Dilfer said he had “home-schooled” himself on the nuances of elite quarterbacking by studying every Hall of Famer who had been inducted since the Class of 1983, a range that stretched from Joe Namath to Dan Marino to John Elway to Steve Young. His focus was to pull out any commonalities he could find. He realized that the Hall was full of slow-footed guys and guys who didn’t have elite arms. The one thing every quarterback had was the knack for creating space and somehow extending the play.
“You have to have that, ’cause Norv [Turner] can only dial up the perfect play on rhythm so many times,” he said. “At some point, you have to play beyond the X’s and O’s. Those are the athletic traits we want to identify as evaluators and train as coaches.”
The bulk of quarterback training to date had entailed the science of repetition, Dilfer maintained. “We’ve had a community of guys who have gotten really good at being bad,” he said. “I was one of them. I was never really on balance. I was one of the first guys to learn the high right elbow—the ‘shelf.’ Tight trap.
“You can get good at being bad if you rep it enough. Why not get good at being good? I’m not claiming that I know it all, by any stretch of the imagination. There’s a lot of effective ways you can train a quarterback.”
Being on balance is paramount for a quarterback, Dilfer’s research showed. He looked for the most common posture that creates balance. What he found really opened his eyes. He realized that a wider base with evenly distributed weight was consistent in all of the players he studied. He also learned that the upper body posture and ball carriage had a pivotal role in creating the optimum passing platform, which was totally contradictory to what he—and most QB’s—had been taught.
“Watch the elbows of every one of these elite NFL quarterbacks as they carry the ball. The elbows are actually pointing more down than out, and the ball is resting against the body, not away from it. Every one. There is not an exception. Why? Because raising the ball away from your chest or pointing your elbows out locks your trap. If your trap is engaged and locked, it adds tension to your forearm, and that adds tension to your hand. If you have tension in your hand, you can’t consistently spin the ball.
“I lived it, guys. Elbows pointing down relaxes your traps, forearms, and grip, and also unlocks your lower half. Elbows out and the ball pushed up creates tension in the traps and tension in the upper half locks the body up—both lower and upper body. That decreases speed and functionality and makes it so much more difficult to spin the ball naturally and get more velocity!”
As Dilfer worked his clicker, slowing down video of Aaron Rodgers, Drew Brees, and other active NFL star QBs to reinforce his points, chins dropped around the room, and pens jotted down notes into binders. Dilfer tapped the Pause button at the beginning of a Denver Broncos highlight.
“Look at the base,” he said. “When Peyton Manning came out [of college], he was notorious for being narrow in his base. He was on his toes and very narrow. He’s on the Mount Rushmore of quarterbacks, and in his fifteenth year, his biggest point of emphasis was getting wider, because he’s bought into the biomechanics that wider is better.”
From a shot of the 6′5″ Manning, one of the tallest quarterbacks in the NFL, the tape moved on to a Seattle Seahawks game and the shortest QB in the league.
“Russell Wilson is 5′10¾″. You’d think he would want to play tall.
“We don’t play tall in the pocket.
“We play strong in the pocket.
“On the top of his drop, he’s probably 5′7″, but he understands that’s how he needs to play to maximize energy in his body.”
Whether it was Rodgers, Brees, Manning, or Wilson, Dilfer showed clip after clip of quarterbacks making throws with all their cleats in the ground.
“We don’t play on our toes,” he said. “The guys who generate the most ball speed are the ones who generate the most ground force.”
Many of the beliefs Trent Dilfer now holds are contrary to what he and most other quarterbacks were taught. He now believes the essential aspect of a quarterback’s being able to fire a tight spiral comes from the player’s wrist load. He credits former-Major-League-pitcher-turned-biomechanics-whiz Tom House for helping reshape his perspective, his lexicon, and for opening his eyes to the science of throwing.
“I never understood this until I started studying about how you load the ball as it goes back,” Dilfer said. “It’s amazing how consistent it is, and when you look at guys who struggle with accuracy, they don’t do this. ‘Opposite-equals’ is a position that every great passer gets to. And when the hands separate, you have elbow-wrist association where your opposite wrists are at equal height. Every great quarterback gets there. It happens on foot strike. With the great golfers, their bodies are moving at the same speed as their core, and all that energy is being transferred out to the ball. Whether it’s tennis, throwing a football, [or] hitting a golf ball, you have to be matched up.
