The QB The Making of Modern Quarterbacks

by Bruce Feldman

  Jones said if he finds out that Cassel’s an ESTP, he’ll let the kid call his own plays.

  Usually by this stage, Jones (who has since resigned from the SMU job) would already know a player’s type, but for the past three years Niednagel has been unavailable, battling Stage IV melanoma. The cancer started out on his arm, then jumped to his back, and then to his chest. He’s had to battle two bouts of pneumonia and arsenic poisoning that he got, he said, from eating so much wild rice.

  “I’d seen top experts in the field but ended up creating my own protocols,” Niednagel said. “I was two weeks from death, but I’ve come back a long way.”

  His recovery comes at a time when he believed he, along with some help from a company in Orange County, was on the brink of a scientific breakthrough, that through DNA analysis he had four of the sixteen personality types defined. “The neat thing is, we’re bringing out the science now in a way that is irrefutable,” he said. “But, hey, anything that has been noteworthy over the ages has been scoffed at. I’m looking at this as a way to change mankind, not change NFL teams. It’s far bigger.”

  ESTP OR ENTP, TRENT Dilfer was rooting for Neal Burcham. If the kid blossomed into a college star and made it to the NFL, it would help validate his model and his evaluation savvy. But his connection to the young quarterback ran deeper than that, just as it did with all the quarterbacks he had bonded with, whether they made it to the Elite 11 finals or not. He’s told the kids who don’t get selected that nothing would make him happier than “if you prove me wrong,” and it doesn’t seem like mere coach-speak when you see how choked up or moved to tears he sometimes gets around the high school quarterbacks.

  “I’m always aware that some kids are gonna leave very disappointed. I don’t want them to be crushed. I want them to be motivated,” he said, adding that he often ends up texting back and forth with some of these kids more than with the ones he does invite to the finals. Walk into the office at his home, and you begin to understand why. The room is jammed with books, trophies, game balls, photos, and hard drives. There is also one of those giant cardboard checks, the kind contest-winners get. Dilfer’s was a $25,000-prize check for winning the 2001 Stan Humphries Celebrity Golf Classic. Dilfer shot a course-record 62 to beat former Major League pitcher Rick Rhoden, the guy who was dominating the celebrity-golf circuit, who shot 67 the final day. On the wall facing Dilfer’s chair is an antique dresser with a marble top covered with a half dozen trophies, including a two-foot replica of the Super Bowl trophy next to a game ball commemorating the Baltimore Ravens’ Super Bowl XXXV win over the New York Giants. Above the dresser is a large flat-screen TV mounted to a built-in wall unit, and above that are three more game balls. The ball in the middle, directly above the Super Bowl trophy, commemorates the Ravens’ 24–23 road win over the Titans in Week Eleven from mid-November 2000, which handed Tennessee its first loss in the thirteen-game history of Adelphia Coliseum.

  The game was tied at 17 late in the fourth quarter. The Ravens just got a turnover and had the ball deep in the Titans’ territory. In good position for the go-ahead field goal on a third-and-7 from the Tennessee 19-yard-line, Dilfer tried to force a slant intended for Patrick Johnson, but Titans defensive back Perry Phenix stepped in front and returned it 87 yards for a touchdown. Dilfer gathered himself on the sideline, said a prayer, and returned to the field to start a game-winning drive from his own 30 with 2:19 remaining after Tennessee’s kicker missed the point after. Faced with another third down, Dilfer relied on some of his old athleticism after being flushed out of the pocket to his right, and he found Shannon Sharpe along the sideline for a 36-yard gain. On the ninth play of the drive—with 25 seconds left—Dilfer looked to Johnson again. This time, he connected on a 2-yard touchdown pass for the win.

  “What I’ve learned from playing this game is that you never let circumstances around you affect what you do,” Dilfer told reporters after the game. “You have to keep fighting. I’m from the old school. You play as hard as you can until you die out there. You leave everything on the field. I can’t believe something this good happened to me. It’s been such a long time.”

  The Ravens won the next nine games in a row to win the Super Bowl. That game proved to his new teammates in Baltimore that the guy who was run out of Tampa Bay could win big games and that he could shine in the spotlight after being slammed with adversity.

