The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks (36 page)

“This is not the difference between right and wrong,” Palmer told them. “This is the difference between, ‘This guy’s pretty smart,’ and, ‘This guy knows what the fuck he’s talking about.’ It’s the difference between, ‘Um, excuse me, I was wondering if you come here often, and maybe I could buy you a drink,’ and, ‘What’s up? I’m Keith. Have you ever seen ESPN? S’up, girl?’ ”

One of Palmer’s big selling points to draft clients was his grasp of teaching NFL concepts. A few days earlier, that’s what he’d hoped would’ve resonated with Teddy Bridgewater when the Louisville star toured EXOS. He’d quizzed Bridgewater on what the safety’s responsibility is in “Quarters” coverage.

“He’s got the quarter of the field,” Bridgewater said.

Palmer asked Bridgewater’s advisor, former NFL safety Abe Elam, if he was right. Elam said yes, before Palmer asked him again: “Or, does he have inside leverage run support and eyes on number 2 [receiver]? If number 2 travels across the field or into the flat, he moves his eyes to number 1 and forms a bracket. If number 2 travels vertically, he takes him man to man. That’s what we’re gonna learn, because that changes the way I read Curl-Flat.”

Palmer maintained that everything with quarterbacking hinged on two things: confidence in your abilities and confidence in your understanding.

“I always start by asking, ‘What is the most important trait in a quarterback?’ ” Palmer said, before pointing to his forehead. “This is a muscle, and we can work this every single day.”

Palmer is not a “quarterbacks coach,” he said.

“I am a quarterback consultant. As a consultant, as in my [marketing] business, I come in and say, ‘Here’s where you’re at. Here’s where you guys tell me where you want to be. Here’s some holes, and here’s some holes I think we can fill. If you don’t like them, you fire me at any point and terminate our contract. If you like them, I will build a model or create a campaign to help facilitate those that you’re interested in. You’re the CEO. You’re making the decisions.’

“I think the biggest mistake guys make, and a guy on the East Coast does this all the time from what I hear—is ‘Trust me. Trust me. This is the way to do it.’ I think that is the worst mistake you can make. You know how many dudes played in the League? So this guy who played in Buffalo, and he did something a little different, does that mean he doesn’t know what he’s talking about? I’ve been exposed to a lot of football. I’ve played with some great ones and been coached by some great ones. But the difference is, I’ve also gotten thousands of hours of reps through the Elite 11 of how to say it and how not to message it. I look at it as a doctor.”

When Bortles and Smith arrived in Carlsbad, both loaded on their back leg. Palmer explained the drawbacks of that: “You’re not on balance, and the second problem is over-striding. You can’t throw the ball until your left foot hits the ground. If you want a quicker release, eliminate any unnecessary movement along the way. The longer it takes for my left foot to hit the ground, the slower everything happens.”

Palmer subscribed to many of the Tom House principles about quarterbacks as rotational athletes. That explained why, a few hours later, when he brought Bortles out for a throwing session on the 35-yard turf practice field in the back of the EXOS facility, he had his star protégé doing wall-sits with his arms above his head, elbows at 90 degrees, gliding up the wall, and why the QBs were firing passes to each other from 25 yards apart while on their knees. It was also one of the reasons behind a philosophical difference between Palmer and Whitfield on a teaching point when it came to making touch throws.

“What should happen is, the arm angle should change,” Palmer said. “Me and George vehemently disagree on this. He teaches guys to flick and hold, like shooting 3-pointers. It couldn’t make less sense to me. That’s like me saying I want you to run a 40-yard dash, but I’m gonna put a wall at 41 yards. Your arm isn’t making a basketball motion. Basketball players aren’t rotational athletes. You’re creating all this energy. Why would I stop it?”

Palmer was quick to add that he has great respect for Whitfield. The two had become friends through their work on the Elite 11: “I’ve
told guys, ‘If you don’t throw with me, throw with George, because you know what you’re gonna get. You won’t have a guy taking money out of your pocket. He won’t make you worse.’ We offer different products. We’re not competitors.”

Earlier in the week, Palmer had brought his three quarterbacks to Laguna Beach to try one of his passions—stand-up paddle-boarding. Palmer, who grew up surfing, kind of fell into the sport. In his first race, a woman taking part for her fiftieth birthday celebration beat him. He soon realized the workout tied in quite well for a quarterback because of how much the motions and balancing on the board amid the waves tapped into your core muscles and shoulder flexibility. Palmer was delighted when ESPN producers came with him and his QBs for a trip into the water as part of a docu-series on the 2013 draft.

