The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks (26 page)

Sherman’s explanation was blunt: “He’s a first-round pick, and we have money in him. I can tell you, you’re gonna get fucked.”

“After that, me and Coach Sherman had a great relationship,” Nall said. “We could talk frankly.”

Nall’s psyche took another hit whenever he’d be leaving the Packers’ facilities and fans would ask for his autograph, thinking he was Rodgers.

“It’s the eyes, I guess—even my wife agrees we have some similar features,” Nall said, adding that he soon realized that the resemblance afforded him a way to get a jab at Rodgers. Whenever he’d hear someone call him “Aaron” or “Mr. Rogers,” he’d laugh to himself at the thought of blowing them off and leaving fans thinking, “That Aaron Rodgers, what a dick!”

After the 2005 season, Nall opted to sign a three-year contract with a $1-million signing bonus with the Buffalo Bills. The starting job was open. On the second day of training camp, he went the entire morning practice without one of his passes hitting the ground, he said. Then, on the second to last play of practice, he tried to outrun a linebacker to the corner of the end zone and felt his hamstring give. “That hamstring was the beginning of the end for me,” Nall said. “I was inactive number three the rest of the year.” One year later, he was out of Buffalo and on the Texans’ roster before ending back up in Green Bay in 2007. Nall lasted one more season in the NFL, with the Houston Texans, before retiring. He’s proud to note that he’s somewhere in the Packers’ record book for having thrown the most passes (48) without an interception.

“I ended up behind two Super Bowl–winning quarterbacks,” Nall said. “We know Favre is going into the Hall of Fame, and Rodgers is on his way. Had I gotten drafted someplace else, who knows? Had I gone to Florida instead of LSU, who knows? But I don’t have any regrets. I try not to let myself go there, because it could be maddening, since there’s nothing you can do about it.”

DILFER
,
A GUY WHO
played with, among others, Ray Lewis and Hall of Famers Warren Sapp and Walter Jones, called Aaron Rodgers the “most confident human being I’ve ever been around.”

Observing the Elite 11 quarterbacks, Rodgers said he couldn’t believe how good some of the QBs were. It didn’t take much for him to recall being their age. Of course, when he was, nobody wanted him as a quarterback, which had actually turned out to be a very useful thing for him. Rodgers, now thirty, said he still had the letter a Purdue assistant once sent him that said, “Good luck with your attempt at a college football career,” after he’d mailed the Boilermakers his high school tape.

“You really need to remember where you came from and have appreciation for the journey that you went on,” Rodgers said. “I think a lot of kids these days, especially with the outlets we have, the exposure that we have, where a lot of these young guys are ‘blue-chippers’ from the time they’re in high school to the time they get drafted, there’s not a ton of adversity that they go through. I dealt with adversity on every level, from not getting recruited out of high school to going to junior college, to being a backup in D1, to falling farther than I thought I would in the draft. For me, it was great, because I got to sit and learn and be with the disappointment. Those experiences can either strengthen your character or make you really bitter. Thankfully for me, it really strengthened my character and gave me a good resolve.”

Rodgers, like Dilfer, credited Jeff Tedford with enabling him to become a first-round pick: “Jeff’s a perfectionist in nature, and that rubbed off on me a lot,” he said. “He challenged me to be perfect in my footwork, in my preparation, in my reads, and in my execution.
It’s that kind of mind-set that allows you to never be complacent, even in your greatest games. I owe Jeff a lot. I often felt like I had to prove to him every single day that I was mentally tough, I was physically tough, and I was good enough to be his quarterback.”

The metamorphosis of Rodgers’s game early in the QB’s career in Green Bay that Dilfer spoke of was actually inspired by none other than Brett Favre. Not long after Rodgers arrived in Green Bay, there were numerous reports of friction between the two. Rodgers said the relationship was “mischaracterized. To be an older player like myself, ten years in now, it would have been difficult to have your successor picked before you’re ready to give it up. He played three more years when I was there, and then he played three more after that.” Still, fitting in on Favre’s team, in his town, was challenging, but Rodgers soon realized how fortunate he was to have a firsthand, close-up look at one of the most extraordinary talents to ever play the position.

