detail and the things he does that nobody else told him, that, ‘This is what you have to do to be great.’ ”

Moffitt’s favorite highlights of Manning’s career didn’t take place in Neyland Stadium. They happened around the Vols’ football complex at odd hours, when almost no one else was around. Such as the time Moffitt heard a tap on the window to his office. Manning was outside. He needed help. Said he had a bunch of VHS tapes in his SUV that needed to go upstairs. Moffitt came outside to Manning’s old black Oldsmobile Bravada and did a triple take when the senior quarterback opened the trunk.

It was jammed with tapes of every practice, every game, every opponent. Tight copies. Wide copies. End zone copies. Four years of film study. The ingredients to Manning’s secret sauce. They ended up with two full shopping carts and kept unloading and filling.

Or the time Moffitt watched from his office window a nineteen-year-old Peyton tying a surgical cord to a goalpost and the other end around his waist so he could work on his drops from center. Back and forth. Back and forth. For what seemed like hours. Moffitt had never seen any other quarterback do that, and certainly not doing it on his own, without any coaches or teammates around.

“Nobody here told him to do that,” Moffitt said. “Maybe Archie did.”

Nope. It wasn’t Archie’s idea, either, according to the head of America’s First Family of quarterbacks.

“I didn’t lead him there,” Archie Manning said, chuckling. Then again, he kind of did, in a roundabout, Peyton sort of way.

“Peyton told me once he wanted to be a good player,” Archie said. “I told him the good players I know work at it. That’s all I told him.”

That was Peyton Manning, always figuring out a way on his own to get better. Moffitt said that was why the guy would be a first-ballot Hall of Famer. It was also a big reason why more than 1,200 kids and some two dozen college QBs made the trek down annually to the Manning family’s week-long camp in stifling humidity in Thibodaux, Louisiana.

The camp was Peyton’s idea, Archie said. Peyton, then a young quarterback at Tennessee, noticed the high school box scores in the newspaper, with teams getting blown out and their QBs going 1 for 4. Peyton wanted to have a camp to boost the level of quarterbacking in the local high schools. That first year, the Manning Passing Academy was held at Tulane University and had 180 campers. That first year, there were three college counselors helping out: Peyton, Jake Delhomme from what was then called Southwestern Louisiana, and his receiver, Brandon Stokley. Peyton’s baby brother, Eli, was a high school camper. It didn’t take long for the MPA to outgrow the place, shifting to Southeastern Louisiana before relocating to the Nicholls State campus in 2005.

Instruction is handled by the Mannings—Archie, Peyton, Eli, and oldest brother Cooper (a former Ole Miss wide receiver till a spinal condition ended his playing career)—and dozens of their friends who are either former college quarterbacks or coaches from all levels of the game.

“In seventeen years, the four of us have never missed a minute of the camp,” Archie said. “We’ve bought in. That’s a credibility thing. It’s meaningful to us. It’s the only time all year when we get four days together.

“I think it’s just our passion for what the institution of high school football is, what it does for the life lessons that youngsters learn, and just the values it gives people. It’s getting attacked right now, more than ever. It’s our passion to try to have a good time with these kids, to help them get a little better and to understand that high school football can be a great experience for them. We really haven’t changed our concept awfully much. We still try—we always try—to make it a non-recruiting thing. That wasn’t its purpose. It wasn’t for
blue chips necessarily. We don’t mind having the blue-chip players. That wasn’t the concept, though. We just tried to enhance the experience of high school players, particularly quarterbacks and receivers. Just the numbers, obviously growing and growing, which means our staff gets bigger. Actually, I think, because of that, it all just gets more fun.”

From sunrise to sunset at the Manning Passing Academy, there were young quarterbacks being coached in every possible element of the game at a variety of stations seemingly on every corner of the Nicholls State campus. Clearly, it was also no mere vanity project for the Mannings. They were neck-deep in it when it came to hands-on instruction and interaction.

On the evening before the camp officially kicked off, Archie and Peyton explained to their staff precisely how they wanted certain nuances of the game taught. For instance, on a 5-step drop, Peyton told his staffers, “Do drops on the yard-line, so it forces them to stay straight,” or on a 3-step drop, “When you put two in the ground, it should align your hips to throw the hitch to the boundary or to the field.” More than anything, for the price of $585 for three nights at the camp (it’s $440 for day campers), all the budding QBs—at some point during the week—will get hands-on access to Archie and his boys. And where else can a kid be taught the little details of playing quarterback by a five-time NFL MVP?

