The QB The Making of Modern Quarterbacks

by Bruce Feldman

  “We didn’t know he was getting ready to put his cape on,” said Ault, “and it’s now with a big K right in the middle of it.”

  The NFL is actually full of quarterbacks fueled by skepticism and snubs. Warren Moon going undrafted and detouring to the Canadian Football League for six seasons before getting his shot at the League. Tom Brady lasting till the 199th pick of the draft. Aaron Rodgers having zero scholarship offers out of high school. It was a theme exercised repeatedly when the counselors were called up one by one to share their stories with the campers. Even George Whitfield stretched to bang that drum in his introduction of Johnny Manziel …

  “He scored seventy-five touchdowns in his senior year. Seven-TEE FIVE! But TCU still said, ‘Slow down. Not all dreams end with being a Division One player.”

  Whitfield’s intro quickly turned into a testimonial, tracing the fiery Texan’s emotional state through the recruiting process to the time he showed up during the spring break of his freshman year at Texas A&M, to each step on each rung up the Aggies’ depth chart. Whitfield perked up as he got to the Thursday-night phone call he received from Johnny Manziel, while he was checking out another one of his protégés, Virginia Tech’s Logan Thomas, facing tenth-ranked Florida State. At the time, the Aggies were less than forty-eight hours from a huge test at number one Alabama: “I know you’re watching Logan, so I’ll keep this short. This is gonna be like going into the Roman Colosseum,” Manziel said, hatching a gladiator/dragon-slayer theme that Whitfield would soon adopt for his own brand—DRGN SLYR. “We are going to shock the world on Saturday. We’re gonna knock out Alabama. I can feel it. I just know it. I’ll call you after.”

  The whole room broke into applause by the time Whitfield brought Manziel up to the front.

  Unlike the other counselors who’d preceded him, Manziel didn’t give a short speech but rather an offer to an open forum: “Wassup, fellas? Y’all know what I’m doing every second of every day just by turning on ESPN. I’ve been asked probably every question you can imagine, but I’ll answer anything you like.”

  When he was asked what his biggest challenge had been, Manziel’s response was as much a glimpse into how his life had been transformed from anonymous to the surreal as it was an answer to the question.

  “I am still the same person. Me and Whit, a year later, our relationship’s grown even tighter. We still talk the same,” Manziel said, smiling at Whitfield.

  “Keep your circle even tighter. People come in and out of my life every day wanting this or wanting that. It’s hard to trust people in this situation. You learn. You adapt. It’s not just meeting LeBron and saying, ‘Wassup?’ It’s trying to pick his brain. He’s played in a couple of NBA Finals. I talked to Kobe the other day. I thought he was going to stop texting me because I was wearing him out so much asking him, ‘How do you handle this? Handle that?’ ”

  Manziel’s biggest motivation?

  “It’s essentially guys like you—the anointed Elite 11 campers. I was not even in the Top 100 in the state of Texas. I was, like, the 35th-ranked quarterback. It’s different now. The shoe is on the other foot. They used to say, ‘He’s too short. Improvises too much. Runs around too much.’ And I know there are people out there who are doubting me now. Still.

  “For whatever reason it is, people always like to doubt me, but one day, down the road, in twenty or thirty years, people will stop doing it, but I won’t ever stop.”

  Seated ten feet away from Manziel, fellow Texan—and former two-star recruit—David Blough could relate. Blough knew what it felt like to have the big Texas schools come by his school to watch him and leave without saying a word to anyone. “It felt like he was speaking right to me,” Blough said later. “It was really cool to listen to how he wanted to prove all the people who passed on him wrong. He plays with a chip on his shoulder, and you can see it in everything he does, and that’s exactly how I’m trying to be. I really do wish I get to play at Texas or Texas A&M someday.”

