The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks

by Feldman, Bruce

  “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.

  THE DRAFT

  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.”

  Hoge’s analysis of Manziel’s NFL prospects was also rooted in skepticism about whether he could develop into a capable pocket passer and that he didn’t understand pass protection.

  The former was something Manziel had spent two seasons working to improve with his coaches at A&M and with Whitfield. Still, it was a valid concern about whether the kid could rewire his instincts to flee the pocket to go make a play. The latter—fair or not—wasn’t what he’d been asked to do at A&M and was something he had been taught only in the previous three months while at Whitfield’s draft camp in San Diego.

  “I don’t think it’s fair criticism at all,” said Kliff Kingsbury, a onetime former NFL quarterback who was Texas A&M’s offensive coordinator in Manziel’s freshman season. “And I’m pretty sure they’re not going to put the protections on him as well. I know they want him to go out there and use his God-given ability, which is pretty exceptional, to make plays. And that’s what we wanted to do with him, to free his mind and allow him to check us into the right play and just play the game.”

  The issue of Manziel’s preparation became an interesting subplot in football circles about ultimately how much responsibility, if any, should be on the college coaches to get their player ready for his transition to the NFL, much as it eventually was with Tim Tebow after the former Florida Heisman winner struggled in his pro career. New University of Texas defensive coordinator Vance Bedford tried to use the opportunity to take a swipe at the Aggies’ staff when he tweeted
: “Manziel is a top 10 pick by the scouts. I wish him the best. He played backyard ball for 3 years. Now he will have to learn how to be a Qb”

  Whitfield hopped onto SportsCenter to offer his own retort: “I understand [Bedford] has an opinion. I’m just surprised he has time to tweet about it, given the Longhorns’ task at hand with their defense.”

  Kingsbury didn’t buy the notion that college coaches should balance their responsibility to their players when it came to getting them ready for a potential jump to the NFL.

  “You’re trying to win games at that level and go from there,” he said. “We’re trying to win right now with what we’ve got by all means necessary, and as far as preparing a kid for the next level, their level of play is going to do that, and when they get to the next level, that coach there is going to mold them and shape them however he needs them to play in his system. We’re just in the here and now.”

  Manziel’s agent, Erik Burkhardt, fired back at Hoge via social media, tweeting: “I see @merrilhoge achieved his goal of being relevant this week. Same guy who said Rodgers was “a wasted draft pick” & Luck shouldn’t go #1”

  That reference was to a previous on-camera Hoge assertion that he was sold more on Brian Brohm, a second-round pick by Green Bay in 2008, than Aaron Rodgers. Hoge’s colleague, ESPN draft analyst Todd McShay, took a similar stance, saying Brohm had more “upside” than Rodgers. (The Packers waived Brohm after one season before he spent two seasons with the Buffalo Bills, where he didn’t throw a touchdown, before bouncing around to the United Football League and the CFL.)

  One veteran NFL coach called the Hoge rant “so predictable. It always seems like Merril Hoge or Jaws [Ron Jaworski] doesn’t like the guy who isn’t the prototypical guy. There’s some wild-card draft guy, and they have to be the guy to come in and shoot him down. I try not to take much of that into account, and we say that to the players, too, not to worry about that stuff.”

  The interest in the NFL Draft has spawned a legion of “draft experts” in the past five years. You can pretty much find someone somewhere who either loved or hated every prospect in the country. And for every time they’ve been proven wrong on an evaluation, they’ve probably turned out spot-on on several other occasions. Hoge, to his credit, also had predicted that former college greats Vince Young and Tim Tebow would be flops as NFL QBs—and both were cut within five seasons. In 2011, NFL Network’s draft analyst Mike Mayock touted Missouri’s Blaine Gabbert as his number one QB prospect ahead of Cam Newton, saying Gabbert is “the one quarterback in the draft who, if you’ve got to bang the table for a franchise quarterback, he’s the guy.” McShay also called Gabbert the best QB in the draft class. The number ten overall pick in the 2011 draft by Jacksonville, Gabbert lasted three seasons with the Jaguars before being traded to San Francisco for a sixth-round draft choice. Newton, taken first overall in the draft, won NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year honors and was selected to the Pro Bowl in two of his first three seasons.

  Dilfer acknowledged that his own evaluation skills were sorely lacking when he first started doing TV for ESPN. He admitted to being fooled by QBs he believed would be stars. He’s also proud to say that he was “the only analyst in the business who had a first-round grade on Nick Foles in 2012.” (Mayock had Foles evaluated as a fifth-round pick.) The Arizona QB went to Philadelphia in the third round and became a Pro Bowler by his second season after setting a league record with a 27-2 TD-INT ratio.

  “I got made fun of when I said [Foles] should be a first-round pick,” Dilfer said. “I read a lot on him about the adversity he went through and how he was coached at Arizona. Talked to people about him, although I never felt totally convinced on his intangibles, but I loved what I saw on film. From his instincts, to playing in conflict, to his being a natural passer, to his stature, and for being a limited athlete, he does a really good job of creating space and time for himself. He was brilliant on the move. He also had some basketball background. All those things added up for me to say he should be a first-rounder.”

  Dilfer’s opinion ran counter to Hoge’s about Manziel, saying the Texas A&M star actually “has high-level NFL instincts.”

