The Quarterback Whisperer

by Bruce Arians

  Every new season in Indy we brought in backup quarterbacks to try to beat out Kelly—Stoney Case, Billy Joe Hobert, and Steve Walsh. It wasn’t personal to Kelly; we merely wanted to challenge him. Plus, the NFL is a harsh Darwinian world. No matter how much you might like a quarterback, if you can find a better one, you sign him, because that’s for the betterment of the team. Besides, the “better ones” are pretty damn rare.

  Kelly handled every competition with class. He always helped the other quarterbacks in our meeting room and on the practice field. He was a true pro, which made me like him even more.

  Plus, I could see a little bit of myself in Kelly. He was a fighter, a scrapper, the kind of guy you want by your side in a dark alley.

  Kelly was a country kid. He grew up in Fayetteville, Tennessee, a town of about 7,000. His dad, John, played baseball in high school, and his mom, Amy, was a star basketball player in high school. Kelly inherited athletic genes.

  As his dad worked construction, Kelly would constantly be in the yard throwing a football to his mom and playing pickup games with other kids. When he was twelve the family moved to a farm three miles outside of town. Kelly took up hunting; he bagged his first ten-point buck before he was even a teenager.

  In sixth grade Kelly announced to his father that he wanted to go out for football. His dad was skeptical. Kelly was rail thin, and his father didn’t know if he could survive a season. Plus, his dad feared that after his son took a few big licks, he’d lose his desire to play the game. So he told Kelly what I told my son, Jake: “If you start the season, you play the entire season, no matter what. You’re not going to quit.”

  Kelly agreed. “Dad,” he said, “I’ll never quit. I promise.”

  And so began his football career. He was a tireless worker. After school he’d come and convince his mom to play catch with him. For hours on end, the two of them would toss the ball back and forth. Amy eventually had to bow out of these backyard games; her son was gunning the ball so hard it was breaking her fingernails.

  By the time Kelly was in high school he was on the baseball team and could throw a 90-plus-MPH fastball. He was an all-conference pitcher and shortstop. But then he fell in love with football, and that became his top priority. He tied an old rubber tire to a rafter in their barn and threw footballs at that tire for hours on end, minutely adjusting his grip, changing his arm motion, differing the velocity of the ball. He couldn’t get enough of learning how to spin a tight spiral through a small space.

  In his junior year the starting quarterback went down with an injury. Kelly trotted onto the field. The team had been running the option, but the head coach started calling passing plays for Kelly, who then weighed all of 155 pounds. He proceeded to light up defenses the rest of the season. As a high school senior, he led his team to a 15–0 record and a state championship.

  But it was off the field where Kelly really shined. One time, the team’s starting tight end wanted to skip practice to spend time with his girlfriend. This didn’t sit well with Kelly. He confronted the bigger player. Kelly ended up with a cut on his chin, but the tight end scrapped his plans with his girl and instead went to practice. This is what leadership looks like.

  I knew all of this about Kelly the day I met him, which made me inclined to like him. He had flourished in multiple sports in high school—a key ingredient for future NFL success—and was country tough and back-alley smart.

  He desperately wanted to play for Alabama, but the Tide coaches looked at his skinny six-foot frame—as a high school senior he couldn’t have weighed more than 170 pounds—and didn’t offer him a full ride. So he signed with Middle Tennessee State. In his first scrimmage he was knocked silly by a truck of a linebacker, but only minutes later he begged his head coach to go back onto the field. In his sophomore year a defender crushed him in an early game and he played most of his season with his jaw wired shut. Heck, he could barely talk and had to drink milkshakes for his meals—but he kept playing. The kid was a fighter. He had grit.

  Kelly went undrafted in 1995, but signed as a free agent with Tampa Bay. He was cut. He eventually landed a job at Anheuser-Busch, where he helped build a boat dock for a brewery. But he wasn’t ready for a nine-to-five lifestyle. So in 1996 he played in the World League for the Barcelona Dragons. He played well enough to earn a shot with the Colts, and he made the team. He was a player I could work with.

