The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks (37 page)

The next morning the quarterbacks were on the turf for their forties and whatever other drills the NFL coaches wanted to put them through. Manziel, like Bridgewater, had opted not to throw at the Combine on the advice of his agents, preferring to hold off till his Pro Day, where he would be working with receivers he knew and had
timing with. Bortles, though, was determined to show the NFL brass he just wanted a chance to compete.

Outside the media room, about twenty yards from the ESPN set, were several big flat-screen TVs showing the NFL Network’s coverage from the field. In one of the metal folding chairs by the TVs sat Palmer like a nervous father, watching Bortles throwing passes. Much of the discussion among NFL analysts, though, was about Logan Thomas, who put on a dazzling display of athleticism, running the fastest 40-yard dash time among QBs (4.61), jumping the highest (35.5 inches), the farthest (9′10″), and throwing the hardest (60 mph). (Manziel’s official 40-time was 4.68, while Bridgewater chose not to run. Bortles’s was a disappointing 4.93. Manziel ran the fastest 20-yard shuttle time at 4.03 seconds, ahead of Thomas’s 4.18.)

NFL Network draft analyst Mike Mayock said Thomas’s footwork was “lazy” but observed that the ball came out of his hand “beautifully.” Still, Mayock lamented that Thomas’s “tape is so bad.” His colleague, former NFL coach Steve Mariucci, sounded more optimistic: “I think he’s smart enough to learn. He’s had some big games. I think he would be fun to coach.”

Whitfield, listening to the commentary, was irked, pointing out as he walked away that Mayock also once had Cam Newton ranked below Blaine Gabbert and Jake Locker in his draft class.

Four hours later, Manziel had already flown out. Whitfield felt like celebrating. He was getting good feedback from his NFL connections about Manziel, and Thomas had created more intrigue with his arm strength and his freakish athleticism. He settled into one of the couches in the lobby bar at the JW Marriott waiting for Flaherty and Thomas. In between fielding text messages, Whitfield thumbed at his smartphone to check what was being said about his protégés.

“I had three NFL coaches say, ‘We wanna see [Manziel] throw with anticipation,’ ” Whitfield said of the feedback he got in regard to Manziel’s upcoming Pro Day, which he planned to have 100 percent from under center. Flaherty arrived grinning. Thomas looked exhausted as he collapsed onto a couch. He recounted the oddest question he had gotten asked by a team in one of the fifteen-minute meetings he had in the NFL’s speed-dating setup with prospects. He
was asked how many things he could do with a brick. He said he came up with six, but at the moment, Thomas was too fried to name them.

“Hey, G—You’ll love this,” Thomas told Whitfield. “They [the NFL coaches during his workout] were telling me to slow my drops. I lit up the outs. I was 5 of 7.”

Jeanine Juliano—Whitfield’s assistant—seated next to Thomas, did a Twitter search for Thomas’s name, which unlocked a torrent of snarky comments reacting to any praise he’d gotten for his show in Indy. Asked why the venom toward Thomas, she was told it was probably backlash from draft analysts once touting him as a potential first overall pick of the draft.

“But I didn’t do any of that,” Thomas said, shrugging. “That wasn’t anything I said.”

At that point, he was just looking forward to getting his first-class-upgrade flight back to California and taking his girlfriend to Disneyland before gearing back up for his Pro Day.

 
11.

FEBRUARY 9, 2014
.

A kid with shoulder-length blond hair sprawling from underneath a white baseball cap that was turned backward took a seven-step drop. His big red Nike high-tops kicked up sod as three pass-rushers waving big puffy pads gave chase.

“PUT A LOT OF PRESSURE ON THIS GUY! GO! GET UP-FIELD!” yelled Steve Clarkson from ten feet away as he did a countdown.

“SIX!… FIVE!…”

The QB darted left, evading one of the rushers.

“SEE IT! FEEL IT!… THREE!… TWO!”

The quarterback almost survived the drill, avoiding being tagged by the D-linemen for nine seconds, but with one second remaining, the kid brushed into another player. The quarterback flung the ball down in disgust.

These were the eight-year-olds.

