The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks (35 page)

Thomas knew it was going to be a long process but felt he was ready for it.

“I think this is gonna help me a great deal,” he said of his draft prep. “I think it’s knowing what I’m getting myself into. I’ve learned a lot from Coach Kevin and George, and now I get to prove myself. You play the game to compete against the very best, and I’m extremely excited for this.”

O
’
CONNELL AND WHITFIELD
,
WITH
the help of Twitter, monitored the buzz from Mobile like nervous parents. As expected, Thomas left jaws on the floor when NFL personnel people eyeballed him. His hand size, measured at 10¾″, dwarfed that of the other five quarterbacks playing in the game. Only Miami’s Stephen Morris [10⅛″] was even bigger than 9½″.

The reactions from the week’s Senior Bowl practices, which matter more to NFL scouts than the actual game, were tougher to get a handle on.
CBSSports.com
NFL Draft analyst Dane Brugler said of Thomas: “We’ll often hear this draft season that Thomas has ‘what can’t be taught’ when referring to his physical attributes, but can touch and accuracy be taught? It can be tweaked and improved from a mechanical standpoint, but from his performances the past two days, along with three years of game film, it’s tough to see the upside with Thomas. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Virginia Tech quarterback ends up hearing his name called on the second day of the draft. But a team that drafts him that high is living on a hope and a prayer—similar to many of Thomas’s throws this week.”

NFL.com
’s Bucky Brooks, a former pro scout, wrote that Thomas “delivered the ball with excellent velocity and zip in drills and looked like a confident passer from the pocket …[and] flashed timing and anticipation on a handful of throws in 7-on-7 that showcased his potential as a passer in a pro-style offense.”

Thomas’s performance in the game was underwhelming. Even though he completed four of five pass attempts, it was for just 17 yards. He also was sacked five times. Perhaps the moment O’Connell cringed the most was when he heard Thomas’s response to the question, “What if I asked you to play tight end?”

Thomas’s reply, according to
The MMQB:
“I would disregard y’all right off the top.”

WHITFIELD LOST OUT IN
the competition to train Bridgewater (he opted to work with Weinke at the IMG facility), but the coach did get a visit from his mentor in late January when Cam Cameron came down to Carlsbad while on a West Coast recruiting trip. The crop of high school junior quarterbacks—the Class of 2015—was being touted as Southern California’s best group ever, and Cameron, the LSU offensive coordinator, had a few prospects he’d heard great things about. He was also curious to see what new drills Whitfield had come up with.

One of Whitfield’s newer drills, he called “the Creator,” where he had different defensive linemen come free, piercing the pocket, forcing the quarterback to evade pressure while keeping his eyes downfield. He’d come up with the drill a year earlier to help Oklahoma QB Landry Jones improve his pocket presence and “get used to creating operational space.” The premise: Very few times will all five offensive linemen hold their blocks. Often in team practices, coaches blow the whistle whenever a defender gets close to the quarterback.

“I’m trying to train a second set of instincts,” Whitfield said. “It’s like when you push racehorses into a starting gate. Sometimes, they don’t wanna go.” It was often like that with Manziel, as the drill showed. Whitfield watched Manziel give in to his natural instincts and step in between two linemen as if he was ready to bolt.

“No, no, no,” Whitfield said. “There is no escape route! Only adjustments. This is not an escape.”

“I could if I wanted to,” Manziel said with a mischievous grin as he scooted backward with the ball while still spying downfield.

“I know you could,” Whitfield said.

Cameron chuckled as much at the ingenuity of his protégé as at Manziel’s daring spirit. Whitfield viewed the fifty-three-year-old Cameron as a guest professor, often relying on him for feedback on the drills he cooked up.

“You can get lost in making up drills sometimes,” Whitfield later said. “You can come up with something that looks good but then realize it can have zero correlation to the game, and if that’s so, then you gotta ditch it.”

Cameron’s suggestion for the Creator drill: to incorporate another aspect of Whitfield drills—using numbered flash cards while standing at the middle linebacker spot to force the QBs to focus downfield and make “reads.” Another Cameron idea: have the quarterbacks wear helmets and shoulder pads for drills, which would be more similar to game situations.

It also didn’t take Cameron long to home in on one of Whitfield’s points of emphasis for draft camp with Manziel, getting him to try to drive the ball more. “It’s kind of a shotgun problem,” Whitfield surmised. From all his time around the Heisman winner and studying his every move, Whitfield was convinced Manziel’s penchant for getting up on his toes wasn’t so much for combating his lack of height but responding to the quarterback’s own supersized adrenaline reservoir.