  We had signed him with the Browns in March 2001. I knew, given the right circumstances, that Kelly could succeed in the NFL. At first he was our backup. I wanted him in the quarterbacks’ room because he knew my system. He spent hours working with our starter, Tim Couch, poring over the playbook and teaching Tim the intricacies of my offense. He embraced his role and helped Tim play the best football of his NFL career.

  But then when Tim went down late in the 2002–03 season, Kelly was ready for prime time. On January 5, 2003, on that snowy afternoon in Pittsburgh in the first round of the playoffs, this journeyman quarterback was transformed into a veritable Hall of Famer—all because he had spent years preparing for the moment. For sixty minutes of action, hell, he looked like the second coming of Otto Graham.

  I had been in this kind of situation before.

  In the spring of 1978, I was the passing game coordinator at Mississippi State. I spent spring practice searching for a starting quarterback. But all the signal callers I had on the roster really struggled. I feared we wouldn’t win a single game in the SEC. And if that happened, I knew what it meant—my fledgling coaching career might be over. I was twenty-five and had a young family to provide for—Jake was in diapers. Shit, we were living in a dorm room. I was desperate.

  Then, one afternoon in the sticky spring heat, I saw our kicker, Dave Marler, pick up a ball on the practice field. He threw a pass to another player. That sounds like a simple act, but I was immediately transfixed. The ball flew out of his arm in a gorgeous spiral, and he looked far more natural throwing that pass than any of the quarterbacks I had been teaching.

  Marler was listed as our fifth-string quarterback and I admit I hadn’t been paying much attention to him. Then one Saturday we held a scrimmage. We couldn’t make a first down on offense. I was extremely frustrated and was silently wondering just how long this season was going to be. Then I remembered seeing Marler throw that pass. I asked the other coaches to put him into the scrimmage and line him up behind center.

  They thought I was nuts until Dave uncorked his first ball—a tight spiral that hit the receiver in stride. Even though he was our starting kicker, Dave led us down the field on his first possession and we scored. Then he did it again. Suddenly I’m thinking to myself, We’ve got something to work with here.

  But it wasn’t just that he had a beautiful throwing stroke; it was clear that he could read the defense, he could process the needed information, and by God he knew what to do with that information. Over and over during the scrimmage, he threw the ball to the correct receiver based on the coverage the defense played.

  Plus, Dave was hungry and had an edge to him—two characteristics I love in quarterbacks. He grew up in central Mississippi and as a boy dreamed of one thing—playing quarterback for the Mississippi State Bulldogs in Starkville.

  But head coach Bob Tyler didn’t offer Dave a scholarship. Tyler didn’t believe he had the physical attributes to be a successful SEC quarterback. So Dave headed to Mississippi College in Clinton, a small Division II school at the time. He played quarterback and was the team’s first-string kicker. But he never relinquished his dream. After two years, he transferred to Mississippi State to be the Bulldogs’ kicker.

  I didn’t really even know who he was until that day in spring practice when I saw him throw that innocuous pass on the practice field. But then I dug into his background and quickly realized he had one of the skills I demand out of my quarterbacks: desire—abundant desire. When a quarterback has that, you know you have something to work with. So I had my lump of clay. Now I just needed to sculpt it on the potter�
��s wheel.

  Even though I was relatively new to coaching—shoot, I was only four years older than Dave—I had done that once before. In my first year as a graduate assistant at Virginia Tech my primary task was to transform Phil Rogers, who had been our leading rusher when I was a senior, into a wishbone quarterback.

  I spent hours with Phil studying the playbook and analyzing opposing defenses. I tutored him on simple things like how to get his teammates lined up, how to voice his cadence at the line of scrimmage, and how to properly receive the snap. I worked endlessly on refining his throwing motion and his footwork. Running our wishbone attack, Phil wasn’t always the prettiest quarterback to watch, but he did lead us to an 8–3 record. He wound up rushing for 762 yards and passing for 379. It wasn’t easy, but we made a quarterback of him.