  Manziel later elaborated on his arrest in the summer of 2012 when his buddy reportedly directed a racial slur at a man, which prompted a scuffle after the Texas A&M freshman tried to play peacemaker and ended up all over the Internet with a shirtless mug shot and charged with three misdemeanors for disorderly conduct, failure to identify, and possession of a fictitious driver’s license.

  “I was so blessed to have an opportunity to get a full ride to a school in the state of Texas. I go out one night and make a bad decision, and I felt like I pressed my foot on the [lever] and flushed it all down the toilet. I didn’t know if I was gonna be on the team anymore. Lowest point of my life. Teammates are not really messing with me anymore. I just continued to chop wood. Worked on the things Coach Whit told me to focus on. Just kept chopping wood.

  “I’ll never forget the day. I grew up the biggest Texas Longhorn fan in the world. Vince Young was the baddest man on the planet. He was the man. I always wanted to play for them. I almost didn’t play football anymore so I could play baseball for the University of Texas. That’s how bad I wanted to go there. I’ll never forget, Coach Duane Akina called me and said they had one last scholarship, and it was between me and this one other kid from San Antonio—for DB—‘and we went ahead and offered the other guy.’ It crushed me. But, at the end of the day, it only made me work that much harder. I wanted to show Mack Brown and everyone else in that program that y’all really, really, really messed up.”

  A few hours later, the Nike store in downtown Portland was jammed with blue-chip high school football recruits. Nike had closed down the store so it could host the Elite 11 guys and the 160-plus other players who had just arrived in town for The Opening. Nike trotted out some of its most celebrated football clients for a Q&A session hosted by another Nike guy, ESPN announcer Desmond Howard, and including Ndamukong Suh and two-sport legend Bo Jackson. After a few minutes, while the store was having problems with the panel’s microphones, it became apparent that the recruits couldn’t care less what “Bo knows” and instead were riveted by the presence of Johnny Football hanging out with Boyd and Fales. For the rest of the day, both at the Nike store and back at the hotel, Manziel was mobbed by recruits asking to take a picture with him or just shake his hand.

  “I never, ever heard of him [Bo Jackson] till today, but this is Johnny Football, man,” explained one seventeen-year-old, 300-pound lineman standing in line to get a pic on his smartphone with Manziel. “He’s a legend.”

  NIKE’S INVESTMENT IN Elite 11 and The Opening stretched well beyond just giving a couple hundred teenage football prodigies from around the country the run of its campus and turning over the Nike store. It also meant bringing in active NFL stars to help with some on-field instruction—and motivation. The biggest celeb of the bunch was Aaron Rodgers, a former NFL MVP, who moved around through morning drills for a few hours. Rodgers mostly observed and occasionally chatted with Trent Dilfer. The Northern California–bred QBs are golf buddies who share the same mentor, Jeff Tedford, and the same agent, David Dunn.

  David Blough, like most of the high schoolers, was starstruck by Rodgers. When he misfired on a route with a receiver, he figured he had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to pick the NFL star’s brain.

  “I feel I did something wrong there,” Blough said to Rodgers.

  “Yeah, you’re over-striding on your back step, and you didn’t get your full rotation through,” Rodgers told him.

  “Well, what do you think I need to work on the most?”

  “You’re staring down your target,” Rodgers replied. “You’re throwing one-on-ones, so, of course, you’re gonna stare down your receiver, but challenge yourself. You’ve got all the arm talent in the world. You know you’re throwing to this guy, but why not stare down the middle of the field and know what timing he’s going to be on, and then, on your last step, look over at him and deliver the ball. Find a way to challenge yourself even if it’s a little routine drill or routes-on-air (against no defenders).”

  Blough lat
er said it was some of the best advice he’d ever gotten. He was well-versed in Rodgers’s path to stardom. Months ago, when he was ranked as a two-star recruit and had no scholarship offers, his dad would tell him different stories about the meandering routes NFL quarterbacks often had to take. Such as Kurt Warner bagging groceries and playing in the Arena Football League, or Rodgers starting out in community college after being overlooked by every major college in the country in high school. To Blough, Rodgers was an inspiration. To Craig Nall, Rodgers was a sour reminder of a star-crossed NFL career.

