The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks (40 page)

Another reflection of the growth of Whitfield’s rep: the level of blowback he was receiving from competitors. On one of the days when he had the sixteen college QBs with him, former NFL quarterback Jeff Garcia, now a private coach, showed up at the same high school field in Del Mar to train a protégé. Whitfield moved his group over so Garcia had some field to work. Then one of Whitfield’s interns showed him snarky comments Garcia had made about him online. Whitfield grabbed the intern’s phone and took it over to Garcia, who initially backpedaled from the tweets, but then challenged Whitfield on his coaching credentials as compared to his own NFL pedigree.

“That was great,” Whitfield said. “And we cheered for you, but I don’t think you understand that this is a different realm. You know Andy Reid never played quarterback, and I know Coach Holmgren never played in the NFL, and those guys are celebrated as some of the best coaches in football.”

Garcia brought up having to share a panel once on NFL Network, where Whitfield was IDed as a “Quarterback Guru.”

“That was bullshit,” Garcia said.

“Listen, you’re gonna get everything you work for in this arena,
but you coming at me isn’t gonna help,” Whitfield said before walking back to his group.

Whitfield scheduled his spring-break QB camp in two groups that started at 8:00 a.m. in two different locations on the University of California at San Diego campus. Before Manziel and Thomas’s daily sessions started, Whitfield called on them to play guest lecturers.

“Come on in here, Leonidas,” Whitfield yelled over to Manziel as he strolled in five minutes after Thomas arrived.

“Between the two of ’em, they’ve had every experience a college quarterback could possibly have,” Whitfield said before introducing Logan Thomas and Johnny Manziel to the college quarterbacks seated on the ground in a semicircle like Cub Scouts around a campfire. “They’ve both been booed, cheered, celebrated, and written off.”

David Watford, who was actually in the same recruiting class as Manziel, asked him about the biggest change he’d made during that first time visiting Whitfield almost exactly two years earlier, which helped him win the A&M starting QB job.

“I just needed confidence,” Manziel said. “I just wasn’t happy with how my spring went. We picked one thing that I really wanted to work on, and that was keeping my left elbow tucked in so I could drive the ball harder.”

Whitfield reminded the QBs that any time they bought something—even if it was only a pack of gum—to make sure they kept the receipt to keep their school’s compliance people—and potentially the NCAA—happy. He was also candid speaking about Thomas and Manziel’s own challenges in front of them as their Pro Days approached.

“Logan’s biggest thing is consistency,” Whitfield explained, “because he was inconsistent, so it’s what he left on tape. With Johnny, some people question, ‘Can he drop, and can he drive the ball, and can he play in rhythm?’ A lot of the stuff they work on isn’t sexy enough to write cover stories on. That’s why we got the hood up and we’re working on the engine. These guys are now like racehorses three days before the Kentucky Derby. They’re agitated.”

Another one of Whitfield’s guest speakers during the week for
spring break was Trent Dilfer, who showed up on Tuesday after spending Monday in Carlsbad with Jordan Palmer, to check out his draft camp with Blake Bortles. Dilfer walked around observing the various stations Whitfield’s staff had set up for all the college QBs.

He stood, arms folded and beaming, as he watched two sets of quarterbacks throwing the ball to each other from twenty yards apart with both knees on the ground. “If you’re doing it wrong, your body’s going to fall forward, and you’ll have to catch yourself,” Dilfer yelled. Or the quarterbacks would, literally, fall on their faces.

The drill was one Dilfer had actually come up with at the end of his career after hearing his old QB coach Jim Zorn talk so much about the rotational nature of a throwing motion. Dilfer, being as big a student as he was of the golf swing, saw the correlation with what he noticed on super slo-mo video of how elite quarterbacks’ bodies moved and their “hip-shoulder disassociation.”