  Now I tried to do the same thing with Dave Marler—the second quarterback project of my career—at Mississippi State. We started, as always, with the fundamentals. In one drill I stood ten yards behind the goalpost and Dave stood ten yards in front of it. I wanted him to throw the ball over the ten-foot-high crossbar so that it would hit me squarely in the chest. He needed to thread the ball as close to the post as possible without hitting it.

  At first, Dave struggled. He’d overthrow me or the ball would sail underneath the post. But we kept at it for about two weeks, a hundred throws a day. Pass by pass, he improved. My goal for him was to perfect his throwing motion and increase both his arm strength and his accuracy. The ten-foot-high crossbar is an important marker; it replicates how high a quarterback will need to throw the ball, with velocity, to get it over leaping defensive linemen and linebackers who drop back into coverage, but in front of the safeties.

  At the same time that we performed these drills, I taught Dave how to read SEC defenses. So much of this aspect of the game falls on the quarterback and his desire to learn. This is why a coach always wants a quarterback who has something to prove—who believes he has somehow been wronged—because he is typically going to want to do everything in his power to succeed. And Dave was an ideal student; first, he absorbed everything I said; and then at night, alone in his dorm room, he’d stay up at his desk with his head bowed under a circle of lamplight and he’d review everything we had discussed as if he was cramming for the most important final exam of his life. This is another example of grit.

  We opened the season against West Texas A&M in Jackson, Mississippi. The coaching staff kept everything simple for Dave; the last thing we wanted was for him to overthink on the field and suffer paralysis by analysis, a common malady for young quarterbacks. We pared down the playbook and Dave was terrific, leading us to a 28–0 win.

  The next week we traveled to North Texas State. We again employed a rudimentary game plan and Dave thrived in our bare-bones offensive system. We won 17–5. Fourteen days later, with Dave becoming more confident and more comfortable behind center, we expanded our repertoire of offensive plays against Memphis State. We cruised to a 44–14 victory. Dave—our kicker, our former fifth-string quarterback—now led the SEC in several passing categories.

  To nurture Dave’s growing confidence, I began telling him every day, “Dave, you’re the best quarterback in the SEC. You’re the best damn quarterback in the league!” Everyone in life needs reassurance, but quarterbacks especially so. You want to eliminate all doubt in the quarterback’s mind. In late October we beat Tennessee 34–21 at the Liberty Bowl in Memphis. The following week we bused to Birmingham, Alabama, to face the third-ranked Crimson Tide and their legendary coach Bear Bryant at Legion Field. This, we knew, was going to be our biggest challenge of the season.

  We anticipated the Alabama defense playing what’s called a “zero coverage blitz.” We figured they would blitz us virtually every play, sending one more guy than we could block. But this also meant that they were covering each of our wide receivers man-to-man with only one defensive back. So if our quarterback had time to throw, our receiver should in theory be able to beat his guy and get open.

  How could we exploit this? We practiced the single-wing shotgun—the quarterback lined up seven yards behind center, usually with a fullback and tailback set off to his left and a wingback to his right—with four basic quick-pass patterns; the idea was to throw it before the extra defender reached Dave. We felt great about this old-school attack that was the precursor to the modern spread formation and that that no one in the country was running. We were, it turns out, ahead of our time.

  During pregame warm-ups when Dave was kicking he felt a pop in his right thigh. He limped over to me and with a determined look and forceful words in his voice, said, “Coach, I can stand still and throw it.” I found out minutes later from our trainer that Dave had partially torn a muscle, but the trainer said he could play… if Dave could withstand the pain.

  Dave promised me he could. I then told him to act like nothing was wrong; I didn’t want to tip off Alabama that our quarterback could barely run. Minutes before kickoff he hobbled into the locker room, where the trainers quickly wrapped his leg. He returned and entered the game shortly after the start of the first quarter, but he was sacked on his first possession and aggravated the injury. Now he could barely walk. I’m up in the press box and it’s obvious to me—and to everyone in the stadium—that our starting quarterback has about as much mobility as my one-year-old.