  “I threw the worst pick of my life,” he said, staring at the game ball. “Came right back and made a big play to Shannon Sharpe on third and long and then threw the game-winning touchdown pass in the two-minute drive. That’s my career. Some good and some epic failure.”

  That game was more significant than even the Super Bowl win, which is why Dilfer aligned the game ball above the replica Lombardi Trophy. But there is something even more meaningful than that Ravens–Titans game ball. Above it is a framed picture of a smiling little boy, Dilfer’s only son, Trevin. In 2003, the five-year-old boy began to feel sick on the second day of a family vacation to Disneyland. At first, doctors thought it might be asthma or bronchitis. Then other doctors thought the boy might have hepatitis, so they sent him to a children’s hospital, but en route Trevin’s heart failed in the ambulance. Doctors revived him. They stabilized Trevin and put him on a heart-lung bypass machine. They needed to transport him to the hospital at Stanford University. He required a heart transplant, but they couldn’t put him on a waiting list until they could prove he still had brain activity. One day, Trent put his finger in little Trevin’s hand and started talking to him. A tear rolled down the boy’s face, and he squeezed his daddy’s finger, which gave doctors enough proof to put Trevin on the list. That led to twenty-five more nerve-wracking days of hoping, but before the family could get more good news, they were told that Trevin appeared to have a systemic infection. On April 27, 2003, after a six-week battle, Trevin Dilfer passed away.

  Over two thousand people, including dozens of NFL coaches and players, came out for a “Celebration of Trevin’s Life” at People’s Church in Fresno three days later.

  That picture of Trevin perched near the top of the wall means everything to Trent Dilfer. Trevin would now be almost the same age as many of the high school quarterbacks Dilfer was grooming.

  “I get to have a second chance,” he said. “I get to pour out everything I have into young men’s lives. I now have a bunch of sons. I get to do what I would’ve done with Trevin. I wouldn’t have been the overbearing dad, but I betcha I woulda been close. I mean, good thing my daughters are strong.”

  Dilfer also had become a big brother and father figure to some of his Elite 11/TDFB staffers as they set out on their own coaching careers. “I think I like the coaching more, but I’m better at the mentoring,” he said.

  “He is [as] emotionally connected to these kids as anyone I’ve ever been around,” said Yogi Roth, who has a Master’s degree in communications management and who, before going into coaching, worked in the Pittsburgh mayor’s and state representative’s offices. “That’s a combination of 1) the loss of his son, 2) his unapologetic, pure love of the game of football, and 3) for his desire to prove that he’s the best in the world at understanding the quarterback position.

  “I’ve watched him truly grow. He has gone through the process of self-discovery of how he coaches, how he speaks. His awareness of how he challenged the [players]. The greatest thing he brought to the Elite 11 is, he raised the standard. They [think they] can’t handle more than twenty-five plays. What do we have? Eighty-three? Eighty-seven? Their minds can expand. He’s raised the stakes. I watched him grow so much as a head coach. When Jameis [Winston] stood up [at the 2011 Elite 11 Finals] and said, ‘Hey, we know you lost your son, but you’ve got twenty-five sons in here’—I still get a chill thinking about that right now. I think that’s when he realized not only the power he has in shaping young men but also in shaping young men who then have the opportunity to shape lots more people. These are the crème de la crème, right? These are the CEOs
. The BMOCs. They’re the Dudes. They are going to take some element of what they learn from Trent and carry it on in life. And it’s the same with his coaches, who not only look up to him as a player who won a Super Bowl, but also for where he goes philosophically. The thing is, he doesn’t miss what he gets back from this, either. Other coaches I’ve been around—they don’t take a moment to recognize that, because they don’t have the time. This is one of those jobs where it’s not thankless. It’s thankful. I think that’s why he really loves it.”

  5.

  THE QB WHISPERER FROM DIME CITY

  JUNE 5, 2013.

