The QB The Making of Modern Quarterbacks

by Bruce Feldman

  Rossley had spent one season as the Atlanta Falcons quarterbacks coach in 1990. The organization was scouting QBs for the draft. Favre was tempting. He played at Southern Miss, which was the only program that had offered Favre a scholarship—and USM was basically living on the margins of big-time college football. Southern Miss had recruited Favre as a defensive back, but he pushed them to give him a chance to play QB. It didn’t take him long to generate some buzz in the scouting community. The guy who began his freshman season as the Golden Eagles’ seventh-string quarterback won the starting job by the third game of the year, when he led them on a come-from-behind victory over Tulane despite having spent the pre-game hungover and vomiting during warm-ups. In his junior year, Favre carried USM to an upset of number six Florida State.

  The summer before his senior season, Favre lost control of his car, flipping it three times before he crashed into a tree. The wreck left him with a broken vertebra and a concussion, and thirty inches of his intestine had to be removed during emergency surgery. In spite of that, six weeks later, Favre still sparked Southern Miss to a 27–24 victory on the road against number thirteen Alabama.

  The Falcons needed a young quarterback. Jerry Glanville, Atlanta’s colorful head coach, drafted Favre in the second round with the thirty-third pick overall. Rossley, though, wouldn’t be around to coach him. A few months before the 1991 NFL Draft, he left the organization to become the head coach at SMU. The Mustangs were emerging from the wreckage of the NCAA’s “Death Penalty.” Rossley lasted five seasons trying to rebuild the SMU program before being fired. His record: 15–48–3.

  Rossley returned to the NFL as a position coach with the Chiefs and then the Chicago Bears before Packers head coach Mike Sherman hired him to be the team’s offensive coordinator, where he’d finally get to work with Favre.

  Favre had just turned thirty. He’d already been a three-time NFL MVP and led the Packers to a Super Bowl. He and Rossley bonded instantly. Favre always had stories.

  “He told me the first time he worked out for an NFL team,” said Rossley, “he got there late. They had him run a forty. He got to the end and went down on his hands and knees and started throwing up, because he’d been out drinking the night before. The coach said, ‘Jeez, what did you drink last night?’ ”

  Favre also had plenty of stories about his curious relationship with Jerry Glanville.

  “He could really do a good Jerry imitation,” said Rossley. “Jerry didn’t call him by his name. He called him ‘M’ssippi.’ And every stadium they walked into, he’d say, ‘M’ssippi, come over here. M’ssippi, let’s see if you can throw this ball out of the stadium …’ ‘M’ssippi, let’s see if you can throw this ball into the upper deck.’ Every stadium it was a challenge. Brett has the strongest arm I’ve ever seen, and the strongest arm that’s probably ever been in the NFL. He’s amazing. It’s God-given, and he’s a little bit wild.

  “When I first got there, I was doing footwork drills with Favre. I’d say, ‘Brett, your footwork is horseshit. We’ve gotta do some footwork drills.’ And he’d laugh at me. He would go through every drill, but he’d still play his way when it came to the games. He’d jump up and kick his feet or hop step after a throw. Matt Hasselbeck was our backup. He’d give them names, such as, ‘that was the Mississippi Sidekick.’ But I really think, when you watch it, that’s one of the reasons he never had a knee injury or a hip injury, because his cleats were almost never in the ground. I remember watching Byron Leftwich when he came out of college, and he had such a long stride, and his feet were constantly in the ground, and thinking that he was gonna get hurt before long. One of the big reasons Brett was so great is because he’s so competitive, and he has that field sense. He never had a knee injury in all that time because nobody ever got a clean shot at him. He could spin out of a sack or evade a guy coming from the blind side, and I’d say, ‘Brett, how’d you see that guy?’ He’d say, ‘I didn’t. I don’t know how I knew he was there. I just knew.’ It’s a sense of where the players are on the field, and when he scrambles, he knows where guys are, and he can throw on the run and put it on him with accuracy.”

  Favre’s freewheeling style, which some football people categorize as a “gunslinger,” was akin to Magic Johnson’s on a fast break, complete with everything from off-balance flings to cross-body chucks to sidearm and even slung-from-the-hip flick passes. In general, it was a mishmash of stuff coaches had spent a lifetime preaching against. Favre was fearless. It was as if doubt or caution or any element of self-preservation never crept into his mind, because his rampant gusts of self-confidence always overrode it. “More than anything, he played free,” said Gil Haskell, another former Packers assistant.