“When people say the feet are the most important thing, I always say they are one of the most important things if they work in conjunction with the rest,” he later said. “If you’re only talking feet, you’re ignoring what I’m seeing on film from every great passer: They have the ability to disassociate their upper half from their lower half, because you can’t guarantee your offensive line’s protection. You can’t guarantee where you can put your feet, but you can guarantee what you can do with your upper body.

“There always has been the one-knee-down drill that people have taught forever. I saw the flaw in that. That’s not how the body moves, from what I’m seeing on tape. With one knee on the ground, you still have some lower-body control. With the knee that’s up, those cleats are in the ground, and you can manipulate it. If I put my right knee down and left knee up, I can activate my left hamstring and still feel my lower half moving. With both knees on the ground, my hamstrings are completely relaxed, and I have to torque my left shoulder underneath my chin. I have to rotate my core to generate any type of speed. Not only that, my right elbow has to work backward, not up, and my left arm needs to work with it, since my left thumb is tucked underneath my Dri-FIT. It was a way of simulating the proper biomechanics when the feet aren’t involved.”

The muscular Watford, while still on his knees, asked Dilfer’s advice about a mechanical issue he’d been trying to solve for years, where his left arm—his front arm—drives down too much in his throwing motion.

“Get your shirt on,” Dilfer told him.

Dilfer’s response wasn’t about a show of respect, but rather about providing Watford with a prop for a little trick the old quarterback had taught himself. Dilfer had learned from his old mentor Jeff Tedford about how vital the left arm was in the throwing motion. Tedford, years after coaching Dilfer at Fresno, turned an underachieving Kyle Boller into a first-round pick after coming up with a contraption tying a shoestring to the strong-armed QB’s wrist up at Cal. Dilfer had developed a mechanical flaw with his own left arm. He tried Tedford’s shoestring method. He also tried using a bungee cord from his garage, but with all the surgeries he’d had on his upper body, nothing seemed to work. Then, in the mid-2000s, when Dri-FIT gear became the norm, Dilfer got the idea to stick his left thumb under the collar of his Dri-FIT shirt and realized he’d found his solution, because it kept the quarterback’s motion compact.

“This is the best thing I’ve ever done,” Dilfer said. “I started experimenting with it on kids, especially when you can put them on their knees and take their feet out of it. Your feet can make up for a lot of things. So you take their feet out of it, then you take their left arm and put it in their jersey so that it feels natural and it works. We call it being ‘matched up.’ It matches them up with their rotation. It’s the best of both worlds. I found it to be the number one of stroke mechanics—the thumb under the jersey, on their knees—because it’s teaching them the proper right/left arm synergy.”

After ten minutes of trying Dilfer’s Dri-FIT thumb trick, Watford was sold. “Now I have to get more Dri-FIT shirts,” he said.

Two hours later, Dilfer stood in front of a classroom with Whitfield to his right and each of the college quarterbacks seated in the first two rows of chairs. His speech was similar to the one he gave to his Elite 11 quarterbacks. It was about his journey and what he’d learned about quarterbacks and what each of the best ones had told him they believe is the most vital quality for success.

“The most common response I’ve gotten is confidence,” Dilfer said. “One of the reasons I’m so passionate about quarterback development—whether it’s at the grassroots level, the college level, or the NFL level—is because it’s about building the confidence muscle. The ‘secret sauce’ really is confidence, and when people say you either have ‘It’ or you don’t, the ‘It’ is really confidence.”

Dilfer told the young QBs about how he used to get “claustrophobic” when he moved up in the pocket. “I’d be thinking, ‘Oh, crap, I gotta get out of here!’ ” He credited hours and hours in the squat rack to strengthen his base, as well as hours of practicing while in traffic high in the pocket, for remedying that mind-set. But it was his entire perspective as an NFL quarterback that he said still kept him up late at night.

“The reason I invest so much time in you guys and in my coaches is because I don’t want you to go to bed at night thinking, ‘I could’ve done so much more.’