  Twelve year-old Chase Griffin was up before 5:00 a.m., dressed in his workout gear, waiting for his dad to make the two-hour drive from Austin to Bryan, Texas, on a steamy Wednesday. The Griffins were headed to see young Chase’s private quarterback coach, George Whitfield, the guy who in what seemed like just a fortnight had replaced Steve Clarkson as top guru in the private-QB-coaching world. In truth, young Chase was giddy because he was also going to see Johnny Manziel, the reason Whitfield had come from San Diego to Allen Academy, a tiny Christian school that played six-man football a ten-minute drive from Texas A&M. Whitfield was set to train Manziel, Griffin, and three other college QBs, including the starters at Syracuse and Memphis, in Dallas, but the Heisman Trophy winner said he needed to stay local for his workouts with his Aggie teammates, so Whitfield audibled—and the other college QBs scrambled to relocate three hours south on a day’s notice.

  Manziel’s separate one-on-one with the thirty-five-year-old Whitfield was scheduled for 8:00 a.m., but the Aggies star was twenty minutes late. He arrived in a dark SUV, flanked by two of his buddies. Whitfield was already annoyed with the star for being tardy. Watching Manziel’s pals each stroll up and snag a bottle of water from an ice chest set out for the half dozen high schoolers who had shown up to play receiver for the day only irked the coach even more.

  “What’s up, playa?” Manziel said as he spotted little Chase, whom he had met two months earlier at the Dallas Elite 11 regional when he spoke to the high school QBs.

  Whitfield handed Manziel two Chinese Baoding balls to maneuver through his hands before they trotted onto the field. They were the same kind of therapy balls Whitfield recalled from his childhood that his dad used. His old man said they helped regulate blood flow and that great Chinese warriors used them before they went into battle. Whitfield bought a set (price: $80) for all his QBs. In fact, he had bought so many online from a certain company that its owner called him to ask if Whitfield was re-selling them on his own. Whitfield explained that he was a coach who gave them to his athletes, and he asked who normally bought them. He was told that musicians and surgeons used them to help develop dexterity, which got Whitfield thinking about how most athletes grab and clutch things with their mitts but seldom hone skills with their fingers to have a more acute touch. He bought so many more sets since then that the guy gave him a deal for nearly half the price he had been paying.

  As Manziel sleepwalked through Whitfield’s drills, one of the QB’s buddies, a twenty-year-old whom the A&M star called “Turtle”—just like the name of the pal-turned-gopher in the HBO comedy-drama Entourage—tried to explain the player’s mind-set.

  “It’s his instinct to not listen to anyone trying to tell him what to do,” said Turtle a.k.a. Nathan Fitch, an old high school classmate who had just dropped out of A&M to manage Manziel’s life.

  If anyone had Manziel’s trust, it seemed to be Whitfield. The son of two high school teachers in Ohio, Whitfield was the king of accessible metaphors; for example, he might coax a quarterback to use more of his body and less of his arm in his delivery by telling him, “The body pays the tab. The arm pays the tip. If the arm takes the whole bill, the arm can bankrupt you. The body can’t bankrupt you.”

  If a quarterback was doing a drill and got too far up on his toes, Whitfield might tell him, “We don’t want you to go Michael Jackson here.” To remind a quarterback to keep good posture, it was about “keeping your suit and tie on.” When he prodded Michigan State quarterback Connor Cook to pull his lead elbow (left arm) through in his throwing motion, Whitfield crouched behind the Spartan standout and told him, “Just imagine there’s a midget talking shit right here. You don’t want to decapitate him. You just wanna make him spit his gum out.”

  One drill Whitfield created to fine-tune Manziel’s instincts or, more specifically, to retrain them, he called the Jedi. In order to get Manziel to work lower in his base, a tendency the A&M star worked against as his adrenaline revved, Whitfield said he wanted to “rob” the quarterback of his sense of vision by putting a blindfold over his eyes, so his instincts would kick in. His analogy was to the way someone wakes up in the middle of the night in a dark room and tries to, cautiously, be more anchored as they feel their way to the bathroom. “It put him in more of a controlled, predator position,” Whitfield said. In the Jedi, Whitfield lined up two receivers, one off to the QB’s left, the other to his right, and pointed for one of them to clap, triggering Manziel to plant his feet and get set to fire. Whitfield actually didn’t intend for Manziel to try to throw the ball. “I didn’t want him to throw, because I didn’t want the ball to dictate ‘success.’ ” Manziel couldn’t help himself, though. He connected on 26 of 28 throws while blindfolded.

