The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks (13 page)

TO DO THIS THING
right, to make the Elite 11 even more substantial in its space, Dilfer said, he had to incorporate some “soul-building stuff” into the process. “That was, without a doubt, the number one thing I wanted to address,” he said. “I wouldn’t be part of a ‘camp,’ because camps are lame. Camps determine whether you’re good at camping or whether you’re good at drills. There are very few transferable traits that come from traditional camps. You learn how to thrive in controlled environments without random elements being thrown at you. I said, if I was gonna do this, I wanted to discover the soul of the
player as much as the talent. I wanted to create environments where you’d see them fail. That way I could find out about them.

“The only kids we’ve missed on since I’ve taken this over are the ones who had faked the Dude Qualities, that when they were really put into the tough situations, they were broken emotionally and mentally. They just didn’t have it in them, yet.”

Dilfer was still trying to determine what his best barometers and revealers for DQ were in the regional Elite 11 workout settings. Those events tended to feel like cattle calls. He credited Joey Roberts, his protégé from TV, for being a good resource. “He played a big part in getting a behind-the-scenes look at who a kid was, because people still didn’t know who Joey was,” Dilfer said. “They’d just think he was a friendly face walking around writing down notes. Joey became a lot of the reconnaissance on the kids. We were doing a lot of the drills I guarantee a lot of them hadn’t done, because I know I didn’t do them until late in my NFL career. We watched how they interacted with their competitors, how they interacted with their parents, with their coaches.”

The Elite 11 finals afforded Dilfer more control and a clearer window to see Dude Qualities. In his first year running the Elite 11 finals, he made the QBs pull an all-nighter. The quarterbacks were summoned to the hotel lobby just before midnight and told they were responsible for knowing the rest of their playbooks, which meant they had to cram on three times the information they were supposed to have gotten down by that point. The next year, Dilfer called in the Navy SEALs for a surprise 4:45 a.m. workout that involved three-hundred-pound logs, chilly ocean water, hundreds of push-ups, bear crawls through the sand, and a bunch of determination. He wanted to see them tapping into their personal reservoir, he said. Better still, Dilfer wanted to observe how they responded in the practice sessions right after they were the most physically and emotionally drained.

“We’re looking for guys who have ‘figure-it-outness,’ ” he said. “Go figure it out. Now I’ll guide, and we as coaches need to help, but if we create robots, those guys are gonna fail. They have to be empowered to figure it out. We can give them some of the answers but not all the answers. They have to discover those answers.”

The more Dilfer delved into the quarterback culture, researching the great ones—and not great ones—from the past three decades, the more he’d become convinced that it was much more “nurture” than “nature” that produced top QBs.

“I’m 100 percent sold on nurture, ’cause the streets are littered with talented kids, and the Pro Football Hall of Fame is littered with guys who aren’t that talented. They have great ‘figure-it-outness.’ They make great decisions. They develop.”

Dilfer learned a lesson from his early work as an NFL analyst that he factored into how he structured the Elite 11 and his perspective on evaluating and developing quarterbacks. He admitted that he’d been fooled as an NFL analyst by how some quarterbacks came across in their interviews. Dilfer cited a guy in his first few years as a TV commentator he had pegged as a first-pick-of-the-draft talent, a guy he thought had “serious Dude Qualities.”

“My biggest whiff,” Dilfer said. “I got sold. I had really never been around him. I took other people’s word for it. I said, ‘I think he’s the best quarterback in the draft,’ and I based my evaluation on hearsay, not personal experience. Now I don’t do that. That’s one of the reasons we bring the counselors to the Elite 11. They don’t know that. You’re an idiot if you don’t come be a counselor for me at Elite 11. It’s just that simple. You have a chance to show me who you are for four days in a great environment. It’s priceless for my evaluation. Johnny Manziel proved so much to me with what he did the three days I was with him. I don’t think he’s the most talented. I don’t think his size is ideal. I don’t think a lot of things about Johnny are ideal. But Johnny has the Dude Qualities for when the moment’s big, when the pressure is on; when the shit hits the fan, it brings out the best in him. It brings out the worst in others, but it brings out the best in Johnny Manziel. And Johnny will be successful, because the shit hits the fan every day in the NFL.