“My initials are ‘T. D.’ They should be ‘I. N. T.,’ ” Dilfer said, shaking his head, eliciting laughter from a few of the quarterbacks. “I threw 129 interceptions in the NFL. That’s a lot. Two things about that: Somehow, I kept my job throwing 129 interceptions, but I also set the NCAA record for most passes without throwing an interception—318 during my junior season. That record stood for almost twenty years. In college, my coach, Jeff Tedford, he was superpositive with me. We never talked about making mistakes. It was about having an attack posture with a conservative mentality. ‘Make good decisions! Make perfect throws!’ That’s how I was spoken to, and it translated. I was a dominant college player. I went to the NFL, and I played for really negative, conservative coaches. It was always, ‘Don’t take a sack! Don’t throw a pick! Be careful!’ It was all the negative talk. So I started talking negative with myself. So, 129 interceptions later, I’m going, ‘What happened to me?’ Positive self-talk is huge. When you start going negative, bad stuff happens.”

Before Dilfer wrapped up his forty-five-minute Q&A, he ended up talking about his mission of trying to overhaul the way quarterbacks were developed, sharing his own education about leadership
that was taught to him by a much younger teammate the season after he won a Super Bowl.

“I’m pretty sure I’m the only quarterback who won a Super Bowl, was a free agent, and was not re-signed by his team,” he said. Dilfer signed with the Seahawks late in training camp because he waited to scout out his best opportunity “to knife the guy who is supposed to be ahead of me.”

Seattle had just traded with Green Bay for Matt Hasselbeck, who had no NFL starts but had been “anointed the guy” before Dilfer was signed. The atmosphere in the QB room when Dilfer arrived “was very uncomfortable,” he said. “Matt and I had a very contentious relationship the first couple of weeks, and two weeks into it, I’m the dude. We’re back in Seattle getting ready for Week One, and he said to me, ‘You know what? I just spent three years with Brett Favre. That’s the greatest leader I’ve ever seen. He’s not the most-liked guy but the greatest leader. You’ve led this team in the two weeks that you’ve been here, and it’s been about you. It hasn’t been about anybody else. You know what Brett Favre does? He knows everybody’s name in the building. Brett Favre. He’s won three MVPs in a row.’

“Matt says, ‘I’ll follow you when you know everybody’s name in this building.’

“It was pretty profound. I had to look at myself in the mirror. I thought, ‘That dude is right. I’ve got a lot of juice. Just won the Super Bowl. I just took this guy’s job. But I wasn’t leading the guy who was in the room with me every day.’ So I went to work. I got one of the PR books. And if there wasn’t a picture of somebody, I went around and took his picture. I learned every single person’s name in that building. It was a great lesson.”

 
12.

On March 19, Merril Hoge,
a former-NFL-fullback-turned-football-commentator, dove face-first into the Johnny Manziel debate that was about to become Tim Tebow 2.0 for the football world.

“I see ‘bust’ written all over him,” Hoge said on a
SportsCenter
appearance, “especially if he’s drafted in the first round.” Hoge’s blunt comments made a splash around the Internet, and around his own network, which kept trotting out the forty-nine-year-old running back for more versions of his Manziel take that got more biting with each new visit.

“His accuracy is questionable,” Hoge said on a later show appearance. That claim actually seemed questionable, given that Manziel was the third-most-accurate passer in college football in 2013, completing 70 percent of his passes. Even ESPN’s own research data noted that Manziel completed 74 percent of his passes from the pocket in 2013, highest among all quarterbacks in major college football. Manziel also wasn’t prone to just relying on shorter passes, as several other QBs in the 2013 draft were. One out of every four passes he attempted from the pocket traveled at least 15 yards downfield, where he completed 55 percent of such throws—which was best in the SEC and more than 15 percentage points better than the norm in college football.

“I think he has a pop-gun arm,” Hoge continued. “He doesn’t translate to the National Football League. He’s clearly not a first-rounder. And, if somebody does draft him in the first round, their job is gonna be in jeopardy immediately, because he will not be able to withstand the expectations that are going to be put on him, because his skill set will not handle it.”