“He did things so differently than what I was used to,” Rodgers said. “I had three years to really practice all those things and figure out what I liked. I’ve been reading Hank Haney’s book about Tiger Woods. What I found interesting was when Tiger’s talking about ninety percent of the things that he hears, he throws out. Five percent he works on and then throws out, and then the other five percent he incorporates into his game. For me, it was absorbing a lot of information from Brett, watching him, listening in the meetings, listening to him in the huddle, watching him in practice, and trying to figure out what I wanted to absorb into my game and what I wanted to change and do differently or do better.

“It also challenged me to play around with some things, and I had the luxury of not having been thrown in there right away to try to help the team win. I got the chance to hone my skills and incorporate some things and change some things that I wanted to in order to be successful. Those three years were crucial to me in becoming a better player. Here I was, looking at a guy who was unorthodox at times and trying to figure out why. Jeff Tedford taught us things, and when he did, he told us to ask the ‘Why.’ I think that is the most important question a quarterback can have, because once you figure
out why you’re doing it, then you can really figure out how to make it work for you in a clutch situation. I watched Brett for years … [and] I would figure out the Why—why he would offset one way and throw back the other way; why he would load his leg one time and not another time; why he would use a certain footwork on a certain drop. And when I was able to figure out why he was doing it, it made sense to me. Then you can really take it and make it useful in your own game.”

Rodgers had three years to study up on Favre’s preternatural on-field geometric wizardry. He was able to distill some of the uncanny and unconventional off-script plays that had become Favre’s trademark. Even Favre’s own coaches had given up trying to explain how the three-time NFL MVP ended up doing some of the remarkable—and often ill-advised—things he could pull off on a football field. Rodgers, though, not only figured out Favre’s rationale, he found his own way to mimic the maneuvers.

“The one thing I really learned is, you have to have a real, innate sense about how each throw affects your body and really harness that instantaneous feeling/reaction about how each throw feels,” he said. “So when you’re making a throw on the run to the left, eventually you learn you have to aim a little bit inside, because your body is moving hard to the left, and then you compensate. Well, it’s the same thing in the pocket, when you throw a ball off your back foot or throw a ball moving hard to your left or up in the pocket—you really want to capture that feeling. I think that is what Brett did so well. He was really able to harness that feeling in his mind about how to put the ball in a spot he wanted based on what his body was doing and disconnecting often from his upper body and his lower body. He was able to harness those feelings and then could recall them in a split second to make the proper throw. As incredible as that might’ve looked sometimes, to Brett, I don’t think it was that difficult, because he knew what that felt like, and he had that muscle memory ingrained in his mind so he could repeat that on multiple occasions, and that’s what gave him his advantages.”

The depths Rodgers went to expand his game sometimes didn’t
sit well with the Green Bay coaches. In his rookie season of 2005, Mike Sherman’s team would have “Feel Good Friday,” a no-pads practice with shorts and helmets, leading into the weekend.

“The defensive coaches wanted me to throw the ball to this certain guy every single time on the scout team,” Rodgers said. “What it really meant was, they wanted me to throw an interception every single time. As a competitor, I just couldn’t do that. I told our guys, ‘You just run to the proper spot, and I’m gonna no-look almost every throw.’ So, one, I was working on, can I no-look a throw and put it in the proper spot? Two, the competitor in me is saying, ‘I am not gonna throw a pick. I don’t care if Coach Duffner is coming over to tell me to, if Jim Bates is coming over to tell me to throw it, or if Speedy Washington is telling me to throw a pick. I’m too much of a competitor to throw a pick every single time, even if it is practice on a ‘Feel Good Friday.’ Finally, after five or six weeks of doing that and ticking off the defense, Sherman pulled my QB coach, Darrell Bevell, aside and said, ‘Tell the young kid to stop doing that.’ So they tried to put a stop to that (ha-ha), but it didn’t really work.”

Five seasons later, Rodgers earned Super Bowl MVP honors for leading the Packers to a victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers in Super Bowl XLV. A big reason for Green Bay’s title and the subsequent NFL MVP trophy Rodgers won the following season stemmed from all those hours he’d spent deconstructing Brett Favre’s magic, experimenting at the Packers facility, reinventing himself—and the quarterback position.