  “Johnny’s überconfident on the football field,” Dilfer said. “He does some really dumb stuff. He also does some of the greatest stuff I’ve ever seen on a football field. He makes mistakes, but it doesn’t change the way he plays the next play.”

  Hoge’s rants about Manziel came forty-eight hours after Teddy Bridgewater’s Pro Day. It was expected to be an impressive performance—quarterbacks’ Pro Days almost always are, since they’re so scripted. Bridgewater credited his private QB coach Chris Weinke, the former Heisman Trophy winner, for getting him to use his legs more in his delivery. “I was just an arm-thrower before,” Bridgewater said.

  Both NFL Network and ESPN had TV crews on site to broadcast the workout. Representatives from twenty-nine teams turned up at the Louisville indoor facility for a closer look. Scott Turner, the Vikings’ new quarterbacks coach in attendance, noticed something curious as soon as Bridgewater started warming up. The QB wasn’t wearing gloves, as he did during the football season. Turner and his dad, Vikings offensive coordinator Norv Turner, were both perplexed.

  “I didn’t understand why he didn’t wear ’em,” the younger Turner said later. “He played in ’em, and he’s gonna play in ’em. It’s not like it’s illegal or anything. If you’re comfortable doing something, why would you change it?”

  How much, if any, impact throwing without the gloves had on Bridgewater was hard to gauge. He misfired on several throws in the 65 passes he attempted. Eight passes were incomplete. Two of those were dropped by his receivers. The juice on many of his passes left several observers underwhelmed.

  Mayock, who, going into the NFL Combine, had Bridgewater as his number one QB in the 2014 draft, said—after Louisville’s Pro Day—that he would not take him in the first round. “I’ve never seen a top-level quarterback in the last ten years have a bad Pro Day, until Teddy Bridgewater,” he said. “He had no accuracy, the ball came out funny, the arm strength wasn’t there, and it made me question everything I saw on tape, because this was live.”

  Bridgewater later elaborated on his decision to go gloveless on Pro Day to Jon Gruden on his QB Camp show: “When I was training leading up to the Combine, I was back home in Florida—nice weather. I went back to my high school days—no gloves.

  “I learned a valuable lesson that day. I had a few balls that got away from me, and, like I said, I was able to learn walking away from there that just do what got you there. If you’re comfortable with the gloves, continue to wear the gloves. So everywhere I go, I make sure I carry my gloves with me.”

  Bridgewater’s modest frame—he weighed in at 208 pounds (6 less than he did at the Combine)—also elicited some carping from anonymous NFL personnel types questioning the twenty-one-year-old’s durability. That skepticism came in spite of the fact that Bridgewater only missed one start in his college career—and in that game he came off the bench to lead the Cardinals to a victory. Or that he played through a broken wrist and a severe ankle sprain in other games. Or that he withstood a vicious, head-rattling shot from a Florida linebacker that knocked his helmet off, and Bridgewater still popped up and proceeded to carry Louisville to an upset win over the number four Gators in the 2013 Sugar Bowl.

  Blake Bortles’s Pro Day, orchestrated by Jordan Palmer, came two days later—a few hours after Hoge started dissecting Manziel. Nearly every NFL franchise had a rep at UCF for the show. Bortles displayed his refined mechanics, most notably the UCF star’s improved balance and base and a quicker release. Gone was his propensity to load on his back leg as he maneuvered from a variety of three-, five-, and seven-step drops. Later, in his 65-throw workout, Bortles overshot a couple of receivers, which he acknowledged occurred because in season he had underthrown a few deep balls.

  “It went well,” Bortles said. “I thought I showed the things I wanted to. Showed movement, that
I fixed the footwork that were flaws on film. Obviously, I had a couple throws I’d like to have back, but that’s going to happen when you throw 65 balls.”

  MARCH 27, 2014.

  Manziel’s Pro Day had a different vibe from Bortles’s and Bridgewater’s—and from any other Pro Day a quarterback prospect has ever had. The night before, Whitfield was frazzled after finding out that someone had posted the script, or, at least, an early version of it, for Manziel’s workout online. Whitfield figured the culprit was someone who worked at the local Office Max, where he had made copies earlier in the day.

  “Luckily, we didn’t have any real notes on there, and we had some real notes,” a relieved Whitfield said about twelve hours before Manziel arrived at A&M’s indoor practice facility.

  ESPN and NFL Network both had three-man crews on sets near the field providing analysis of the Manziel show. Aaron Rodgers provided some analysis of the analysis, tweeting: “2 of the 3 guys commenting on this workout right now have opinions that shouldn’t be taken very seriously”

  Rodgers didn’t specify which crew he meant: the NFL Network trio of Paul Burmeister, Mayock, and Super Bowl MVP Kurt Warner; or the ESPN grouping of Ed Werder, Todd McShay, and former NFL exec Bill Polian.

  Whitfield had flown in many of his San Diego crew: Kyle Bolton, a short but fast former NAIA wideout; NFL-backup-QB-turned-private coach Kevin O’Connell; Hank Speights, a former Division III lineman/Whitfield protégé who acted as Manziel’s snapper, since one of the points of emphasis was to show how adept the QB was with his footwork from under center—something Manziel didn’t have the opportunity to show in A&M’s system. Seventh-grader Chase Griffin, Manziel’s little pal, also rode over with his dad to help out as a ball boy.