The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks (24 page)

Many of the campers nodded. It had been a long day. Most had flown across the country to get there. They’d met a lot of new people in the past twelve hours and had a bunch of information thrown at them. And now they had finished the night on a very emotional turn. They each were given a flashlight as they filed back into the darkened hotel. Turned out, the power wouldn’t come back on for another hour.

Saturday would bring new challenges. Starting at 4:30 a.m., Dilfer had them beginning the day by climbing a mountain.

THE COLLEGE COUNSELORS WERE
able to sleep in and skip the climb. But Saturday was a big day for them, too. That’s when the Counselor’s Challenge was scheduled.

Every year, a half dozen or so college QBs also came to the week-long camp to compete against one another in addition to their roles assisting the Elite 11 staff. The 2013 group was the most star-studded batch of college counselors the camp had ever had. There was Johnny Manziel; Devin Gardner; Tajh Boyd, the ACC’s Player of the Year; San José State’s David Fales; Georgia Tech’s Vad Lee; and Louisville’s Teddy Bridgewater, a guy many were projecting to be the first overall pick in the 2014 NFL Draft. Gardner and Boyd came to Oregon a few days early just to get in some extra work with Whitfield.

The opportunity to compete against the Heisman winner and the possible first overall draft pick had the other guys fired up. Especially Boyd. “That’s all he’s been talking about for two days,” said Gardner.

It’s doubtful Manziel would’ve even bothered to come halfway across the country for the event had George Whitfield not been helping coach. Manziel was there because of Whitfield. And a few of the other college QBs were there because of Manziel.

The six quarterbacks competed in a series of different passing drills, testing their footwork and accuracy. Manziel and Bridgewater were touted by most at the Elite 11 as the favorites. The other remaining Elite 11 coaches pegged Boyd, the most talkative counselor, as the winner. In the Clemson quarterback’s last game, against eighth-ranked LSU on New Year’s Eve in the Chick-fil-A Bowl, Boyd showed how “clutch” he could be when he converted a fourth-and-sixteen throw into tight double-coverage from near his own goal line to spark a last-minute, come-from-behind victory. Boyd was telling anyone who would listen that he was going to win the Counselor’s Challenge.

David Fales, the San José State quarterback, was on the other side of the spectrum. In a camp full of alphas, Fales was the quietest quarterback on the Nike campus. In truth, none of the other counselors
had ever heard of Fales till that week. Even though Fales led the nation in completion percentage (73 percent) and carried the Spartans to a Top 25 finish in 2012, it was not as if he’d arrived at college with much buzz. San José State only had to beat Indiana State to get him out of junior college. Before Fales’s stint at Monterey Peninsula College, he was at Wyoming (for less than a month) and Nevada and was buried on the depth chart at both places.

Fales later admitted that he’d always wondered how he compared to the other top QBs in the country. Turned out, at least in that kind of setting, Fales was more than capable of holding his own. His pinpoint accuracy, particularly while throwing on the move, had all the Elite 11 coaches and campers hooting and hollering with every perfect pass as he jumped to a big-points lead over Boyd. Manziel, constantly trying to fire up Fales and Boyd—and himself—rallied to close the margin and put the pressure on the San José State QB. Fales, though, never cooled down and hung on to win the competition.

“It’s eye-opening,” Fales said later, before qualifying that the competition was not like an actual game, though.

“It really doesn’t matter. It’s all hype kinda, but it did help my confidence.”

So, yeah, maybe it did matter.

EACH NIGHT OF THE
Elite 11, Dilfer and his staff retreated to their office on the sixth floor of the hotel for a war-room session that sometimes dragged on for four hours. Dilfer had framed his rating system around four categories to rank the eighteen quarterbacks: competitive temperament, functional football intelligence, passing proficiency, and trainability on a scale of 1–5. Dilfer mandated that a grade of 5 should be rare.

“Jameis had unique competitive temperament,” Dilfer said, evoking the name of the star of the 2011 Elite 11, Jameis Winston. “
That’s
a 5.”

Dilfer also wanted to incorporate some sort of new quarterbacking metric into the Elite 11 evaluation, which would rely on the statistical data.

