The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks

by Feldman, Bruce

  House also examined Tebow’s diet and determined that the QB was taking in too much protein and didn’t have enough balance. House wanted to make his body more “quarterback specific, so he doesn’t look so much like a linebacker anymore.”

  For his entire life, Tebow’s will had been seen as his greatest attribute. It was celebrated in many features written about him. In truth, House believed, it also had been a detriment.

  “He probably has been in muscle failure most of his adult life,” House said. “We talked about prepare, compete, and repair. You’re more efficient when your body repairs before you start asking things of it.” It took a good six weeks before Tebow’s body got acclimated. They eventually gave him Wednesdays off to recover.

  House picked up on what a “pleaser” Tebow was. House and Dedeaux would tease Tebow sometimes; they’d whisper gibberish to each other out of the quarterback’s earshot.

  “Hey, what are you guys saying?” Tebow would ask. House and Dedeaux would laugh.

  “Feedback is huge for him,” House said. “But he doesn’t like bullshit.”

  House dismissed a lot of reasons why people said Tebow struggled, from being too stiff in his neck and shoulders to a penchant for over-striding. “There is no such thing as over-striding, but there is something about not having the right timing in the foot stride,” he said. “Guys like Brady and Carson Palmer have much bigger strides than Tebow, but they had better timing with those strides. When we start teaching, we look at timing first, then kinematic sequencing, and then the mechanics of the throw. So if you’re not timed right, no matter how good you are with the mechanics, it’s gonna look weird. It’s called the step-wise regression analysis.

  “All of the stuff that they’d criticized him about—there was actually no basis for them to criticize him. The only thing that held true was that he was not accurate. He knew that. [Bill] Parcells knew it. Everybody knew that.”

  TEBOW WAS THE FIRST high-profile product of House’s new 3DQB business, which launched in the summer of 2013 to help leverage the momentum the former Major Leaguer had in the QB-development world. House admitted he didn’t know much about the quarterback-coaching space as a business, but Adam Dedeaux did.

  “I’m not much of a marketer,” House said. “He is. He’s helped me in how to market and how to relate to this current generation of athletes.

  “There are some really good quarterbacks coaches out there, like the Whitfields, but nobody teaches the throwers, the rotational athletes, like we do.”

  House was mentoring Dedeaux just as the kid’s grandfather once mentored him when he was a USC pitcher back in the ’60s. One of House’s mantras—Fail Fast Forward—about athletes not being afraid to fail, was something he’d learned from the legendary Trojan coach. In addition to the work they were doing on the USC campus, 3DQB also was branching out into the youth-camp model, which former NFL quarterback John Beck, the other member of the business, was shepherding. They had already done camps in Boston and Utah, and had another one lined up in Arizona in the spring.

  “John’s helping build a camp model for us, so we can reach more kids, because there’s only so many hours in the day,” said Dedeaux.

  House wanted to throttle down his pace by the time he was seventy and have Dedeaux become the face of 3DQB, he said. That way, he could do more research; House had noticed that things had only gotten more hectic for him in the past year than ever before.

  He was at USC every day during the week and then traveled to give similar lectures on weekends. “I just did a golf thing at Ojai Country Club for twenty-five seniors like myself,” he said. House mostly stayed in a condo across the street from the Staples Center at L.A. LIVE, a ten-minute drive from USC. He had gotten a nice home on the beach down in Del Mar but lamented that he only got to live in it about two or three days a month.

  “I’m surprised how quickly it’s grown,” House said of his business. “I was happy with three or four guys, and now we have fifteen to twenty. It’s cool, because we don’t advertise. It’s all word of mouth. We’ve only been pushing [the quarterback business] hard for about a year. I was dabbling in it for fourteen to fifteen years, but it’s become a real business with Adam and John.

  “Our biggest wish is to be too busy, and our biggest nightmare is to be too busy to deliver a product. I think we’re on overload right now. Adam wants size. We’re not gonna be a babysitting group, though. I’m not gonna do large numbers. But the most important [thing] to me is that when someone leaves here, they’re better.”