  Working with Favre proved to be an education for the coach in his mid-fifties. Favre did things Rossley had never seen pulled off. Things that you wouldn’t, couldn’t, ever coach a quarterback to do. In the presence of this, Rossley became convinced that truly great quarterbacks were born more than made. But surely they could also be screwed up if you messed with them too much—as Favre playfully reminded him often.

  “Brett used to say, ‘Well, I’m gonna play well this week if I can overcome my coaching.’ And it kinda makes sense. He was being light with me, but he was telling me, ‘Don’t overcoach me.’ ”

  Rossley’s experience with Favre—and that’s what it often felt like as a coach: you experienced Brett Favre—was the complete opposite of his time working in Chicago with another NFL quarterback he’d had a few years earlier. That guy, unlike Favre, was a first-rounder—the second overall pick of the 1993 NFL draft—and came from a big-time college program.

  “Beautiful” is how Rossley described Notre Dame product Rick Mirer. “Pro-perfect-looking quarterback and could throw it great, but when you’d get him on the field, he was in a cloud. He didn’t compete. He just couldn’t see the field.”

  Mirer lasted one season with the Bears, throwing 0 touchdown passes and 6 interceptions before being released. After Rossley started working in Green Bay with Favre, the coach knew exactly what Mirer was missing.

  Magic.

  To get ready for the draft, Rossley and his coaching protégé in Green Bay, Darrell Bevell, a former standout quarterback at Wisconsin (and a coach who would later rise up the NFL ranks to become a top offensive coordinator with the Seattle Seahawks), compiled a list of characteristics they wanted in a Packers QB.

  They debated what should be the number one component:

  Is it feet?

  Arm strength?

  Accuracy?

  Height?

  Is it body type?

  “We had twelve to fifteen different things,” said Rossley. “But the number one thing for me that we’d put at the very top: magic. Just magic. I’d learned. You can’t wow me with height and being pretty in drills. You gotta wow me when you’re competing.”

  Whenever Rossley evaluated QBs, he wanted to see how they did in tight games with their teams trailing. Better still would be if those situations took place on the road. He also looked at how they handled themselves on third downs. Anyone can make plays or complete passes on first and ten.

  It was a decade later before Rossley would be wowed again by another quarterback. This happened years after Mike Sherman, Rossley, and the rest of the Packers staff had gotten fired in Green Bay. The coach was in his mid-sixties and working for Sherman as Texas A&M’s quarterbacks coach. Rossley was evaluating tapes of high school juniors. He was fascinated by the play-making wizardry of an undersized, wiry, white kid with an uncanny knack for knowing where everyone—especially defenders—were. Even if the kid couldn’t see them. Around the Texas Hill Country, everyone had been buzzing about “Johnny Football.”

  “The tape was phenomenal,” said Rossley. “It just went on and on and on.”

  “Johnny Football” a.k.a. Johnny Manziel accounted for 53 touchdowns and 4,400 yards running and passing as a junior at Tivy High in Kerrville, Texas (population: 23,000). The kid made dazzling
scrambles and dizzying moves to evade would-be tacklers on one highlight that led into another for what seemed like an hour as the veteran coach marveled at what he was seeing. There were plays on the tape where coaches broke out a stopwatch to time that Manziel scrambled around behind the line of scrimmage for an unfathomable seventeen seconds, frustrating helpless defenders from sideline to sideline. Manziel looked like a one-man team, and according to college recruiters who scouted the area, he essentially was. Against mighty Steele High from Cibolo, Texas—a bigger program with more-touted prospects led by the nation’s top running back recruit Malcolm Brown—Manziel ran for over 100 yards and passed for 319 more yards, amassing 5 TDs to lead the Fighting Antlers to a come-from-behind 38–34 upset as the QB outshined Brown’s 329 rushing yards.