Almost all the ratings in the first hour were 3s or 4s with plenty of qualifiers. After a half hour of discussions, Dilfer put the name of David Blough, a 6′1″ Texan committed to Purdue, on the big screen at the front of the room. Joey Roberts, Dilfer’s ESPN protégé-turned–Elite 11 general manager, made a compelling case for the week’s first 5 in regard to Bough’s competitive temperament.

“I talked with Kyle Allen, Jacob Park, and DeShaun Watson [three of the camp’s highest-rated recruits] and said, ‘Who’s the alpha in this group?’ Blough was the one commonality,” Roberts said.

Blough was an unheralded recruit till he’d caught the eye of the Elite 11 staff at the regional camp in Texas and then made them believers in Chicago one month later. He had zero scholarship offers at the time. He learned that he’d landed a golden ticket to the Elite 11 finals while sitting in his fifth-period Technologies class. A buddy told him to check Twitter. Blough tapped at his smartphone and noticed a tweet from NFL star Drew Brees mentioning him: “On behalf of coach @TDESPN the fifth golden ticket to the @Elite11 Finals goes to fellow TX QB @David_Blough10 Welcome to the fraternity David.” A few days later, Brees’s old college became the first to offer Blough, who accepted one month later.

Blough studied the previous
Elite 11
shows on TV and bought in to Dilfer’s message. In one of the earlier events of the week, the high schoolers had a pre-dawn, 4.4-mile run up a hill that concluded with a last-man-squatting competition. Blough outlasted everyone and remained in the squat position for six minutes just to prove a point.

“I learned it’s about a lot more ‘mental,’ the leadership and being able to adapt and make plays work,” Blough later told me. “It’s a lot more than just being able to throw the ball; it’s all about how you’re wired, how you work. A thousand kids can throw the ball, but it’s the intangibles that separate you.

“They really stress it. That was something I had to focus on if I wanted to be noticed. I was slapping people’s hands when they caught a pass for me; I tried to bring high energy, and it seemed to work. So it’s stuck with me.”

Months later, Dilfer was told about how years of watching
Elite 11
had affected Blough; he was not only parroting Dilfer’s message
but said he was trying to live it. “That’s why I pushed for the TV show,” the former NFL QB said. “It’s great that we’re nominated for an Emmy. It doesn’t make me more money. I’ve lost a lot of money on the Elite 11. A lot. The TV show is important to me because it’s the way we message the next generation, because I want these kids to understand, this
is
nurture, not nature. You are not born to be a quarterback. That is the stupidest argument I’ve ever heard. There are kids who are born to be leaders. There are kids born with more talent than others. They are not born to be Tom Brady, to be Peyton Manning. A lot of that is nurture, and the TV show is part of the nurturing process for the next generation. They get to see what is emphasized, and they get to see it played out the year or two before they get to go through it.”

Dilfer shifted into a story about another high school QB, this one a blue-chip prospect, whom he’d “loved” on tape. “I’d invite him off of tape,” he said. “NFL body. NFL arm. NFL pedigree. [The prospect] had seen the shows, and he cowered [at one of the Elite 11 regionals]. He disappeared. He brought nothing. I talked to a couple of coaches who’d recruited him. They both said when they talked to him on the phone, there was nothing there. He was so soft and unsure of himself. When that happens, it is a red X. You have seen what is important to us. You have seen what we emphasize. My talk is the same. ‘I don’t wanna hear you. I wanna feel you. Thermostat and thermometer,’ to the point people roll their eyes. There has to be a major paradigm shift for this kid to survive in a college locker room, let alone in an NFL locker room.”

AFTER DAVID BLOUGH
’
S FIRST
two days in Oregon, it sounded as if Purdue had gone into Texas for another recruiting coup, as the Boilermakers did in the ’90s when they plucked out Brees after the big in-state schools passed on the Austin native.

Craig Nall mentioned that after he took a baseline test on AXON, measuring his ability to instantly deduce defensive looks, Blough approached the old ex-NFL quarterback, inquiring what his score was.
Nall said that Blough, who had the highest initial score among high schoolers, looked genuinely disappointed to find out that the onetime LSU Tiger had topped him. Nall felt compelled to point out to the kid that he did have a bit of an advantage on the test: “I reminded him, I did play in the NFL.”

One of the coaches chimed in to say that Blough had approached him earlier to report, “Coach, I haven’t taken the elevator yet.”