  THE “FIXING” OF TIM Tebow, the quarterback, would take some three months. House’s diagnosis of why Tebow was inaccurate all came back to timing issues with his body. Once they could get his body in sync, the mechanics were actually pretty easy to fix, the former Major League pitcher said. “He still does what he’s always done with his throwing arm. We just fixed the front side and gave him a better posture to do it and made him time it better.” Beyond that, House said Tebow learned why he would misfire whenever he did, which “The Professor” said was vital for anyone to be at their best.

  “We allowed him to understand why the ball goes right or left, why the ball goes high or low and how to spin the ball and how to physically prepare from feet to fingertips and to take it out and make the dynamic movement work for you and not against you. Does the term ‘muscle-head’ make sense? He muscled everything. He can muscle it when he needs it, but now he’s got kinematic sequencing. He’s muscled down for efficiency.”

  Another underlying problem that tied into Tebow’s issues in the NFL that House IDed: the former All-American quarterback had no confidence in his throwing ability.

  “He didn’t think he could make that throw, so he went to what he was confident in, and that was his legs.”

  Dedeaux added that Tebow was particularly flummoxed by timing routes: “If he’s supposed to hit a corner, and he thinks, ‘Well, maybe I can hit or maybe not, or I can just roll out and let everything become chaotic, and then I’ll find somebody.’ That’s where he found his strength to be.”

  “He’s gone from chaos to total repeatability,” House proudly interjected. “If I had never seen him throw before, and then I watched him throw on Tuesday in the Coliseum, I’d say he was right up there with the guys we work with. Is he quite at the level of Drew Brees, Brady? No, but it’s pretty frickin’ good. He can make all the throws now.

  “It’s a numbers game. You saw Malcolm Gladwell’s book that it takes ten thousand hours for mastery? He’s getting close.

  “You can be the tough guy here,” House said, turning to Dedeaux. “How much better is his accuracy than when he first showed up?”

  DEDEAUX: It’s a lot better. He knows how to throw now. If he was playing a game of catch, and he was 65 percent, the deviations have gotten much smaller.

  HOUSE: The problem with identification is half the solution. When he misses high, he knows why. When he misses right or left, he knows why. Without stepping on anybody’s toes, I think quarterbacks get less help than pitchers. I don’t think they get much help at all. They either perform, or they don’t. And if they’re not performing, next!”

  When told that they were not the first people to work with Tim Tebow and pronounce the big QB “fixed,” Dedeaux nodded. “That’s why I’m a little bit more conservative.”

  HOUSE: I’m not. I’m not. We know for a fact that if you block-train X amount of reps, and you random-train X amount of reps, and if you put those two together with skill training, and you can get predictable consistency out of the skill training, he’s fixed. He’s fixed! Because he already has the ‘It’ stuff. His asshole’s not gonna slam shut when he goes between the lines.

  “What we don’t wanna do is send him off, telling everybody he’s fixed, and have him poop the bed. But he’s not gonna poop the bed. He knows why he’s screwing up, and he can tell you why. I think he’s ready to go play right now. If we could get him into a system he’s comfortable with, he could go play now.�
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  DEDEAUX: He will definitely be better. Right off the bat, what’s his biggest flaw? Completion percentage. As we got to know him, we saw that he looked deep and then would check down. Maybe he saw those checkdowns but just wasn’t confident enough to make those throws. He just wasn’t, so he wouldn’t make them. He’d roll out or run.

  HOUSE: Why’s he more confident now? Because he knows what, why, and how. The best players in the world aren’t always really the best players. If you’ve done your homework, and you’ve done everything you can possibly do, then you’re confident that your process gives you a better chance to succeed—so all those pieces are [now] fitting for him.

  DEDEAUX: The only thing we haven’t been able to simulate is a defense with rushers, which is a big piece. And that is my only worry: when he’s thrown into the fire, does it hold up?

  That, of course, was a big piece. The knock from NFL coaches and personnel people on Tebow, beyond doubts about his accuracy, was that he struggled to read defenses and process what was in front of him at warp speed the way top NFL QBs need to.

  House dismissed that skepticism. “He’s already proved it,” he told me. “He couldn’t throw accurately, and he still won in the NFL.