  Still, for all Manziel’s preternatural gifts, he lacked size, and he seemed a curious fit for the system Texas A&M ran. Like most programs that had run a pro-style system, A&M wanted a prototype 6′4″, 220-pound guy behind center. The team’s starting quarterback, Ryan Tannehill, was that size. The QB Tannehill followed, Jerrod Johnson, was 6′5″, 250 pounds. The Aggies’ QB recruiting board had a couple of other bigger guys ranked above Manziel—Brett Hundley, a 6′3″, 210-pound, mobile quarterback from Arizona; and Zach Mettenberger, a 6′5″, 235-pound, strong-armed pocket passer who had begun at the University of Georgia but had gotten into some trouble off the field and had resurrected his career at a Kansas junior college. Mike Sherman, a career offensive line coach who had spent the previous decade in the NFL, was skeptical about how Manziel’s unhinged game might translate to the college level. Rossley had his doubts about Manziel, too.

  “I wasn’t sure that he could stay in the pocket and plant his foot and make a throw, because everything with him was scramble and on-the-run and a makeup play.”

  In the spring evaluation period, the month-long stretch when college coaches are permitted to visit high schools, watch film, observe practice, and speak with coaches and counselors (but not the recruits themselves), Rossley drove to Kerrville. By NCAA rules, he wasn’t allowed to have a conversation with Manziel, but he could eyeball the kid. The first thing Rossley noticed, and studied, was Manziel’s hands. The kid might have had a scrawny frame with narrow shoulders and little meat on his bones, but he had freakishly big mitts. Seeing that also reminded Rossley of Favre.

  “That was one of the first things we looked at when we evaluated quarterbacks in Green Bay—how big their hands were—because of how Brett was and how well he could play in cold weather,” said Rossley. “That’s such a key with handling the ball, controlling the ball, and with the snap coming out. The size of a quarterback’s hands is even more important than his height. Brett Favre had huge hands, and so did Johnny. I could tell when I watched him grip and throw the ball. When I saw that, and then saw how he could zip the ball with velocity—his release was quick, and he was accurate—that was it for me.”

  Favre’s hands were measured by the NFL years ago (from thumb tip to pinkie tip) at 10⅜ inches. For comparison’s sake, Tony Romo’s hand was measured at 8.88 inches. Anything bigger than 9½ is considered large for an NFL QB prospect. Most personnel people expect hand size to correlate with body size, but that’s not always the case. Favre has abnormally big hands, as does 6′0″ Drew Brees (10¼ inches) and as does budding Seattle Seahawks star Russell Wilson, who stands, according to the NFL, at 5′10⅝″ yet has 10¼-inch hands, which were among the biggest the league had measured in a half decade for the hundreds of QBs who have passed through the NFL combine.

  Rossley was sold on Manziel before making the four-hour drive back to College Station. His head coach, Mike Sherman, was not. Sherman’s reputation was for evaluating offensive linemen. In his 2010 recruiting class, Sherman signed three linemen who developed into stars: Luke Joeckel, who ended up as the second overall pick in the 2013 NFL Draft; Jake Matthews, who ended up as the sixth overall pick in the 2014 draft; and Cedric Ogbuehi, who got feedback from the NFL College Advisory Committee, which came back with all first-round grades, yet the 6′5″, 300-pounder opted to return for his senior season at A&M in 2014 in hopes of becoming a top-five pick in the 2015 draft. Another signee from that class, Jarvis Harrison, ranked by online recruiting analysts as a “two-star” prospect, became a three-year starter on the line. In all, Sherman signed six offensive linemen in that crop, which will go down as one of the best line classes in college football history. (The other two guys barely cracked the Aggies’ depth chart.)

  When it comes to recruiting quarterbacks, college coaches have to be more selective. After all, you can only play one at a time. Plus, egos often get bruised. Sherman always reminded his staff that you can’t afford to miss on a quarterback, because if you pick the wrong guy, your program is in trouble. Sherman only needed to look a few hours down the road to Texas. Longtime coach Mack Brown targeted the wrong QBs in back-to-back classes, turning off a few local quarterbacks whom he only saw as college defensive backs, at best, and they ended up stars in other places, while UT plummeted from the Top 25 rankings. That growing list of Longhorn misses included Baylor’s Robert Griffin III (from Copperas Cove, Texas); Stanford’s Andrew Luck (from Houston), Arizona’s Nick Foles (from Austin), and A&M’s own Ryan Tannehill (from Big Spring, Texas). Johnny Manziel grew up dreaming of being a Longhorn, too. He spoke of bleeding Burnt Orange. His high school coach said that even if Brown had only offered Manziel a scholarship to Texas to play defensive back, the kid would’ve jumped at it. Brown, though, was skeptical of Manziel’s size and whether he could stand in the pocket and throw the ball well enough and never offered him a scholarship. A handful of smaller colleges—Tulsa, Louisiana Tech, and Rice among them—told Manziel they’d love to have him as their quarterback.