“I think it’s gonna blow up once it gets out, because there’s no better workout for a quarterback off the field, and you can’t get hurt,” he told me.

Palmer’s own playing career had been on life support many times. Unlike his big brother, Carson, he was never a touted recruit or praised for having a huge arm. Coming out of college, he was a sixth-round pick by the Washington Redskins in the 2007 draft and was cut before the season. He sat out the year and then signed with the Arizona Rattlers of the Arena Football League, but the day before he left for camp, his brother’s team, the Cincinnati Bengals, offered him a deal. He was fifth on the depth chart. He said he didn’t “know anything about football” till he met the Bengals’ QB coach Ken Zampese, whom he impressed enough to get kept as the third-string quarterback. “I learned how to learn,” Palmer said.

The younger Palmer lasted three seasons in Cincinnati before being released. A year later, he landed with the Jacksonville Jaguars for a season and got cut again. Then, in the spring of 2013, the week Dilfer’s TDFB was launching, he got a tryout with the Chicago Bears, competing that day with two other members of the 2007 QB draft class, Jamarcus Russell, the top overall pick, and Trent Edwards, a third-rounder. “That order got flipped in terms of productivity that
day,” Palmer said. But he was still released by the Bears on the eve of the 2013 season. However, after starter Jay Cutler tore a groin muscle at mid-season, Palmer was re-signed and spent the rest of the year living in an Extended Stay America hotel.

“I think the Elite 11 has done a lot for my playing career, because I would’ve never started thinking about the sports psychology side of it,” he said. “I am a slightly above average thrower and a below average athlete. Experience-wise, I’m 114th out of 114 or whatever the number of quarterbacks is. But it doesn’t affect my confidence. I have developed that mind-set. I used to feel like it was something I didn’t have. It’s not God-given. It’s how you were raised and experiences you had growing up. I developed it.”

In Blake Bortles, Palmer had found another late bloomer with a similar approach. Bortles was an afterthought in the recruiting process for most schools. Tulane and Purdue both offered him scholarships, but it was to play tight end. According to the former UCF recruiting coordinator, head coach George O’Leary wasn’t interested in Bortles, a local product, till the Knights whiffed on four other mid-level QB recruits. Colorado State was his only other D1 offer to play quarterback. Bortles, though, started to blossom after the first month of the 2012 season. Then, as a junior, he flashed onto the national radar after sparking visiting UCF to a 38–35 upset of Bridgewater’s unbeaten Louisville team, rallying the Knights from a three-touchdown hole in the second half. For those trying to make the case why Bortles could end up as the first overall pick, it didn’t hurt that he threw 3 touchdown passes to defeat Penn State, the team new Houston Texans head man Bill O’Brien used to coach.

“Blake’s gonna go number one to Houston,” Palmer predicted. “You have a 5′10″ guy [Manziel] who was hands-down the best player in college football. He can do things no one else can do. He’s probably as confident a player as anyone I’ve ever been around, which is why he can do some of the shit he does. He’s also a liability. Can we trust Johnny? Totally scary. Teddy [Bridgewater] is unbelievably productive. Supersmart. Doesn’t own the room. No presence. Two hundred pounds. Then you’ve got Blake. Six-five, 240, gonna run a 4.6.
Doesn’t have half the experience the other two guys have. Had a drill sergeant [O’Leary] as a coach. Doesn’t throw the ball as naturally as Teddy does. He’s off-the-charts coachable and will be the coolest guy in the room. Coolest, meaning likable.

“It’s a crapshoot. Bill O’Brien is a very smart man. He’s gonna come back to one thing: Who’s the most trustworthy quarterback? If I take you as a quarterback at number one, and you’re a bust, everybody gets fired.”

Palmer also didn’t subscribe to former NFL coach Tom Rossley’s notion that the number one quality a QB needs is magic, which also factored into the Manziel versus Bortles debate.