  Nall, too, was once a blue-chip recruit. The Louisiana native picked LSU over Florida. The way the Tigers depth chart set up, Nall figured he’d develop behind an upperclassman and then have three years to start. Problem was, in 1999—his third year in the program—the Tigers brought in another, more-hyped QB, Josh Booty, a local legend who had spent the previous five years playing professional baseball after signing a million-dollar deal with the Florida Marlins. Booty had been a rival of Peyton Manning coming up in the state. In fact, in 1994, it was Booty—not Manning—who won USA Today and PARADE magazine Offensive Player of the Year honors.

  Nall, though, still beat out Booty and another future NFL quarterback, Rohan Davey, to win the starting spot, but after he helped the Tigers to a 17–7 first-half lead, he was pulled. “They were just doing that to appease me,” Nall says, “knowing I was only gonna start a half. ‘Then we can start Booty the rest of the year,’ which was what happened.”

  Feeling he had no shot to overtake Booty, Nall opted to transfer down to 1-AA-level Northwestern State in Natchitoches, Louisiana. The Green Bay Packers—impressed by how Nall had carried the undermanned Demons to an overtime upset win at TCU after leading a fourth-quarter, two-minute rally and by another two-minute drive he piloted in the 1-AA playoffs against eventual champion Montana—drafted him in the fifth round in 2002.

  Nall entered an ideal situation. The starter was a superstar, Brett Favre. The backup was a thirty-four-year-old vet who had also played his college ball at a small school in Louisiana, Doug Pederson. “I was [Packers quarterback coach Darrell] Bevell’s little pet project,” said Nall, who only started twelve college games. Bevell overhauled how the former college javelin thrower gripped the ball, eventually breaking Nall’s habit of pointing the ball down and toward his back foot as well as spreading his fingers out and farther down on the laces by a notch, so he stopped pushing so many of his passes.

  “I threw in the net every day my whole rookie season,” said Nall. “When special teams practiced, I was there throwing in the net, thirty minutes a day, with Darrell. All during training camp. All off-season, throwing in the net.

  “We overhauled everything. During college, I didn’t get a whole lot of instruction. It’s compete, compete, compete all the time for a starting job. I came from a system with [LSU offensive coordinator] Jimbo Fisher, where you’re making protection calls and sight adjusts and doing all that type of thing to Northwestern State, where you ask, ‘So what happens if they bring more than we can protect?’ And the answer is, ‘Just go make a play.’ It was one of those conversations. ‘OK, let’s do it.’ ”

  Nall ended up spending years marveling at Brett Favre, the NFL’s king of “Just Go Make a Play.” Nall cited a short touchdown pass that Favre threw as an example. The called play was a running back screen to the right. Favre, though, signaled [wide receiver] Robert Ferguson to run a slant on the back side of a screen, which typically doesn’t mesh with the call. No matter. Favre still fired a touchdown pass to Ferguson.

  “You can’t really coach that,” said Nall. “You don’t want your QB playing outside the system like that, but he made it work. You don’t want to encourage him to do that, because he’ll do it more and more, but what do you say? He’s got the most interceptions in the NFL, too.

  “One of the things he told me in my first year there was, ‘When in doubt, just throw it hard. Defensive guys are over there for a reason, because they can’t catch it as well as offensive players.’ The second part of that is, ‘If you do throw a pick, head to the back pylon, because they can’t hit you there.’ That’s why he played for twenty years.”

  Ask Nall to name the most amazing thing he ever witnessed Favre do, and he thinks for about twenty seconds before nodding and then breaking into a big smile.

  “So, we’re out on the practice field in the indoor facility,” he said. “At the top of the uprights, there’s a little box cutout for the film guy to get the end-zone copy. We’re standing on the 40-yard line. Brett goes, ‘You think I can throw this ball into that square up there?’

