The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks (14 page)

NEAL BURCHAM
,
A SHAGGY
-
HAIRED
kid from Arkansas, arrived at the 2011 Elite 11 finals unknown to even the national recruiting reporters. Burcham had just one scholarship offer—from FCS-level Central Arkansas. He was, literally, a no-star recruit. The 6′2″, 175-pounder got assigned to room with Jameis Winston, the strongest personality among the twenty-four QBs invited, and Burcham never seemed awed by anything. Not Dilfer’s late-night cram session. Not the more-hyped, higher-profile quarterbacks with their supposed rocket arms. Not being surrounded by elite wideouts and defensive backs everywhere he looked.

The more perfect passes the kid threw, the more he picked apart 7-on-7 defenses, the more he rose to jump at any challenge, the more annoyed Dilfer got, knowing that Burcham had been so overlooked in the recruiting process.

“That shows how stupid some of these people are in college football,” Dilfer told reporters at the finals. “If you’re in that region, and you haven’t offered this kid, you’re stupid.”

Burcham left the West Coast sharing MVP honors with Jameis Winston and Tanner Mangum. The most-hyped quarterback prospect invited to the camp, five-star QB Gunner Kiel, struggled in Dilfer’s setup and wasn’t even selected as part of the top eleven—news that left many recruiting analysts bewildered.

A few days after Burcham returned home, he received his first FBS scholarship offer, from Arkansas State. The bigger college programs, though, either already had settled on their quarterbacks or weren’t believers in Burcham, which didn’t sit well with Dilfer.

“Neal Burcham is QB w/no major offers. Shows the absolute
dysfunction in NCAA recruiting. Coaches need to work harder and study QB pos more,” he tweeted on the eve of the 2011 college football season.

June Jones became a believer in Burcham a couple of months after Trent Dilfer did. The SMU head coach, a former NFL quarterback, has his own measure for DQ. Only his letters of preference for his QBs are “ESTP” from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the psychological prism based on the theories of psychiatrist Carl Jung. The sixty-one-year-old Jones first became intrigued by Myers-Briggs in the spring of 1998, in the midst of football’s biggest QB debate. Jones was in his first season as the San Diego Chargers quarterbacks coach and had spent months with his colleagues trying to sort out the dilemma facing them about which QB the organization wanted: Peyton Manning, the cerebral son of football great Archie Manning; or Ryan Leaf, the rocket-armed country kid from Montana who had just led Washington State to the Rose Bowl. Jones took a break from draft prep one night and turned on
20/20
, the ABC newsmagazine show. It was featuring a man claiming to be an expert on brain-typing. The man, Jonathan Niednagel, is a lay scientist whose academic credentials are rooted in finance, not science or psychology. In the
20/20
episode, Niednagel was asked to size up Manning versus Leaf. He said one of the two guys has
“It.”
One doesn’t.

“Which one?” Niednagel was asked before saying, “I can’t tell you. I’m being paid by an NFL team.”

The next day, Jones walked into the office of his boss, Bobby Beathard, the Chargers’ GM. San Diego had the second pick of the draft. Beathard admitted it was the Chargers who were paying Niednagel. “He says Peyton Manning has
It.
Ryan doesn’t,” Beathard told Jones. Manning was ESTP. Leaf was ESTJ.

“I said, ‘Are we going to take Ryan Leaf, even though we know he’s not one of
those
guys?’ ” Jones recalled. “He said, ‘Well …’ and then he hemmed and hawed and said something about how the owner made the call.” The Colts shrewdly drafted Manning first. The Chargers, against Niednagel’s suggestion, drafted Leaf, who wasted little time alienating his teammates. Leaf opened the season throwing just 1 touchdown pass and turned the ball over 15 times. Head coach
Kevin Gilbride was fired after six games. Jones became the interim head coach. A few days after taking over the Chargers, Jones met Niednagel.

“He scared the piss out of me the first time I ever talked to him,” Jones recalled. “We talked for two and a half hours. He said, ‘Let me tell you four things about yourself,’ and they were things that nobody else would know. He said, ‘When you don’t prepare, you’re at your best.’ I’d just become head coach of the Chargers. Tony Gwynn and Ted Williams are there. I prepared for it and wrote a speech, put it in an envelope, and I get called up and realize I’d put the wrong deal in there. I gave the greatest speech I’d ever given in my life. Standing ovation. Two days later, he tells me that.”

