The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks Read online

  ALSO BY BRUCE FELDMAN

  SWING YOUR SWORD: LEADING THE CHARGE IN FOOTBALL AND LIFE WITH MIKE LEACH

  MEAT MARKET: INSIDE THE SMASH-MOUTH WORLD OF COLLEGE FOOTBALL RECRUITING

  CANE MUTINY: HOW THE MIAMI HURRICANES OVERTURNED THE FOOTBALL ESTABLISHMENT

  Copyright © 2014 by Itzy

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York. www.crownpublishing.com

  Crown Archetype and colophon is a registered trademark of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Feldman, Bruce.

  The QB : the making of modern quarterbacks / Bruce Feldman.

  pages cm

  1. Quarterbacks (Football)—History. I. Title.

  GV951.3.F45 2014

  796.332′25—dc23

  2014027734

  ISBN 978-0-553-41845-3

  eBook ISBN 978-0-553-41846-0

  Jacket design by Michael Nagin

  Jacket photography by Hunter Martin/Getty Images

  v3.1

  To Christie, Ben, and Riley

  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.

  1.

  TOMORROW WE CHANGE THE GAME

  MAY 31, 2013.

  One by one they each gazed up at—and then hurried past—the eight-foot-tall bronze statue of Woody Hayes, posed leaning slightly forward with his hands on his hips, standing in front of the Ohio State athletic center bearing his name. Few of the two dozen QB gurus arriving from all over the country for a 6:00 p.m. Friday meeting stopped to check out the Buckeyes’ seven Heisman Trophies positioned in the lobby. Inside the 53,000-square-foot complex, past the trophy cases and all the framed mantras, they made a beeline for the Buckeyes’ team room, where the far-flung coaches were assembling.

  The room is part theater, part classroom. It is where Urban Meyer meets with his players. The Ohio State coach had handed over the Buckeyes’ facilities for the weekend’s Elite 11 Super Regional event—part of what’s become the American Idol of quarterbacking. Starting with the high school Class of 2000, the Elite 11 “campetition” has produced, among other future first-round draft picks, Tim Tebow, Matthew Stafford, and Andrew Luck.

  The evening’s first speaker was Steve Stenstrom, a dark-haired, slender Stanford grad with the air of an aspiring senator. Few of the men seated around the room knew it, but the forty-one-year-old Stenstrom, not John Elway or Andrew Luck, had been Stanford’s all-time leading passer. Stenstrom had bounced around the NFL, playing for five teams in six seasons. For the past decade, he’s headed a Christian outreach program for coaches and pro athletes.

  Stenstrom thanked everyone for being on time, and then he expanded on his background. He has a wife. Four kids. He coaches his son’s Pop Warner football team. He was brought there to Ohio State to be a part of the event by his friend Trent Dilfer, another former NFL quarterback. At Stanford, he had the privilege of playing for the legendary Bill Walsh. The ultimate coach, he said. But more than that, an innovator.

  “Innovators change the landscape for the rest of us,” Stenstrom told the room. “I love—luuuuuve—spending time with innovators. I just get excited being around them, because they’re doing something on the cutting edge. They just see things differently. They’re just wired that way, and they’re being who they’re supposed to be.”

  Stenstrom had grown close to Dilfer over the past few years, he said, from their weekly breakfasts together (both former NFL quarterbacks had retired to Northern California). Stenstrom compared the journeyman ex–NFL QB to the sainted Walsh.

  “Trent’s helping innovate the quarterback landscape for all of us,” Stenstrom said. “And, in the context of this room, there’s some pretty exciting stuff happening around the quarterback space.”

  As Stenstrom continued, it was apparent that in a room packed with former quarterbacks—ranging from career NFL backups to small-college starters—the night would be long on hope and hyperbole. The imagery all around the Ohio State athletic center reflected a similar, relentlessly positive, chest-up spirit. The signage on the wall right above the podium promoted a formula of sorts: BELIEVE>​EXPECT>​ATTITUDE>​BEHAVIOR = PERFORMANCE.

  Stenstrom’s intro lasted seven minutes, but before he called up Dilfer to the podium, he left the group with a prediction.