“There’s elbow-wrist association, and the new term is ‘opposite-equal-foot-strike.’ It’s important to understand this.”
He flipped through play after play before pressing Pause on the moment before the ball was unloaded. “Here’s Matt Ryan, elbow-wrist … Drew Brees, elbow-wrist … Aaron Rodgers, elbow-wrist. It doesn’t change. Every dude gets in[to] that position.”
Another phrase Dilfer harped on was “hip-shoulder disassociation.”
“I’m probably the only guy in this room—and the only guy on the planet—who believes that this [motioning to his shoulders] is more important than this [motioning to his legs]. Don’t get me wrong. I think you should train your feet up the yin-yang. But I think this,” Dilfer said, motioning to his upper body, “tells this [motioning to his lower body] what to do.
“We’ve built a bunch of quarterbacks who need perfect environments. They can go back and crow-hop into a hook. They can do it in a camp setting beautifully. But then in the game, the quarterback goes back, and the guard gets beat[en].”
COACH: Well, the hook’s wide open.
QB: Yeah, but, Coach, I had to step to my left.
COACH: So?
“I believe you train from the waist up,” Dilfer continued, “and the waist down will follow. And the reason I came to this conclusion is all of this geeking out, watching film, and seeing that the best dudes in the league, their feet aren’t right the majority of the time. A lot of times they don’t have to be.”
Aaron Rodgers, the Green Bay Packers star who didn’t have a single scholarship offer when he came out of high school, was featured more than any other quarterback in Dilfer’s tutorial. Rodgers’s penchant for being able to deftly zing passes into narrow spaces while throwing against his body or seemingly out of position from his body’s alignment left many of the coaches in awe. On one play, which was used as a prime example of his “hip-shoulder disassociation” premise, Dilfer paused the tape before polling the coaches on where they expected the ball to be thrown, given Rodgers’s contorted posture. Most noted the positioning of his lower body and assumed the QB was throwing to his left. Instead, the ball zipped to the right—an unlikely direction, given his body angle.
“Wow,” sighed one of the coaches as he marveled at what the Pro Bowler did.
“Oh, and, by the way, I don’t wanna hear the argument,” Dilfer said, “that this guy [Rodgers] is just more talented than the rest. I worked out with him for two straight years in the middle of my career, when I was still pretty damn talented. He was good—not great. He was fiercely competitive, though, and he wanted to be the best and was willing to learn anything. So, his body developed, and he thought outside the box in terms of his development. He watched number four [Brett Favre] closely and pushed his body and his mechanics to the limits, and now he is a made man. This guy is the perfect example of what can happen when you never stop developing. You’re not what you were when you came out of college, or at least you don’t have to be.”
The night’s entire presentation lasted almost four hours,
an hour more than Dilfer had envisioned and about two more than the other guys had expected. A few of the coaches later admitted they thought that the forty-five-minute intro prior to dinner was what they had come for, not a whole evening’s dissertation. Before the crew dispersed to check out the local bar scene, Dilfer closed with another pep talk.
“I miss the team,” Dilfer said, and he started getting choked up. “You miss climbing the mountains. You miss failing. You miss the rawness of every day being a battle. We built TDFB using Elite 11 as a launching point, and [we used] all the cool stuff you saw tonight to build a team.
“I’m done with turf wars! I’m done with you guys worrying about a client here and a client there. It’s bigger than that! I’m giving you Calvin Johnson as your receiver, Walter Jones as your left tackle, and Peyton Manning as your quarterback. I’ll give you every tool you could possibly have to be successful, but it’s gonna be a team. And when you’re a team, it’s team above self. Do you want to be part of this, and you’d be foolish not to—that’s the perspective. My expectations will be exceedingly high. I’m giving you the tools. Let’s go kill it. It starts tomorrow.”