Jones’s team, the Chargers, had just signed Leaf to a four-year, $31.25-million deal, including a guaranteed $11.25-million signing bonus, the most ever paid to an NFL rookie. Jones won his first game over a hapless 1–5 Philadelphia Eagles team, 13–10, thanks to Natrone Means’s 112 rushing yards. San Diego won in spite of Leaf’s only completing 9 passes but for the first time not committing a turnover.

“Ryan Leaf can’t play, and I know it,” said Jones. “Knowing he can’t do it, you call a different game.”

The next week against Seattle, Leaf had what would prove to be the best game he would ever have in the NFL, going 25 of 52 for 281 yards. “We have our final drive first-and-goal from the 3, down 27–20,” Jones said. “We have time for four plays. He misses every pass. I shouldn’t have thrown it, but we were struggling running the ball.”

A week later, at Kansas City, on the opening drive, Jones predicted to his team that they’d spring a receiver wide open on a deep route. Too bad Leaf overshot the guy by five steps. “The whole sideline’s crushed. I said, ‘Ryan, I don’t think I’m going to be here at the end of the year. I’m going to play this [backup Craig] Whelihan guy. You just take your licks and get ready for the next year.’ ”

Jones was correct. He was canned after the season, and Leaf went down as one of the biggest busts in NFL history. Jones left the NFL and has since become one of the most successful coaches in the college game. In his first season at Hawaii, he sparked the biggest improvement in NCAA football history. He led the Rainbows to a
23–4 record in his last two seasons at Hawaii before accepting the SMU head coaching job. In Dallas, he took over a team that went 1–11 in his debut season and the following year went 8–5, making a bowl for the first time in twenty-five years since before the Mustangs got slammed by the NCAA’s Death Penalty. Jones also had become one of Niednagel’s staunchest supporters, along with Danny Ainge, the president of the Boston Celtics, who said, “You can take Red Auerbach, Jerry West, Phil Jackson—I’d take Jon Niednagel.”

Jones had Niednagel “brain-type” his players at Hawaii and at SMU for more than a decade. Jones always had a list of seven or eight players for Niednagel to evaluate when the coach brought him out to his practices. The players were usually good athletes who should have won starting positions but hadn’t because they didn’t respond well, Jones said. Niednagel then gave him direction on what positional moves should be made to better fit each player to his more “natural” position.

“It’s fascinating stuff,” Jones said. “I had some guys playing positions who I thought should be better than they were. He talked with them and then told me, ‘OK, this guy [Reagan Maui’a] needs to be a running back,’ and I had him playing defensive line. He was a 380-pound backup nose guard. I went to him. He had one year of eligibility left. I said, ‘You’re gonna have to trust me on this. If you lose a hundred pounds, I’ll get you into the NFL as a running back.’

“[Maui’a] looked at me like I was crazy. But he lost a hundred pounds. I put him at running back, and he got drafted in the sixth round, and he’s still playing in the NFL. And he’d never played running back in his life.

“He’s been 100 percent right on every kid we’ve talked to him about.”

Niednagel said he could talk to a person and gauge how his mind was wired by his voice inflection and diction as well as by eyeballing his facial features.

“Their eyes are more hawkish or more narrow, which is a telling factor,” his son, Jeremy Niednagel, said of ESTPs. “Even their hair, their gait—whether they go up on their toes when they walk—are indicators.”

Niednagel, who worked out of a tiny south-central Missouri town (population: 453), met with much skepticism from the science community, who took issue with the fact that he had no advanced scientific degree. Instead, he had a BS in finance from Long Beach State and had previously worked as a commodities trader. But he was quick to point out that he’d had almost forty years of research. He maintained that 60 percent of athletic ability came from personality type, and the other 40 percent stemmed from external factors, including how they were coached. He first started noticing the variances in motor skills when he coached his kids’ Little League soccer and baseball teams. Soon, he was testing out his theories.

“I’d draft certain kids even though they’d never played before,” he said. “I’d talk to the kid. I knew that, by halfway through the season, just by my coaching him, he’d be better than a kid who’d looked ten times better in the workout.” Niednagel, then living in Southern California, had so much success as a Little League coach, there were stories about him in the
Los Angeles Times.
Word spread about Niednagel to pro sports teams always desperate for an edge.