HEADING INTO THE
7-
ON
-7 tournament, Dilfer posted a leader board ranking the top eleven quarterbacks. To Blough’s surprise, he was number one.

The dynamic of how the event unfolded, with the Elite 11 quarterbacks having the run of the Nike campus for a few days before The Opening kicked off, provided Dilfer with another window into his kids’ DQ. “You had a bunch of other alphas, and other cultures came in, and now, all of a sudden, they’re surrounded by 150 of the best Dudes in the country. How big were they?” Dilfer said of his QBs.
“Which ones got with their teams and just owned it? And which ones were intimidated and said, ‘OK, who am I gonna follow?’ I really saw those ‘thermometer’ leaders kick in. Half our quarterbacks become thermometers. They did it when they saw that stud [defensive back] Tony Brown or that stud receiver or that big Polynesian lineman show up. ‘They have a bigger personality than me. They have more stars than me, so I’m gonna follow him.’ But David Blough, who had two stars coming into this thing on his team of thirteen studs, he owned it from the second he got into the room with them. There was no doubt who the captain of that ship was.”

The 7-on-7 passing competition had become a staple of off-season football. It was especially big on the high school summer scene, where traveling club teams had sprung up all over the country, much to the dismay of many high school coaches fearing it would have a similar influence to what AAU programs did in high school basketball. The “7-on”—tied in with Nike’s The Opening event—were new parts to the Elite 11. Nike provided plenty of colorful uniforms, while ESPNU provided more than its share of national TV exposure.

There were six teams in the tournament. Dilfer’s Elite 11 protégés, his TDFB guys, coached the teams. They had a draft to select the top eighteen quarterbacks. Even though there were no helmets or pads, the spotlight on and the trash-talking among rival blue-chippers ramped up the intensity. When one of the QBs on Blough’s team, who had struggled all week in Oregon, threw a pick-six with fifteen seconds remaining in the first half to turn a 13–0 deficit into 20–0, the kid looked crushed as he slunk back to the sideline.

Dilfer, observing the action, walked over to put his arm around the young quarterback and then yelled back to Dennis Gile, the staffer coaching the losing team.

“Let’s go, Dennis! Have some energy!” Dilfer called in a voice scratchy and hoarse after five days on the field. On the sideline, one of the defensive players on the team that was leading asked the kid next to him if Dilfer was “Stone Cold” Steve Austin.

Going into the final day at the Elite 11, Blough had dropped in the rankings from number one to number three. Another unheralded prospect, Sean White, one of the final two QBs selected for the
Elite 11, surged in the coaches’ eyes. “He’s telling the other QBs what to do; he’s making these guys better,” said former NFL QB Charlie Frye, White’s coach on the team called the Field Generals. “Just talking about him, I’m getting goosies. He had nine incompletions and five TDs, and he also had a dropped TD.”

The Field Generals began the tournament by losing their first game by almost 40 points, but that was a game White didn’t play in. Led by the Fort Lauderdale native, the Field Generals rallied to win the 7-on title after White led them on a last-minute touchdown drive for a come-from-behind 21–14 win over Team Alpha Pro. The championship carried White—who ended up committing to Auburn two weeks later, a school he didn’t have an offer from before coming to Oregon—to MVP honors of The Opening and the Elite 11.

Blough finished number six. “It was bittersweet,” he said. “I wanted to prove to myself and prove to the coaches at Purdue that they didn’t make a mistake. I was tired of being overlooked. The first two days I was killing it, and I look at that like the first half, but I slacked off toward the end, and I look at that like the fourth quarter. I’m not sure why that was. Being out in front, being the favorite, is something I had to get used to. I’d never been the favorite. My high school was always the underdog. I had to learn how to be at the front of the pack. I guess I was probably a little complacent. That won’t happen again.”

Dilfer’s advice to Blough: “Don’t you ever buy into the fact that you should live in reality. You keep living in this pretend world, because that’s where you thrive.”

“In his world, he’s the biggest, the baddest, the toughest, the strongest, the best,” Dilfer said. “I said, ‘You live there. You have to be a legend in your own mind; you don’t have to buy into this reality that you’re six feet tall and all this other stuff.’ ”