A coach from the back of the room pointed out, “Everything he does is an A+. He’s just locked in.”

Another said, “NFL evaluators look at joint structure. With his wrists, hands, and knees, he has 6′5″ joints in a 6′1″ body.”

Dilfer observed, “When we went around that circle introducing ourselves, I swear he wanted to say, ‘I’m here to kick your asses. I’m not here to make friends.’ ”

Palmer added, “It’s ironic that he’s going to Drew Brees’s school.”

For as much as David Blough had made a glowing early impression in Oregon, a taller, much more touted QB with one of the strongest arms in the camp had turned off several of the coaches.

“He’ll throw a touchdown on a ball he shouldn’t have thrown,” said one of the younger coaches. “He’s arrogant to other people, and he turns his back to me when I know he can hear me.”

One of the coaches said that the teen was “the least-liked person here.”

For Dilfer, the quarterback was treading into the direction of the two other blue-chip recruits who had recoiled when faced with the challenges of the Elite 11. The forty-one-year-old still cringed about how those previous situations had deteriorated, and he was determined not to let it happen again.

• • •

THERE
’
S A FLOOR
-
TO
-
CEILING PICTURE
of one of Nike’s newest breakout stars, Colin Kaepernick, in a second-floor classroom inside the Bo Jackson Building. Back when Kaepernick was a high schooler, he was off the national college football recruiting radar. He was a lanky pitcher who doubled as a quarterback in the run-heavy Wing-T offense; he threw the ball sidearm. Kaepernick tried out for the Elite 11 at two regionals, one in Vegas and one in Berkeley, in 2005. Stumpf recalls that Kaepernick was pencil-thin but showed off a powerful whip of an arm, although he was too raw to get the invite to the national camp in a class that featured Matthew Stafford, Jake Locker, and Tim Tebow.

Chris Ault, the former coach at Nevada—the only FBS program to offer Kaepernick a scholarship—said he wouldn’t have offered based on film. Kaepernick competed at the Wolf Pack’s summer camp, but even after that, Nevada didn’t pull the trigger. It wasn’t until months later, after figuring that Kaepernick could probably be a good free safety or wide receiver if he couldn’t make it at quarterback, the Wolf Pack offered.

“We didn’t know he was getting ready to put his cape on,” said Ault, “and it’s now with a big
K
right in the middle of it.”

The NFL is actually full of quarterbacks fueled by skepticism and snubs. Warren Moon going undrafted and detouring to the Canadian Football League for six seasons before getting his shot at
the
League. Tom Brady lasting till the 199th pick of the draft. Aaron Rodgers having zero scholarship offers out of high school. It was a theme exercised repeatedly when the counselors were called up one by one to share their stories with the campers. Even George Whitfield stretched to bang that drum in his introduction of Johnny Manziel …

“He scored seventy-five touchdowns in his senior year. Seven-TEE FIVE! But TCU still said, ‘Slow down. Not all dreams end with being a Division One player.”

Whitfield’s intro quickly turned into a testimonial, tracing the fiery Texan’s emotional state through the recruiting process to the time he showed up during the spring break of his freshman year at Texas A&M, to each step on each rung up the Aggies’ depth chart. Whitfield perked up as he got to the Thursday-night phone call he
received from Johnny Manziel, while he was checking out another one of his protégés, Virginia Tech’s Logan Thomas, facing tenth-ranked Florida State. At the time, the Aggies were less than forty-eight hours from a huge test at number one Alabama: “I know you’re watching Logan, so I’ll keep this short. This is gonna be like going into the Roman Colosseum,” Manziel said, hatching a gladiator/dragon-slayer theme that Whitfield would soon adopt for his own brand—DRGN SLYR. “We are going to shock the world on Saturday. We’re gonna knock out Alabama. I can feel it. I just know it. I’ll call you after.”

The whole room broke into applause by the time Whitfield brought Manziel up to the front.

Unlike the other counselors who’d preceded him, Manziel didn’t give a short speech but rather an offer to an open forum: “Wassup, fellas? Y’all know what I’m doing every second of every day just by turning on ESPN. I’ve been asked probably every question you can imagine, but I’ll answer anything you like.”

When he was asked what his biggest challenge had been, Manziel’s response was as much a glimpse into how his life had been transformed from anonymous to the surreal as it was an answer to the question.