“I think you need in today’s game to be more of a problem solver than a magician,” Palmer said. His example is a veteran NFL QB, who he said can be as good as anybody and as bad as anybody. “He can keep you from going to the playoffs, and he can throw for 5,000 yards every single year. Every single time [he] drops back, he’s thinking, ‘How do I make a play?’ He can’t help himself. Sometimes you gotta make a play. But if you drop back with the mind-set of ‘How do I make the play?’ the NFL is too good and too competitive, and you are not good enough to do that every time. And Johnny Manziel drops back every time, thinking, ‘I’m going to make a play.’ And he makes a ton of plays, but if he goes into the NFL with that type of mind-set and that kind of confidence, I think he’s gonna have some difficulties, because Robert Griffin III sure had a lot of difficulties in the NFL this year.”

FEBRUARY 21, 2014
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The first real buzz from inside Lucas Oil Stadium during the NFL Combine came when word circulated on an early Friday morning in late February that Johnny Manziel had been measured officially by the League at 5′11¾″. That detail only added to the intrigue surrounding Manziel—listed by Texas A&M at 6′1″—as the entire NFL brain trust—every exec, coach, assistant, scout, and media member—gathered in Indianapolis for the week. The factoid that no quarterback
measuring under six feet had been selected in the first
two
rounds of the NFL Draft since 1953 must’ve popped up a hundred times in the skywalks and bars around a town overrun by NFL types.

By 9:30 a.m. ET, Whitfield was making the rounds in the media area of Lucas Oil Stadium, getting pulled in different directions between NFL Network, ESPN, and a host of other people with digital recorders and flip cams.

“He’s already done nine interviews since we arrived here this morning,” said Jeanine Juliano, an Alabama undergrad and former Miss Teen Alabama interning as an executive assistant with Whitfield’s company.

Whitfield, who had in part turned his penchant for creative analogies into a cottage industry, didn’t miss an opportunity to poke at the skepticism rooted in Manziel’s measuring a tad below some kind of magic six-foot barometer. He held up a quarter-inch snippet of paper on the NFL Network to make his case about how silly such thinking would be for that to be a reason not to draft Manziel.

Sal Paolantonio, a veteran ESPN reporter, commended Whitfield on his little prop as he walked by en route to the bathroom.

“Man, I’m talked out,” Whitfield said, before noting that the quarter-inch piece of paper was actually a tag from his dry cleaning.

“Might as well have fun, since people love making a big deal of a quarter inch,” Whitfield told me. “He’s the same height he was when he was ‘007’ in the SEC. You wanna bet your franchise on a quarter of an inch?”

After hearing that Manziel was en route to the media area for his press conference, Whitfield settled into a seat in the second row in front of the podium to get a jump on what he figured to be a mob scene. A handful of other reporters noticed Whitfield positioning himself and followed suit. One writer asked Whitfield, “What have you done this week to address his height?”

“I don’t know. You’d have to talk to [Manziel’s parents] Paul and Michele about that one,” Whitfield said.

Kevin O’Connell, who flew in with Ryan Flaherty, entered the room and sat down behind Whitfield. Their talk went from which teams were interested in speaking to their QBs before it turned to
Logan Thomas’s new look. Whitfield had prodded the towering Virginia Tech quarterback to go to a barber before getting on the plane to fly to Indy.

“I told him, ‘You gotta come in clean here,’ ” Whitfield said. “ ‘The beard’s gonna come back. Your chance to make a first impression won’t.’ ”

One year earlier, Whitfield had offered up a similar message to another one of his QB protégés, Arizona’s Matt Scott, an athletic, strong-armed quarterback many had projected to go in the third or fourth round.

“He just did not get it,” Whitfield said. “He didn’t think it was a serious deal.”

Scott showed up in Indy with a goatee. He ended up going undrafted, before getting signed with the Jacksonville Jaguars. Would he have gotten drafted if he had come in clean-shaven? Who knows? But Whitfield wasn’t about to let Thomas give anybody another reason to be skeptical.

Whitfield had gotten something of a false alarm. Manziel’s press conference wouldn’t start for another ninety minutes. But it was still a mob scene. Tom Coughlin, the head coach who had won two Super Bowls with the New York Giants, was holding his own press conference on the opposite side of the room with about one-fifth the crowd of media.

Ultimately, Manziel, as he always was, appeared at ease in front of the podium. “This is life now, this is a job for me, taking it very seriously, and I’m really excited about the future,” he said. “I feel like I play like I’m ten feet tall … I’m probably one of the most competitive people on the face of the Earth.”

Some media members wrote that Manziel was over-coached for the press conference. Regardless, Whitfield was pleased. So was Manziel.