It was a gray Sunday morning at Cathedral High in downtown Los Angeles. Legend had it that the school was haunted. Even the Cathedral’s athletic teams are named the Phantoms to honor the school’s rep. In the background, you could hear constant chatter from
a preacher blaring through speakers via the church located just a few yards beyond the end zone. None of the quarterbacks seemed the least bit distracted, though. A few of their parents watched from the bleachers while a dozen more sat behind them at umbrella-covered picnic tables reading books, scanning tablets, and pecking at their smartphones.

Clarkson prodded both his QBs serving as ersatz defensive linemen (“Make ’em work! Make ’em panic!”) and the quarterbacks dealing with the pressure (“Try to feel the rush, and keep your eyes downfield, but NO MATTER WHAT, PROTECT THE BALL!!!”)

This was a typical Sunday at Cathedral. Clarkson had been conducting his workout sessions for more than two dozen QBs—ages eight to eighteen—for the previous four years. On the football field were four different drill stations.

Almost all the QBs arrived at least a half hour before the 9:00 a.m. session began. Clarkson actually had an earlier one-on-one with a high school sophomore who had been flying in from Colorado the previous couple of weeks. The fifty-two-year-old coach, wearing a gray “Dreammaker” sweat suit, looked more like a former lineman than an old quarterback. Clarkson played in college at 205 pounds but appeared north of 255 now. The lower half of his cheeky, round face was covered with gray whiskers.

Many of these quarterbacks had been with Clarkson for years. Two quarterbacks in the 9:00 a.m. group were high-level recruits. One, Travis Waller, a 6′3″, 195-pounder from Anaheim’s Servite High School, came in as a wide receiver and was a standout track athlete who had already been offered scholarships at Washington and Northwestern. “He’s got a huge ceiling,” said Clarkson. Waller had a sense of urgency, too. Unlike a lot of Clarkson’s pupils, Waller came from a modest background. He was being raised by a single mother. “I’m not the richest kid, so we give up some things so I can come here and she can pay Steve,” said Waller, who had been coming to Clarkson’s Sunday-morning group sessions for two years. “I take every rep seriously. It costs a lot, but it’s definitely worth it. I saw a dramatic change right away.”

Some of the other quarterbacks drove Mercedes and BMWs.
Waller didn’t even have a car, his mom, Bridgette, said. “I drive a 2008 Saturn Vue, and we live in an apartment in Fullerton. We sacrifice vacations. We don’t eat out a lot. We don’t go to the movies.” But the Wallers looked at the Clarkson training as an investment that could be worth $200,000 in a college scholarship and even more if he developed the way his coach said he could.

“Some people may get up and go to church on Sundays; we go to Steve,” Bridgette said.

The other touted QB had high, layered, dark hair and a toothy grin, resembling a younger Taylor Lautner. He was wearing a pink long-sleeve shirt and black “Dreammaker” shorts with pink tights and black socks.

“Brady looks like a young Joe Namath,” said Clarkson while taking a break, as he watched seventeen-year-old Brady White do footwork drills. “He actually reminds me of Aaron Rodgers.”

White, the son of a senior vice president at CBRE—the world’s largest commercial real estate service—had been training with Clarkson since he was in the sixth grade.

He was ranked—depending on which scouting service you checked—as one of the nation’s top five QB prospects in the 2015 recruiting class. He played at a program known for cranking out college quarterbacks, Hart High in LA suburb Newhall, California. White already had scholarship offers from Cal, Illinois, and Indiana, among others. His online recruiting profile listed him as 6′2″, 186 pounds, but his wiry frame made him appear lighter than that. The very mention of that seemingly innocuous detail prompted a defensive comment from Clarkson.

“People forget [that] John Elway was 170 [pounds] as a freshman at Stanford,” Clarkson said, evoking the third Hall of Fame–caliber QB in respect to young Brady White within a thirty-second stretch.

“Brady, are you dressed this way for Valentine’s [Day]?” Clarkson yelled to the high schooler as he ran over to a new station.