  “It’s going to take someone who understands that kids can get better and understands that the entourage that comes with Tim Tebow, if managed properly by the front office, is not an issue at all. Belichick proved that already. There’ll be a perfect spot for Tim. I just hope it happens sooner rather than later.

  “I’d like to call some of my contacts in football to say he’s ready.”

  These were uncharted waters for House. His other famous football protégés were more established in their NFL careers. Tebow, to many people, had become a punch line, and that made House play the advocate’s role.

  “He’s a pretty special kid,” House said. “I’m not gonna lie. I was looking for holes in the program, but he’s everything he appears to be.”

  One month later—and about a week after ESPN announced that Tebow was joining the company for its SEC Network as a college-football analyst—Trent Dilfer flew to Los Angeles to work Tebow out for a five-minute TV segment on ESPN’s Sunday NFL Countdown.

  Dilfer introduced the piece by saying he had received a call from Tebow asking for a “brutally honest evaluation of where he’s at.” Dilfer, wearing his Elite 11 baseball hat and pullover, ran Tebow through a workout similar to that of any other quarterback he trained. In the segment, Dilfer made it clear that it was House—identified as the “3DQB Performance Analyst”—who had been overhauling Tebow for the past four months. The video showed Tebow, in a red, sweat-soaked T-shirt with the words I AM SET FREE on the front, going through many of the exercises that are staples of House’s regimen. There was the quarterback with his hands extended above his head, dribbling in unison two grapefruit-sized balls against a cinder-block wall, as well as Tebow snapping a towel against a football held up to mirror the top of his release point in a variation of a drill House picked up in Japan. House at one point compared Tebow to Nolan Ryan for having the “same motivational muscle.”

  “I don’t have all the answers,” Dilfer said on camera, coming out of the segment. “I do know this. If you put Tim Tebow on a football field right now with four other NFL quarterbacks, [and] you didn’t know who they were, and [you] just watched the ball, you wouldn’t know which one was Tim Tebow and which ones were the NFL quarterbacks.

  “I want you to watch this in context. This is one of the greatest players who ever played college football, and he didn’t know how to pass. I believe that now he knows how to pass. Every GM, every scout, every personnel person out there should go at least watch Tim Tebow now, because he’s a different guy.”

  Weeks later, in Indianapolis at the NFL Combine, the reaction from coaches and personnel people to claims of a Tebow transformation was a collective shrug. “The problem isn’t really his arm,” said one veteran NFL defensive coach about Tebow. “It’s that he’s not wired to process what he’s seeing once the ball is snapped, and if you don’t have that, you simply can’t be a quarterback in this league.”

  Told of the skepticism, Dilfer nodded. “I think that’s fair, based on his track record in the NFL,” he said. “I will always err to a fault on ‘nurture’ over ‘nature.’ My argument to that is, now that he has a better passing acumen, doesn’t he deserve a chance to see if that passing acumen allows his mind to free up a little bit to process?

  “Tim is very transparent. He said there were times when he knew he couldn’t complete the ball and was just looking for a chance to move the chains with his legs. That’s a pretty honest answer, explaining a lot of stuff that’s seen on tape.”

  Neither the latest layer of skepticism nor his budding broadcasting career would keep Tebow from House’s workouts. If the NFL had given up on Tim Tebow as a quarterback, that was its decision. It wouldn’t be his or House’s.

  As Tebow exited the baseball field to head to a throwing workout with Dedeaux at a park in El Segundo, he pulled the import/export guy in for a hug and then moved toward House, who put up his hands. “My family doesn’t hug,” he said half-jokingly.

  Tebow, smiling ear to ear, ignored it and engulfed House in a bear hug, as he let out a big “YEAAAAAAH!”

  7.

  QB HEAVEN

  JUNE 28, 2013.

  Elite 11, once again, had tweaked its format. Trent Dilfer picked eighteen top high school QB prospects for his “campetition,” rather than the twenty-five it had in 2012 or the eleven it had for its first decade in existence. The organizers overhauled the process, so that now, by week’s end, a “top eleven” was determined based on quarterbacks’ performance in a very, very wide variety of opportunities and situations. It was Dilfer’s personal lab, a way to beta test his research and theories.