EVERYBODY IN RECRUITING LIES. The college coaches. The high school coaches. The kids do, too. It’s an odd game of liar’s poker that often plays out online with thousands of fans watching it unfold. Trent Dilfer had been lied to, also, he told the hundreds of parents his staff rounded up a half hour before the Saturday workout started. (Dilfer’s eldest daughter, Maddie, was a high school volleyball star being recruited by college coaches. She committed to play volleyball at Notre Dame.) Dilfer made two promises to the parents about their young quarterbacks.
“First, he will leave here better than when he showed up, and second, we will tell you the truth,” Dilfer said. “We won’t lie to you.”
One hundred and six quarterbacks from thirty-one states had signed in. Thirty-one QB coaches—“thirty-one of the best quarterback coaches in the world,” Dilfer said, pausing a few breaths to let that math sink in. “One of those coaches is gonna know your kid intimately,” Dilfer added. “These guys aren’t making any money. Thirty-one guys here, and all they get is their travel paid for. I know you’ve made a great investment. So have we. It’s kid-centric.
“I gotta get to eighteen quarterbacks. I have thirteen spots left. Maybe four, five, or six will come from this group. The goal for you guys and your kid is to get better today with more tools in the tool kit.
“We’re looking for ‘Dude Qualities.’ Who’s the ‘Dude’? We’re looking for the ‘Dude.’ ”
Most of Dilfer’s comments for the twenty minutes of his intro talk to the parents met with nodding or smiling or laughing. “Who’s the Dude?,” though, left them looking puzzled. He ran through all of TDFB’s new features, even the forty-foot trailer parked outside “with some really ugly bald guy [himself] on it.”
“It’s groundbreaking. We’re changing the game today [with] eCoach. Off-line is the traditional model for coaching: fields, classrooms. We’re changing it for a new brand of coach. You’ll have access to these guys three[hundred and]-sixty-five [days a year]. Virtually. The eCoachSports model is to connect the kid to the coach in a virtual relationship. We can do video motion analysis. We’re opening our book to you and saying, ‘Take it!’ We’re opening it to college coaches and saying, ‘Take it!’ Axon Sports is here, too. They’re a worldwide leader in cognitive training. I could only throw so many square-outs, but I could sit in a lab and look at a fifty-inch screen and go through the same rep and have it applicable to the field. Get to the finals, and they’ll have five days of working in an Axon lab. The edge of uncomfortable is where you find greatness.”
Before the “campetition” started, Dilfer introduced two of his coaches: George Whitfield, “the biggest rock star in the quarterback-development space,” and Jordan Palmer, an active NFL QB who had been around the Elite 11 so many years, he actually began as a preteen ball boy. Ninety minutes earlier, in a neon yellow long-sleeved shirt, Palmer was working up a sweat, going through many of the same drills the high schoolers would do. Craig Nall, the former Green Bay Packers backup—with a GoPro mini cam rigged to his shoulder—shouted encouragement, as did a handful of the other TDFB coaches, while the twenty-nine-year-old kept his quarterbacking skills sharp. In five days Palmer—the younger, less heralded brother of 2003 Heisman Trophy–winner Carson Palmer—had an audition with the Chicago Bears in hopes of getting an invitation to their training camp.
Palmer got a close-up on the life of a blue-chip quarterback from observing how his big brother handled everything. He also had the perspective of being the guy passed over for many of the other hyped QB prodigies. He never got invited to the Elite 11. At least not as a camper. He was a ball boy, a receiver, and even when he was in college as the starter at UTEP, he was a counselor. Palmer without hesitation can rattle off the names of all the Elite 11 QBs who got invited the year he didn’t. He can also tell you how far each of them got in football. (Six of them never even threw one NFL pass, and only one of the eleven quarterbacks he was passed over for, career backup Drew Stanton, has had as long a pro career as Palmer.) Some of the other TDFB staffers joked that Jordan Palmer seemed as if he could be Trent Dilfer’s kid brother as much as Carson Palmer’s.
The younger Palmer’s message to the parents took on a more nuanced tone.
“I think the worst thing your kids can do and you guys can do is put importance on the stars,” Palmer said, referencing the online recruiting analysts’ evaluation scale, ranging from elite college prospects—“five-stars”—to mediocre—“one-star.”