Niednagel loved his connection to the sports world. Even though the Celtics paid him a reported salary in the six figures, Jones had never actually paid him for his guidance.

“I just fly him over,” Jones said. “Jon sensed that I got it, and he wanted to help, and that I was more open than any coach he’d ever talked to.” Jones, in his second season at SMU—after he’d led the Mustangs to their best season in twenty-five years—tried to get Niednagel hired as a professor in the Sports Management department.

“If he was a professor, I could run the recruits by him, but they wouldn’t let me do it,” Jones said. “[Niednagel] wanted to do the science to give validity to what he was doing, and being a professor at the university would do that for him. [SMU athletics director] Steve Orsini approved it, but we didn’t have the money in the department to do it.”

Jones had become well-versed in the sixteen personality types from Myers-Briggs, which were at the root of Niednagel’s work. The letters are based on the pairings of psychological attributes:

Niednagel tweaked the older verbiage and came up with his own terminology, which he officially went with in 2011 when he published a book about parenting. Extraverted (E) became Front (F); Introverted (I) became Back (B); Sensing (S) became Empirical (E); iNtuitive (N) became Conceptual (C); Feeling (F) became Animate (A); Thinking (T) became Inanimate (I); Perceiving (P) became Right (R); Judging (J) became Left (L). Niednagel also reduced the profiles even further with numbers, as if the players were dishes off a fast-food menu, along with one buzzword. “ESTP,” the type Peyton Manning is, became “FEIR”—Front Empirical Inanimate Right—or a #5, the “Opportunist.” The full definition: “smooth operator,” deal-maker, tactical, enterprising, adaptable, persuasive, energetic, seeks fun and excitement, athletic, enjoys the moment, realistic, good-natured, self-focused, body- and clothes-conscious, entrepreneur, negotiator, promoter, fine motor skilled.

“I took it out of that bogus Myers-Briggs world and tried to take it into the brain and what it’s really representing,” Niednagel said. “More than anything now, I just use numbers, 1–16. They all have a logical sequence in terms of the mind and the motor skills. And it’s more memorable. I’m finding that dumbing down as much as I can helps them to learn it and retain it better.”

Jones could rattle off the names of all the great quarterbacks who were ESTPs (FEIRs): Joe Montana, John Elway, Johnny Unitas, Joe Namath, Jim Kelly, Troy Aikman, Terry Bradshaw, Fran Tarkenton, and Brett Favre. An eye-catching majority of the Hall of Fame quarterbacks who played in the past thirty years are this one personality type. So were other Super Bowl–winning quarterbacks Ken Stabler, Phil Simms, Joe Theismann, and Trent Dilfer. Jones used the famous NFL Films anecdote of Joe Montana, the moment before beginning a last-minute, game-winning, touchdown drive in the Super Bowl,
walking into the huddle and matter-of-factly pointing out John Candy in the crowd to one of his linemen as an example of a guy wired to thrive under pressure.

“ESTPs, under pressure, play their best,” said Jones. “Whether it’s a two-minute drill or we have to win the game on this drive, they play their best. Manziel—I would guess that he’s ESTP. When the game is under pressure, he makes a lot of plays. I watched him in the Alabama game, and he made big play after big play. I’m pretty sure he is.

“I had this conversation with [former Denver Broncos head coach] Dan Reeves. He wanted to get rid of John Elway. He said Elway couldn’t learn the playbook. But guess who was so great in the two-minute drill? John Elway. Guess who was calling all the plays then? John Elway.

“Can another guy who doesn’t have the same brain type perform at a very successful level? Yes, he can, but you have to know that he’s not one of those guys, and you have to be able to manage the game so that you don’t put him into situations to lose the game, and you take some of the weight off him in pressure situations.”

The latter is a key point that both Jones and Niednagel stressed. As much as it was ideal to find an ESTP quarterback, it was vital to ID what kind of personality type your QB had, so you could alter accordingly how you coached the guy.

Peyton Manning had the “best QB package of all time, thanks to his smarts, tactical spatial logic, peripheral and stereoscopic vision, body balance, and fine motor fluidity and prowess and decision making, etc.,” Niednagel wrote on his blog on braintyping.com. “These DNA attributes also radically separate him from baby brother, #2 BT Eli, who we predicted from his NFL start would never consistently play to the excellence of prodigy Peyton.”