“You have to see them in adverse situations. You have to see them struggle. I think Dude Qualities come out best when you see them fail, so from an Elite 11 perspective, that’s why we create environments where they will fail. All these other camps put them in these other drills that they’ve done a thousand times. You don’t find out if
the kid is a good quarterback. You find out if the kid is good at drills. We’ve created graduate-level drills, where they will fail. They’re designed for these kids to fail, so that we can get a gauge on how they’re going to respond to coaching while they’re failing, on how much can they adapt, how pliable are they. Do the Dude Qualities show up when they’re irritable or only when they’ve just dropped a dime?”

He also figured out that, upon exiting the NFL, he didn’t even know what he didn’t know when it came to evaluating quarterbacks. “No way I would’ve been able to see this in 2011, let alone 2008,” Dilfer said. “I had no wisdom in this space while I was in the League. This is why, when some ‘Coach A’ says something, I say, ‘Wait a second. Why is he the expert on this? Coach A is wrapped up in being Coach A in his little space that he’s focused on. There is no thirty-thousand-foot perspective.’ It wasn’t until after that I got out and embraced my role as analyst and global thinker in this space that I realized I had a lot of work to do.

“I’ll spend twelve hours a day watching college quarterbacks. You have to do the work from a global level, not just a micro level. It was a process of learning how to look at this position differently and taking the best from Mike Holmgren, the best from Mike McCoy, the best from Norv Turner and spending time with all the quarterbacks. What are the commonalties, and what are the biggest things that cause guys to miss? Just wrestling with all this stuff. This has been an evolution. Hopefully, I’ll do a lot better in 2014 than I did 2013, which is better than I did in 2012.”

THE EVALUATION GAME
,
PARTICULARLY
when it comes to things such as draft analysis or even recruiting ratings, often gets clouded with snap judgments.

“Can’t play.”

“Coach killer.”

“He was a two-play guy,” as in, “I watched him for two plays and saw all I needed to see.”

Perhaps it’s human nature to rush to judgment. Perhaps it’s about
egos striving to be authoritative voices. Definitive talk does sound best in the media marketplace. Gray areas are seen as wishy-washy analysis. They don’t drive headlines or attract eyeballs. The same can hold true in war-room settings, where assistants are looking to impress their boss—same with Dilfer’s Elite 11 staff. Dilfer was self-aware enough to know it was a temptation he’d have to battle, especially since in his day job as an NFL analyst for ESPN, he was studying grown men who had been playing the position for decades. That was the world he’d lived in as a player for almost twenty years before immersing himself back into high school football.

In the online recruiting rankings, where a level of groupthink seemed to fester, since most of the evaluators had only worked outside the college coaching system they covered, the evaluators often leaned on which schools were showing which kids interest. The evaluation process was even sketchier, since it related to teenage football players still maturing into their bodies and playing in a wide variety of systems and against levels of competition that were all over the map. In the face of all that, attitudes and egos got shaped about who was a “five-star” and who wasn’t.

Former USC assistant coach and self-described “AdventurePreneur” Yogi Roth was often the most reasoned voice in the Elite 11 war room. The thirty-two-year-old former Pitt wideout, who also works as an analyst for the Pac-12 Network, was best friends in college with Panthers tight end Brennan Carroll, Pete Carroll’s son. Roth co-authored the Super Bowl–winning coach’s
New York Times
best-selling biography/motivational book
Win Forever
and had become an ambassador for Carroll’s message, which can best be summed up as relentlessly upbeat. Roth tried to never lose sight of the fact that these kids were just sixteen or seventeen years old, he said. Roth’s style was formed from his first day on the practice field as a Trojan coach: “My first practice, I was running around like a maniac. Pete said, ‘Why were you doing that yesterday?’ I said because I saw that’s what [fellow Trojan staffers] Kenny [Norton] and Brennan were doing.’ He goes, ‘How about you run around with a purpose today? Better yet, how about you don’t run around at all? Instead, how about you watch
and observe a couple of days, and observe why guys do what they do? Let’s develop a way for you, because it really matters. Do everything with a sense of purpose.’ That sounds really easy, but it blew my mind, especially when it came to coaching. It was always, ‘Go! Go! Go!’ But go where? Instead, it should be, ‘Go here. Step this way.’ No kid is trying to throw three picks in 7-on-7 on the Nike campus on ESPNU. So why are you gonna get on his case? He already feels bad enough about it. Let’s coach him up. Let’s talk to him about it. Let’s give him some real truths.”