“Tell him to put his back foot flatter on the ground,” Cameron said. Playing almost exclusively from the shotgun, as Manziel has, can make a quarterback “toes-y,” as Cameron put it.

Two drills into the workout and Cameron became more involved as Manziel began “routes on air.” Cameron, a former quarterback under Lee Corso and a point guard for Bob Knight at Indiana, walked up to a receiver lined up in the slot and got so close, the wideout could tell whether the coach had used paste or gel to brush his teeth that morning.

That perception is one of the biggest adjustments college quarterbacks must make if they hope to succeed in the NFL. It’s something Cameron spent plenty of time preaching to his first QB at LSU, Zach Mettenberger, a 6′5″ guy with prototype size and arm strength but who had been underwhelming and unfocused till the longtime NFL coach arrived before the 2013 season. Before Cameron, Mettenberger had just a 12–7 TD-INT ratio and took 32 sacks. With him, his TD-INT ratio was improved to 22–8, and he was sacked 11 fewer times and averaged 3 full yards more per pass attempt, a significant jump. An NFL caveat his old boss Marty Schottenheimer always said: “In times of crisis, think players, not plays,” which resonated with O’Connell, who said he picked up that adage from onetime Jets offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer, Marty’s son.

“It’s funny, some guys are just so blackboard-oriented,” Cameron told me, pointing out how his QB had to be prodded into noticing who the players were running the routes, whether they were stars or subs. “It took Mettenberger a bit, to where I’d say, ‘Zach, that’s Jarvis Landry there, and you’re skipping over Jarvis Landry for who?’ To me, you have to be a basketball-mind-set guy. It’s all about matchups, and then the blackboard stuff.”

Landry’s production in crunch time certainly supported Cameron’s faith. In 2013, LSU threw 35 passes on third downs in the direction of Landry; 80 percent of those passes he turned into first downs.

In his days as the Baltimore Ravens’ offensive coordinator, Cameron said he had to coax Joe Flacco to throw the ball more to veteran Anquan Boldin. “Joe would say, ‘Cam, there’s no separation.’ I said, ‘There doesn’t have to be. It’s Anquan. Just throw it in there. If you’re waiting for him to get separation, you’re gonna be waiting a while, but Anquan doesn’t need separation. He just needs one-on-one.’ ”

Cameron had gotten a peek at Johnny Manziel three months earlier, when Texas A&M visited LSU. It was rainy and cold, and the Tigers dominated on both sides of the ball, winning 34–10. Manziel completed just 39 percent of his passes, going 16 of 41. It was the only time all season he completed less than 67 percent of his passes in a game. Cameron credits head coach Les Miles for taking star wide receiver/punt
returner Odell Beckham Jr., the best athlete on the team, and putting him on the scout-team offense as quarterback to mimic Manziel to ready the Tiger D. “We also held the ball for over forty minutes in the game,” he said. “We were an up-tempo team but had a plan to trim nine seconds off of every play. We just did the math.”

Observing Manziel in person in Carlsbad, Cameron was reminded of his former quarterback Drew Brees, whom he coached with the San Diego Chargers, noting the Texan’s oversize hands, athleticism, and demeanor.

“Drew had a presence,” Cameron said. “He wasn’t little to me. Hand size makes you weatherproof. I watched as the season went on how certain quarterbacks changed as the weather changed. They weren’t the same. And you gotta be weatherproof in that league.

“Those are the nimblest big feet I think I’ve seen,” Cameron said, watching Manziel’s size 15s dashing all over the field, shifting the coach’s train of thought. “With quarterbacks, you don’t take anybody’s word for it. You listen, but you gotta go form your own conclusion. Now I know why [Saints coach] Sean Peyton was at our game. Drew can dunk a basketball, could’ve been a world class tennis player, is a scratch golfer. He doesn’t have this speed, though, but he does have great escapability. They’re different, but they’re similar. As everybody knows, for every quarterback the NFL has hit on, they’ve missed on ten. Then, if everybody’s in line [as in front office and the coaching staff], that’s the key.”

Cameron had long thought the skepticism about a quarterback’s height was overblown in the NFL. As a college head coach at Indiana from 1998 to 2001, his offense was led by one of the most dynamic dual-threat quarterbacks in college football history, Antwaan Randle El, a 5′10″, 185-pounder who won Big Ten MVP honors in 2001. Cameron wasn’t surprised that Randle El threw a perfect pass on a 43-yard, double-reverse touchdown play to Hines Ward in Super Bowl XL to clinch the game for the Steelers. “Not many guys can come in cold, sprint, and still throw that ball right on the money,” said Cameron.