  Most of the week’s activities were held at the exquisitely manicured Nike campus in Beaverton, Oregon. A dozen-plus QB coaches from eight different states helped run the event. Many of them were former NFL QBs who had gone into the private-quarterback-coaching business and had come together as part of the season-long Elite 11 process that bounced all over the country trying to ID elite high school prospects. They all were working for Dilfer, who continued to build his TDFB brand, the venture he called a “holistic coaching ecosystem uniting coaches & expanding their influence.” None of them was paid other than for travel expenses.

  By 9:59 a.m., the room was packed with coaches, and an eight-person camera crew was documenting the week.

  “I’m a big thirty-thousand-feet guy,” Dilfer began by telling his staff. “We’re not doing a camp anymore, guys. This is truly a culture.”

  Dilfer and the folks from Student Sports, Inc., who have run the Elite 11 since its inception, have been consumed by trying to find ways to give the young QBs every edge and opportunity imaginable to grow. Since Dilfer’s arrival at the Elite 11, the camp’s competitive nature had amped up. In 2012, he even brought in the Navy SEALs to run the high schoolers through a rigorous challenge in the ocean. He and his staff kept tallies on it all. He reminded the college-age counselors that their words were even more meaningful to the kids.

  “You’re their idols,” he said, looking at Michigan quarterback Devin Gardner [Elite 11 Class of 2009] and Clemson QB Tajh Boyd [Elite 11 Class of 2008]. “Teach them how to learn.”

  Dilfer’s also added to his staff a “high-performance psychology” coach, Dr. Michael Gervais, who helped coach the Seattle Seahawks and in 2012 trained six Olympic gold medalists.

  “We’re not looking for the top eleven quarterbacks; we’re looking for the top eleven competitors,” said former-USC-assistant-QB-coach-turned-Pac-12 commentator Yogi Roth, who was called up to the front along with Dr. Gervais for a quick presentation. Roth helped run the camp and was one of the voices of the ESPN TV show.

  Most of the curriculum covered in Dilfer’s meeting probably sounded familiar to a coaching staff that had spent its life around footbal
l, with many of the Elite 11 assistants having played the game at a high level. Two of the staffers in the room, Neil Lomax and Ken O’Brien, each spent a decade in the NFL. Dr. Gervais’s messages, though, often took the football guys into uncharted waters. There were diagrams with triangles and overlapping circles of mental flow charts.

  “We’re going to teach confidence,” said the forty-year-old surfer before asking where confidence came from. The old QBs threw out a bunch of guesses—preparation? past success?—before Dilfer, a protégé of Gervais, provided the right answer.

  “It only comes from one place—self-talk,” Gervais agreed. “We need to teach, as coaches, how to speak well, how to think well. This is why language matters.”

  Of course, here in Dilferland, it all mattered.

  The players also were put on a high-tech, brain-training system, AXON, to help them, among other things, process coverages faster—and “to show how pliable their brains are,” Dilfer said. Another group Dilfer had brought in was debuting a cutting-edge camera (smaller than a fingernail) built into a helmet that would give the QBs—and the coaches—a full perspective of what the quarterback was seeing, or “Ground Truth,” as Dilfer put it.

  “We’re the product. The kid is the consumer,” he said. “Everything we do. High energy. High respect for others. Let’s be aware of our language. Everything we say matters.”

  The Super Bowl–winning QB told his staff exactly what he was looking for from them and for the kids. Dilfer was passionate, moving around, punching key points. Each of the morning’s speakers he called on hit on elements to illuminate an environment that Dilfer said had the kids who won invitations there feeling like, “I get to go to QB Heaven.”

  Dilfer also was mindful of the perceptions of his group from the outside. “We’re bringing an army up here, guys, and it just takes one weak link to ruin the whole thing,” he said. “How we carry ourselves and how we interact with the hotel and the people with Nike matters. We pick up any garbage, and we leave a room better than when we found it. I want people to say, ‘That is the coolest bunch of cats.’ ”