The dynamic with recruits had become more complicated with the ever-escalating visibility of recruiting and with kids getting offered so much earlier than just two or three years ago.

“We’re gonna blame a high school kid for getting loved up because he’s committed to a major university that has an insane fan following?” said Roth. “We’re gonna potentially discredit a kid because everybody loves him up every day? I think we have to A) guard against that and B) be aware of it. That does not mean we need to break him down to build him back up again. This is not old-school coaching. This means, how do we communicate with him? What type of learner is he? Is he auditory? Is he visual? What is the best way? Is it calling him out in front of a group? Probably not. Is it pulling him to the side and seeing how [his] life is? We have to find that out.

“We always say, we think we’re the new generation for the next generation of athlete, because the athlete has changed. We have to be aware of it. They’ve had more hype. They have more self-confidence. They’re part of a millennial generation. They have the world at their fingertips instantly. We have to be aware of how that affects their emotions. We have to be aware of how emotional some of these kids are and how they mask those emotions, because they’re supposed to be a guy with Dude Qualities, because Trent Dilfer in a tweet said, ‘This weekend I’m looking for guys with DQ! Own the environment!’ None of those kids have a clue what DQ is or what it means to own the environment. They’ve been doing it, but once they start to try too hard is usually when the majority of them fail.”

Roth said for many of these hyped high school quarterbacks, they
just want to land the golden ticket to the Elite 11 so they can exhale and think, “ ‘Whew! Glad I proved everybody right.’ And it’s our job in Coaching 301, 401—graduate-level coaching—to make sure that we communicate really cleanly with these guys in this developmental aspect of their lives, because this is probably one of the first times they’re going to hit some adversity, since they’re [now] around other alpha males, but we need to remember that it’s really not the kid’s fault if he doesn’t know how to deal with not being The Guy.

“If I had to define quarterbacks, they’re like models. They’re very fragile. A model on the runway, when [she’s] walkin’, nobody can touch her. But the models I’ve known or dated are very self-conscious, and 90 percent of quarterbacks are the same way. It’s the Oedipus complex. They all want to prove that they’re The Guy and want someone to tell them that they’re good. I can’t think of one quarterback who isn’t self-conscious, because they have such high expectations and high standards. [Speaking] as a coach, the little nuggets—‘Nice job,’ ‘Good throw,’ ‘Way to be accurate’—do build your confidence, because when a coach isn’t saying them, you’re wondering. And if you’re saying the opposite, it’s even worse. The power of your language is massive. You have to elevate them. That’s your job. You gotta coach them hard, but be aware.”

Just in the first three years running the Elite 11, Trent Dilfer had learned to become more patient with the young quarterbacks, he said.

“Oh, God, yeah,” Dilfer said, “but I came into this thing late, and I had a lot of cleaning up [to do] my first year. That first year [2011], there was a lot of damage control. It just wasn’t what it intended to be. I had to change the culture and make sure it would align with my core values. I was very harsh. I only got to choose about five of the kids the first year. I was very impatient, to a fault, but I think some of that was necessary in order to prove a point to everybody involved that this was going to be very different.

“One of the biggest things was eliminating the stars from the rankings and the offers from the evaluation process. It’s hard to say I know more than
Scout[.com]
,
Rivals[.com]
, 247[Sports], ESPN’s
Recruiting Nation
, but I said, ‘We’re gonna do it better. We have to stick
to our guns, even if it’s about some kid who has five stars.’ All the things I showed to our staff about how you evaluate a quarterback, I said, ‘They [the online recruiting analysts] don’t do this, so we are right. We are more comprehensive in what we are looking at because of our experience, because of our process. So, we are willing to say that just because a kid has a bunch of stars by his name, that doesn’t mean he’s good.’ ”