“He could’ve been a quarterback in the NFL, but very seldom are you going to have a GM, head coach, offensive coordinator, and
a QB coach who’ll all be on the same page to give a guy like that an opportunity. And you all have to be on the same page if you go that route. He had tremendous accuracy and as strong an arm as I’ve ever been around. We were going to draft him in San Diego to be our third quarterback and as a receiver, punt returner, but then Pittsburgh took him.”

What’s imperative for Cameron is to find out how resourceful—and resilient—his quarterback is, something he tries to discern almost on a daily basis at practice.

“I want to blitz them every single down from the day they walk in,” Cameron said. “So many people say, ‘Cam, you can’t do that. You’ll destroy the kid.’ Well, if you drafted the right guy, you want them to get in the right mind-set as quickly as you can. I remember the day Philip [Rivers] threw four interceptions in, like, six throws in the two-minute drill. Marty [Schottenheimer] said, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ ”

“I said, ‘Coach, we’ll know by tomorrow whether we drafted the right guy.’ Philip came out the next day and lit it up. To me, you have to get a young quarterback coming into the league to fail as quickly as possible, and hopefully in practice or in a pre-season game, so you can start digging ’em through all the stuff they need to go through. Everybody wants to see what this guy is made of. I’ve seen too many guys try to protect their pick. The reason Flacco had so much success is because of [former Ravens defensive coordinator] Rex [Ryan]. He came to me one day early on and said, ‘If we’re blitzing too much, let us know.’

“I said, ‘We need you to blitz more. We gotta get this guy to grow quickly.’ He couldn’t believe it. He said, ‘That’s awesome.’ We went to the AFC title game. Same thing at LSU. I want [defensive coordinator John Chavis] Chief to blitz us every single down. And I like when the QB gets hit in practice. I don’t want him hurt, but I want him scuffed up, because it’s not 7-on-7.”

Cameron said evaluators get “fooled” by a lot of the videotape they study on quarterbacks. “You’re trying to find out, who is this guy?” Cameron said. “Go get all the away games. Look at all of those ones where they’re close by seven points one way or the other in the
fourth quarter. Study them. You’ll be amazed at how many guys come apart at the seams and the others who have the magic. That’s the closest thing that translates to the NFL, because you can’t hear [due to the crowd noise], and everything you do matters. Then, take all their red-zone throws and all the third-down throws, because everything other than that can fool you.”

In 2007, when Cameron was the head coach of the Miami Dolphins, many draft analysts speculated that he would use the number nine pick on Notre Dame quarterback Brady Quinn, an All-American. Cameron wouldn’t touch him. “When you looked at that criteria, he was awful.”

Quinn fell to the number twenty-two pick of the first round. He then bounced around to six teams in seven years and was out of the NFL before he was thirty.

A FIVE
-
MINUTE DRIVE AWAY
from Whitfield draft camp headquarters in Carlsbad was a cutting-edge training center. To enter, you went through an enormous metal and glass gravity-hinge door wide enough for an eighteen-wheeler to roll through. The door somehow was balanced in a technological way such that an eight-year-old could pull it open. This was the entrance to the EXOS training facility, where Dilfer’s TDFB protégé, Jordan Palmer, the Chicago Bears’ backup quarterback, ran his draft camp. EXOS, which used to be known as Athletes’ Performance, has six locations around the country.

Palmer trained three draft hopeful QBs: Washington’s Keith Price, Wyoming’s Brett Smith, and UCF’s Blake Bortles. Smith and Price actually put up gaudier stats in their college careers, but it was the 6′5″, 235-pound Bortles who had the NFL scouting world buzzing.

At five minutes past 8:00 a.m. on the last Thursday in January, Palmer scribbled plays on a glass wall inside the EXOS facility. Price and Smith scarfed down eggs and sausage on the foam plates they had brought over from the Residence Inn across the street where the quarterbacks were staying. The twenty-nine-year-old Palmer harped on details, preaching to them about drawing arrows at the ends of their
lines on the routes they drew for NFL personnel people or tweaking Price’s verbiage. “Don’t say, ‘Then, I’m gonna hop back for depth.’ Say, ‘Then, I’m going to re-set for depth.’