In a few hours, the field would be covered with hundreds of teenage football players, not just quarterbacks, as part of a high school 7-on-7 league Clarkson helped run. One of the teams was making the two-hour drive up from San Diego. Its star quarterback was a ninth-grader
named Tate Martell, another Clarkson protégé. In July 2012, as a fourteen-year-old, soon-to-be eighth-grader, Martell—then a home-school student—accepted a scholarship offer to play quarterback for the University of Washington. The Huskies program at the time was run by head coach Steve Sarkisian—one of Clarkson’s first protégés some twenty-plus years earlier. Martell, then around 5′11″, 170-pounds, started to draw attention from college programs with his performance for the Mira Mesa Chargers in the Throwback Football League, Clarkson said. The TFL was another Clarkson creation. It was a springtime, full-contact, club football league that played its games during the months of April, May, and June. Clarkson charged each kid $300 for the season. The sixteen-team league “was created specifically to recruit, develop, and showcase the very best football talent at the sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade levels.” In 2013, the TFL had six more kids receive major college scholarship offers, according to the league website. “I think it’s the future of football,” Clarkson said.

Martell was actually a year older than most of the other students in his grade. That was because his father, a former college wrestler, had held him back in seventh grade so the boy would be more physically and mentally mature as he went through high school and college. It’s a move several Clarkson disciples have made. Clarkson showed Sarkisian film of Martell and had the coach hooked.

“If you could clone Fran Tarkenton and Brett Favre, you would have Tate Martell,” Clarkson told Sarkisian.

The Martell commitment, which made national news, was reminiscent of the story of his buddy, David Sills V, also a Clarkson guy. In 2010, as a thirteen-year-old, Sills committed to a scholarship offer from USC and then-coach Lane Kiffin.

Brady White and Tate Martell and their parents all were featured in a December 2013
60 Minutes
segment about Clarkson titled “Quarterback Guru.” The thirteen-minute piece had aired six weeks earlier, touted as “Morley Safer talks to the ‘Quarterback Guru’ who says the new norm to get to the NFL as a quarterback starts with a tutor like him training kids as young as eight.”

It had been a good winter for Clarkson and his Dreammaker
brand. In January, he appeared on Comedy Central’s
The Colbert Report
for a spoof of him teaching Stephen Colbert how to play quarterback.

Clarkson also planned to train Oakland Raiders QB Terrelle Pryor for the next five months on Tuesdays and Thursdays, he said. Clarkson had worked with the former Buckeyes star some when he was at Ohio State, although Pryor was still a major project when he arrived in the NFL as a third-round pick in 2011. In 2013, Pryor spent his off-season in Southern California working with Tom House. Pryor even later admitted to reporters that, until he met House, “I never really knew how to throw a football before.”

BRADY WHITE AND TRAVIS
Waller, the alphas of Clarkson’s Sunday-morning group, were part of a loaded crop of Southern California quarterbacks in the 2015 recruiting class. White was a consensus top-five QB, and there were actually three other Los Angeles area quarterbacks ranked even higher. “Five of the eight quarterbacks we liked the most are LA kids,” one SEC coach said. “Usually that area’s overrated for quarterbacks. This year, it seems to be the opposite.”

It had been decades since the area produced a group as highly touted. The benchmark for all Southern California QB classes was the 1979 group, led by future Hall of Famer John Elway of Granada Hills. That class included, among others, two other QBs who ended up in the NFL: Tom Ramsey and Jay Schroeder. Steve Clarkson, a record-setting quarterback at Wilson High, was a part of that class, too. That group, especially given the magnitude of Elway’s career, would seem tough to beat. Some analysts, including
Scout.com
’s Greg Biggins, a guy who spent over a decade evaluating quarterbacks for the Elite 11 staff, said the 2015 class had a chance to become the best crop of quarterbacks the area had ever had. The class’s emergence came on the heels of some growing skepticism about the merits of SoCal QBs.

“Since Elway, the quarterbacks from that region have been little more than a series of flops,” wrote Jason Cole of Yahoo! Sports in 2013. “While Carson Palmer, Alex Smith, and Randall Cunningham
have had solid careers in the pros, they are the best of an otherwise sad group.”