“The biggest problem that you get as an athlete is not about where you came from or if you come from a single-parent home; it’s about growing up with a sense of entitlement. ‘I can’t believe these people are making me wait in line. Don’t they know who I am?’ You start drilling that into their head, and endorsing that—it’s the worst thing that you can do. Best thing my dad ever said to me was, ‘Don’t tell me. Show me.’ ”
Palmer reinforced that message with a story about his famous brother. On the day the elder Palmer signed his $126-million contract, Jordan and the rest of the family were in his house waiting to celebrate. “We had the champagne ready, and then he gets up and leaves. He went back into his office to study the playbook. I said, ‘Hang on, you can’t take one night off?’ He said, ‘No, I gotta go earn it.’ ”
NERVES OFTEN ARE THE toughest competition for young QBs. There are no helmets or pads at the Elite 11. No scoreboards, either. Just a lot of eyeballs watching, and for dozens of teenage boys looking to either make a rep or uphold one, that can be as unnerving as any high school game they’ll play in. Making matters worse, the wind in Columbus was crackling. That only prompted the young quarterbacks to try to fire the ball that much harder.
Brandon Harris was one of the few quarterbacks who didn’t seem the least bit bothered by the wind. His tight spiral knifed through, whereas the other QBs in his group—all kids with major college offers—sprayed tail-draggers all over the field. Harris’s athleticism was eye-catching. So was his lack of fundamentals. At one point, after observing Harris wheel around, swinging the ball in one arm while pirouetting past two guys swatting at him with big black pads, Palmer called him over to show him some ball security measures—namely, to keep two hands on the ball in those situations. Harris nodded and made the correction on his next rep. Over to the side, the Louisiana native had drawn an audience. Even though their sons were in groups fifty yards away, Les Miles and Cam Cameron had wandered over to take a look at Brandon Harris and his group.
Harris, though, hadn’t yet been awarded a golden Elite 11 ticket to the season-end event on the Nike campus in Oregon. Instead, DeShone Kizer, an honor student from Toledo, Ohio, got an invite with all the QBs gathered around Dilfer.
“I’m not concerned that I didn’t get picked yet,” Harris said twenty minutes after the announcement. “I’m pretty sure I’m gonna get invited. I w
orked hard. I came out here and got better, and that’s the only deal that I was focused on today.
“Trent and the staff know talent when they see it. They gave out one to DeShone. He had a great day, honestly. Trent’s got six more. I can name you about fifteen guys off the top of my head who were good out here today. They grade off different things. Maybe DeShone did better things after a bad throw or something like that. Give him all the credit. If I get invited, great. If I don’t, it’s not gonna make me or break me. It’s not gonna make it to where a school’s gonna say, ‘Hey, we’re not gonna take you because you didn’t get invited [to the Elite 11]. They don’t care about that stuff. Not bashing a camp. It’s just about you getting better and trying to get all this stuff together, and I know that’s what Trent and the [others] are trying to work on.”
Asked if he’d ever had any private coaching, Harris shook his head.
“None,” he said, smiling. “I don’t know about these other guys, but I haven’t at all.” Despite what the Elite 11 coaches had said about the matter, he seemed proud to admit it. As if the fact alluded to the idea that he had more “upside,” to borrow the clichéd scouting buzzword, more room to develop, than did other young QBs who had spent hundreds of hours being groomed. Harris pointed out that he also played basketball and ran track. “Four by two, four by one, and four by four,” he added, rattling off the names of the sprinting events he competed in for his high school.
“It’s just natural. That’s the deal with being raw. I wasn’t a starting quarterback till I got to eighth grade. A lot of these guys probably grew up playing quarterback in T-League. I didn’t.”
There would be a handful of other quarterbacks invited to the Elite 11 later in the evening. Dilfer had scheduled a “war room” back at the Hilton Garden Inn, where he and his staff would discuss the merits of all their candidates. George Whitfield, one of Brandon Harris’s bigger supporters among the staff, would not be able to participate in the war room. Whitfield had to leave Columbus to get to Texas, where he’d be training his prized pupil, Texas A&M phenom Johnny Manziel, and three other college QBs.
The QB The Making of Modern Quarterbacks Page 3