  But it was the programs he wanted the most—Texas and TCU—that weren’t believers. That hurt Manziel. Scarred him. But three years later, he would concede—just as Jordan Palmer asserted about the short high school quarterback who idolized Johnny Football—that he hated being doubted so much that he actually loved it. It worked for him.

  “He wasn’t very tall, and I thought, ‘Maybe some people would get hung up on his height; hopefully they will,’ but not all of them did,” said then–Louisiana Tech coach Sonny Dykes. “I thought he was ‘a three-play guy,’ where you just go, ‘Whoa!’ and watch for three plays and realize he’s got something special. He ran around and threw it good enough. He just made so many plays with his feet, keeping plays alive.”

  Manziel’s personality had a mischievous edge to it, as well. Just as Favre had, the young Texan could become his own worst enemy. Manziel came from a wealthy family with deep ties in oil and real estate. He often carried himself off the field as if the rules didn’t apply to him, and on the football field he sure played as if they didn’t, either, which, truth be told, is what made him special. But his coaches loved him, and so did his teammates, because they respected his heart as much as his talent. And, when it comes to football, veteran scouts will tell you, heart is a talent. During their homecoming game against Uvalde High School, Tivy was winning in a blowout. Manziel concocted a plan to get seldom-used teammate 5′5″, 120-pound Robert Martinez to score a touchdown.

  “Johnny was about to score a touchdown, but instead he slides down near the goal line and calls a time-out,” said Mark Smith, Tivy High’s coach. “ ‘Coach, we want Robert Martinez to score a touchdown. Put him in at running back.’ ”

  “But he’s not a running back,” Smith told Manziel.

  “Don’t worry,” Manziel replied. “I’ll get him into the end zone.”

  Manziel literally dragged Martinez into the end zone.

  During the summer before his senior year at Tivy, Manziel and his family traveled out west in hopes of increasing his options—and his profile. Their first stop was the University of Oregon’s camp. Ducks head coach Chip Kelly said he was enamored with Manziel the first time he watched his highlight tape. “It’s one of the most impressive highli
ght tapes I’ve ever seen,” Kelly said. “I get that no one looks bad on a highlight tape, but usually a highlight tape is three or four minutes. His tape went on and on and on and on. You couldn’t believe it. There’s one sequence that is still vivid in my mind. He took a quarterback draw and went, like, 90 yards for a TD. But there was a hold, so they brought the play back. They literally called the exact same play, and he took it 95 yards for a touchdown. You’re just shaking your head, going, one guy can’t make this many big plays.”

  In Eugene, Manziel wowed Kelly and his staff. So much so that Manziel was named MVP of the camp after the way the Texan thrived in what Kelly described as a hodgepodge 7-on-7 setup during their team camp.

  “You could tell that he had a real good understanding and had a real good football mind,” Kelly said, adding that the direction in that setting was not very detailed. “You’re holding up a card. ‘Here are your routes. Go throw.’ I just wanna see guys react. Do they just get fixed in on one receiver? Can they just take a look at a basic concept and deliver the ball where it should be delivered based on how the defense is playing? He excelled at it.”

  Kelly loved the fact that Manziel was a great all-around athlete—nearly a scratch golfer and such a good baseball prospect that the Ducks’ baseball staff was intrigued with him, too. Kelly knew that Manziel’s size might turn off some college coaches, but he’d had success with shorter quarterbacks before—provided they had big hands.

  “I learned about the hand-size thing a long time ago from [longtime Boston College head coach] Jack Bicknell Sr., because he had Doug Flutie,” Kelly said. “That was a big thing he talked about. You can take a smaller quarterback, but does he have small hands? Well, we saw Johnny’s got big hands in terms of being able to handle the ball. I liked his motion, how he delivered it, and, obviously, athletically, he was special.”