  One of the cardinal rules of coaching is never panic. Never.

  Don’t get me wrong: We were prepared for the zero blitz—as long as Dave could stand back there and throw. But now we had to run our entire offense, not just the pass plays, out of the shotgun. Of course, we didn’t have time to go over this. So now we just used the four quick passes we worked on in practice.

  Meantime, up in the press box, I’m feverishly drawing the rest of the plays on loose pieces of paper. I must have sketched out fifteen running and passing plays that we now needed to run out of the shotgun. In the locker room at halftime I gathered the offense and went over the different plays I had just jotted down. I’m talking a blue streak, telling everyone our plan for the final thirty minutes of the game. I was coaching by the seat of my pants, but looking back, that probably was the most fun I ever had in a game.

  We came out in the second half and Dave was brilliant, picking apart the Crimson Tide with surgical precision. Against one of the best defenses in the nation, our immobile kicker-turned-passer threw for a school record 429 yards, the most Alabama gave up through the air all season. We lost 35–14, but I must have made some type of impression on Bear Bryant. He hired me a little more than two years later.

  Dave ended up leading the SEC that season in ten different offensive categories, and we set forty-seven school records and fifteen conference records on offense. And our starting kicker was named All-SEC quarterback. Dave broke Steve Spurrier’s record for consecutive completions with seventeen straight, and he even passed Archie Manning on the SEC’s all-time single-season total offense list. Dave took his confidence and the skills he learned at Mississippi State and ended up playing five years in the CFL.

  Did I sprinkle pixie dust on Dave? Absolutely not. He had all that potential inside him, and he was willing—indeed, downright determined—to bust his tail to bring it out. I was just his coach who helped him fulfill a different and fuller potential.

  The playoff game on January 5, 2003, against the Steelers had a midafternoon kickoff. As the offensive coordinator for the Browns, I always met with my quarterbacks the night before the game. The evening before we faced the Steelers, we went over the game plan—as we always did—and I let Kelly Holcomb select his favorite plays, which I then worked into our script of thirty opening plays.

  Some TV analysts will say that it’s always good to start the game with an easy throw—such as a wide receiver screen—to give quarterback confidence. I don’t buy that. I want my quarterback to execute his favorite plays early in the game, no matter how difficult the throws may be. If it’s a bomb, then we’re calling a bomb on the first play. If it’s
a play-action pass, then we’re calling that. The idea is to make your quarterback comfortable, and the best way to do that is to run his favorite plays. You want to get your QB into an early rhythm. Throwing a little screen pass on the first play doesn’t do that.

  We had already played Pittsburgh twice, and they had beaten us by three points each matchup. So Kelly knew precisely what he was going up against. He understood that the Steeler cornerbacks consistently bit on double moves by our wide receivers. So we believed we would have plenty of chances to beat them on deep throws. This was one reason why I was so excited about this game; we were going to sling the ball all over the field and play the kind of wide-open football that I love the most—the kind of game that Dave Marler and I had played against Alabama a quarter century earlier.

  Kelly and I also were in tune with the body language of the Steelers defense. For instance, we knew that when linebacker Jason Gildon lined up with his feet facing directly at the quarterback he was going to blitz. And when his feet were pointed in a different direction it meant he would drop into coverage and the blitz would come from the other side of the field. So at the line of scrimmage, Kelly would read Gildon’s feet and either switch the protection to the opposite side or keep the play as we had called it.

  We won the coin toss and elected to receive—we wanted to show the Steelers that we were confident we could move the ball against their defense, even though we were underdogs. To put it more plainly, we wanted to go after them. In the opening minute, I called a deep pass to wide receiver Kevin Johnson. As we had predicted in our meeting, the Pittsburgh corner bit on Johnson’s double move and Kelly delivered a beautiful ball into his arms. The pass went for 83 yards and set up a short touchdown run by William Green. With snow falling from the cold midwestern sky, we were up 7–0 only minutes after the last notes of the national anthem had been belted out.