  “I believe in life there are three different kinds of days,” he said. “Mundane days. Memorable days. And milestone days.

  “ ‘Mundane’ are most of our days. You’ve gotta go through the mundane to get to the memorable and the milestone days. Days, weeks later, you have no idea what you did on a mundane day. The memorable days are the ones you usually have to plan for and script a little bit, where you try to create a memory. But every once in a while, milestones happen. Those are the days, you’re talking about ’em five, ten years down the road. I love when I get a sense that there might be a milestone day unfolding.”

  Stenstrom walked back to his seat to applause as his buddy took the front of the room.

  The 6′4″, 250-pound Dilfer, with his shaved head and goatee, looked more like a middle linebacker than an old quarterback. His narrow eyes, often appearing to be squinting, to be sizing you up, ratcheted up his intense presence. He’d ended his fourteen-year NFL career and transitioned immediately into the broadcast booth, where he had emerged as a bigger star on TV than he ever was in the NFL—much the way that many of the best coaches weren’t necessarily the best players. Dilfer knew enough to know what he hadn’t known back when he was a player. He had become consumed by the successes and failings of the quarterback world.

  More so than any other position in football and in all of pro sports, quarterback is an identity. Guys play first base or power forward. You don’t play quarterback. You are a quarterback. The key element of being a quarterback is external, and that, too, is a big reason TV producers love Trent Dilfer. His blunt demeanor was honed by two decades spent trying to command rooms bubbling over with testosterone and cluttered with other alpha males. Rooms like the one we were in.

  “What started as an idea is going to culminate tomorrow,” Dilfer began matter-of-factly. “I promise you, what Steve said is true. Tomorrow will be a milestone day. Tomorrow,” he continued as his voice rose, “the landscape of youth development and evaluation in the quarterback space changes forever. ’Cause once you do something like we’re going to do tomorrow with the group of people in this room, you can’t ever go back. Once you taste something so good, you don’t want the thing that was good before the great thing.

  “There’s a couple of different conversations that we’ll have to
night, but from my perspective, it’s all one topic: It’s getting the most from the least and the best from the best, because that’s my passion.”

  Dilfer had been the front man for Elite 11 for almost three years. But he was more than just the on-air face of a reality TV show on ESPN. His vision for where “the quarterback space” could go was different from what any of his bosses could’ve imagined when they asked him to be involved two and a half years earlier.

  The Elite 11 was created in 1999 by a former wide receiver at Cal as a nationwide search to find—and mentor—the best high school quarterbacks in the senior class. Andy Bark, the founder of the media company Student Sports, Inc., came up with the idea after observing a huge disparity in the quarterbacks who showed up for the football camps that SSI ran nationwide. Many top prospects were sons of former big-time quarterbacks or coaches, or had been coached by private tutors from the time they were toddlers. Bark’s goal was to help the guys who might fall through the cracks. The man Trent Dilfer replaced as the Elite 11’s lead instructor was sixty-something-year-old Bob Johnson, a crotchety, Orange County, California–based high school coach who had developed his former NFLer son, Rob Johnson, as well as Carson Palmer, Mark Sanchez, and two other QBs who made it to the NFL, Jordan Palmer and Steve Stenstrom. For a decade, Johnson’s primary focus with the young quarterbacks had been leading on-field drills. Dilfer, though, would be much more invested in the process. There would be more film study, more technique, an NFL-based playbook to learn, and anything Dilfer or his associates could conjure up to test the quarterbacks’ competitive souls. He even added a “high-performance psychology” coach who had trained six gold medalists in the 2012 Summer Olympic Games.

  Dilfer was brought on when ESPN turned the Elite 11 into a reality TV show in 2011. Elite 11—for the first time in the thirteen-year history of the camp—would no longer mean only landing an invitation to Southern California. Instead, twenty-four quarterbacks were brought out to Pepperdine University to compete in front of ESPN’s TV cameras and Dilfer’s glare. Tears were shed—by Dilfer, who often would get choked up addressing his quarterbacks. Since then, Elite 11 has tweaked its format (in 2013, eighteen quarterbacks were picked to compete on the reality show, and they were doing so in Beaverton, Oregon, home of the posh Nike campus) and has grown in scope and drama.