“The Mannings really want to teach the kids, whether it’s someone who has never played quarterback a day in their life and just wants to come see Peyton, or the kid who is gonna get recruited to play D1 football, and everyone in between,” said thirty-year-old ex-Clemson starter Will Proctor, who first started coming to the camp as a high school junior but had since worked as a college counselor and later as a coach at the camp after finishing his playing career.

For the two dozen college QBs, the camp provided them access to a unique fraternity.

“The Mannings are football royalty,” said Oliver Luck, father to Andrew and a former teammate of Archie’s with the Houston Oilers, where both men were quarterbacks in the early ’80s. “They are
our
football royalty. They’ve done it with incredible grace and class and dignity. They’ve set the bar for everybody who plays the position, and it’s a very tough position to play. They’ve done it the right way.

“The Democrats have the Clintons. The Republicans have the Bushes. We have the Mannings.”

The “done it the right way” is big inside the football community. Archie Manning never played in a single NFL playoff game, much less made it to a Super Bowl, but there may be no more respected man among his peers than the former two-time Pro Bowler who was once selected as the NFL’s Man of the Year in 1977. Manning was often a one-man show, scrambling to extend doomed plays for the lowly New Orleans Saints, a longtime NFL punch line. Archie played more like Johnny Manziel than either Peyton or Eli. Off the field, Archie, a genuine SEC legend who married a beautiful former homecoming queen, emerged as one of the true gentlemen of the game. His legacy also was boosted by the way his boys turned out, especially Peyton, regarded as the gold standard of the cerebral quarterback and the man most identified with ushering in the NFL’s era of the advanced, “Problem Solver” QB.

Florida offensive coordinator Kurt Roper was a young assistant coach at Tennessee when Peyton was the Vols’ quarterback. Roper, himself the son of a coach, said the college kid taught him more about preparation than anyone he’d ever been around. “When I played at Rice, nobody watched practice right after and took notes like he did,” recalled Roper. “Here, I am a [graduate assistant], and I’m asking
him
questions, thinking, ‘Lemme learn from this guy.’ I’d try to steal as much time with him as I could. ‘How are you determining coverages? What are fronts telling you pre-snap? What are you looking at on a given play?’ He was studying defense and what it was doing, so he could have a great idea what he was gonna do with the football pre-snap.

“His work ethic and his ability to be singularly focused on winning from week to week and controlling his mind and preparing for his moment was amazing. Nobody I’ve ever been around, coaches included, have the drive that he has to prepare. He is just different than anybody else.”

• • •

OLIVER LUCK SAID HE
wouldn’t send his son, Andrew, to any other quarterback camp or to work with other private coaches, only the Mannings’ camp. Luck, a onetime Rhodes Scholar finalist, spent five seasons in the NFL. He taught his son the proper way to throw a football when Andrew was around four or five. Just as he showed him the right way to throw a baseball or snowball, he said, adding that he was mindful of not overdoing anything, keeping football in perspective.

“Like most things in life, you have to use discretion,” Luck said. “You can’t do too much, because then it becomes a Marinovich sort of thing.”

Any Marinovich reference when it comes to trying to develop a child super-athlete is akin to being a “Little League father” on steroids. The real Marinoviches are father Marv, a former-NFL-lineman-turned-strength-coach who studied Eastern Bloc training methods, and son Todd, aka “The Robo Quarterback,” bred by his dad in a “perfect environment” free of fast foods or sweets. Todd made it to the NFL as a first-round draft pick, but he lasted less than two seasons as he battled a string of drug problems that had first come to light in his college days, when he was arrested for cocaine possession at USC.

“I’ve always believed that if you’re a parent and you think you’ve got a talented kid—doesn’t matter what sport—encourage the kid, make sure the kid is getting quality coaching,” said Luck, “and, at some point, probably around their freshman or sophomore year of high school, the kid—boy or girl—has to have the fire in his or her belly to say, ‘I’m not doing this because my parents encouraged me to or because my girlfriend likes the fact that I’m a quarterback; I’m doing it because I just really like this stuff—the 6:00 a.m. practices, the hundred-degree heat. My goal was not to raise an NFL quarterback. I’m happy as a clam that Andrew is able to do what he’s doing in the NFL, but my wife and I just wanted to raise good kids with the proper values who followed whatever passion they had.”