  While Whitfield was best known as Manziel’s Svengali, the former small-college quarterback trained QBs on six of the top eight teams in 2013’s pre-season Top 25. This dynamic can make a lot of college coaches uncomfortable, knowing that an outside guy—a celeb coach—is tinkering with their school’s most important player. One college coach admitted he’s uneasy with the relationship and is skeptical of Whitfield’s creative teaching methods but is afraid to say no.

  “The one thing I told [my quarterback] I never wanna hear is, ‘But George says …’ And the good part is, they believe they’re getting better, and added confidence is always a good thing.”

  Regardless, that college coach said he cringed when he saw Manziel on ESPN’s NFL Draft coverage in 2013, a few months after winning the Heisman. Manziel was asked on the set if he thought he might leave college (two years early) to go to the NFL, and he responded by saying, “Coach Whitfield will know when the time is right for me.”

  “Coach Whitfield?!? What about his coaches at A&M?” the college coach groused.

  GEORGE WHITFIELD JR. GREW up in a football family with a defensive pedigree. His father, George Sr., was a linebacker at Wichita State before a successful run as a high school coach in Kansas and Ohio. His uncle, David Whitfield, played defensive end for Woody Hayes’s 1968 national championship team at Ohio State and was a captain on the Buckeyes’ 1969 squad. George Jr. was born in Wichita but raised in the football-obsessed town of Massillon, Ohio. Massillon loves to brag that it’s the place where all newborn boys are given a little orange football. The old rust-belt town (population: 32,000) fills its high school stadium, which seats 20,000, to root on the most storied high school program in the nation, the Massillon Tigers. The younger Whitfield’s first job was in football. He was in second grade; he served as the Tigers’ water boy. He was the eighth Whitfield to play football for Massillon but the first who wanted to play offense. The previous seven all were team captains and played on state championship teams. His dad, once the linebacker coach of future football great Chris Spielman, figured little George would grow up and become a linebacker, too, but his son would tell anyone who’d listen that he was a quarterback. The younger Whitfield imagined when he played with his buddies in the backyard that he was John Elway or Major Harris or former Notre Dame star Tony Rice.

  His father, sensing how determined his son was, drove George four hours to Fremont, Ohio, three times a week the summer before his senior year of high school, just so he could learn the nuances of the position from Tom Kiser, a keen football mind who also worked as an engineer.

  Whitfield went on to star as quarterback for the Tigers and to spark Massillon to four fourt
h-quarter comebacks. He made honorable-mention all-state. Whitfield was offered scholarships by Iowa State and Indiana and several MAC schools and the Air Force Academy, he said. But every offer was to come to college and play defensive back. Whitfield didn’t want to hear that. His heart was set on remaining a quarterback. He signed with Youngstown State to play for Jim Tressel, then the coach at YSU. Whitfield redshirted his freshman season and then starred in the Penguins’ spring game, which gave him hope he might win the starting job. Tressel, though, had other ideas.

  One day Tressel waved Whitfield into a staff meeting in a conference room.

  “How many guys at this table would love to have George in their position room playing for them?” Tressel asked his assistants. The linebackers coach, defensive backs coach, and receivers coach immediately raised their hands. In fact, as Whitfield looked around the table, he noticed that every coach except for the offensive and defensive line coaches raised their hands. Whitfield reached down and playfully pulled up Tressel’s hand, too. Tressel doubled as Youngstown’s quarterbacks coach.

  “Your vote’s bigger than theirs,” Whitfield said, smiling at Tressel before ducking out of the room.

  Tressel later told Whitfield that he couldn’t give the keys of his offense to a nineteen-year-old.

  Whitfield thought about transferring to Ohio State as a walk-on but instead opted for Division II Tiffin University, in large part because he would be down the street from Kiser, so he could continue working with him. “He taught me that results aren’t always the reality of what happened after he deconstructed it,” says Whitfield, who went on to become the school’s all-time leading passer.