  “I said, ‘Nope, but I wanna see you try.’

  “He rears back, [then] let’s it go—zhoooom!—the guy had to put his hand in front of the camera or it would’ve broken the lens. This was up a good forty feet on top of it being about fifty yards away. So you’re talking about at least a 60-yard throw into a foot square, on the first try. I swear, it’s true.”

  And then, before Nall could take another breath, another Favre moment came to mind, this one in a game against the Jets. Favre’s rolling to his left out by the numbers. He stops. Puts his feet in the ground and—zhoooom!—hits his receiver in the back right corner of the end zone when the DB was only five feet away. “Absolute laser,” Nall says. “Fifty yards to the back corner.

  “No, wait. This is the one,” Nall said.

  “Probably the other most amazing thing I’ve ever seen him do is, he gets a concussion. Pederson comes in for about a quarter. So, we’re on, about, the 38-yard line, and we’re going for it on fourth-and-five. Everyone’s thinking, ‘Should we go for it?’ Favre all of a sudden gets up off the bench, kinda moves everybody out of the way. He gives [head coach Mike] Sherman the thumbs-up as he’s trotting onto the field, like, ‘Yeah, I got the play. I’m good.’ Pederson runs off. Favre throws a touchdown—our only touchdown of the game. Afterward, [he] tackles [Javon] Walker and hits his head again. He doesn’t know what down it is or what the situation is. After that, they hid his helmet. Of course, he ended up playing [the] next week.”

  In Nall’s third season in the NFL, he got into some mop-up duty late in games. He was sharp, connecting on 70 percent of his passes while throwing 4 touchdowns and 0 INTs. That winter, Doug Pederson retired to move back to Louisiana, prompting the Packers to give Nall a unique assignment.

  “Sherman pulled me aside and said, ‘Look, [Brett’s] best friend’s gone. There’s hardly anybody left from the Super Bowl team. You need to fill that role and be that voice of reason in his head and keep him grounded and give him something to do outside of football.’ It was, like, part of my job description was to go hunting with Brett Favre.”

  Two years earlier, the Packers had Nall go to Scotland to play in NFL Europe. He led the league in touchdowns and QB rating and returned to the United States with his confidence brimming, only to find out they’d signed onetime first-rounder Akili Smith. However, the former Oregon star struggled to pick up Green Bay’s system and was soon released. The next year, the Packers brought in another former first-rounder, Tim Couch. But the Packers cut him, also.

  With Pederson gone and Nall feeling good about his 2004 performance, Green Bay then drafted Aaron Rodgers after the Cal star fell in the first round and the Packers snagged him with the twenty-fourth pick. It created an awkward dynamic, with the team bringing Rodgers in as the eventual successor to the franchise’s beloved hero, Brett Favre, after Favre had just thrown for over 4,000 yards.

  Nall had his own friction with the rookie first-rounder. Like most rookie QBs, Rodgers struggled in his first training camp. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Rodgers didn’t lead the Green Bay offense to a single point until his twentieth and final series of the pre-season, when the Packers scored a touchdown on a drive that was aided by a long pass interference penalty.

  “If the number two quarterback job had been awarded based on performance in training camp and games, it would have gone to Craig Na
ll, hands down,” Packers beat man Bob McGinn later wrote.

  Rodgers still was named Favre’s backup, and Nall was third on the depth chart. The fourth-year vet was devastated. It reminded him of when he got passed over for Josh Booty at LSU. Nall asked to have a conversation with Sherman.

  Sherman’s explanation was blunt: “He’s a first-round pick, and we have money in him. I can tell you, you’re gonna get fucked.”

  “After that, me and Coach Sherman had a great relationship,” Nall said. “We could talk frankly.”

  Nall’s psyche took another hit whenever he’d be leaving the Packers’ facilities and fans would ask for his autograph, thinking he was Rodgers.

  “It’s the eyes, I guess—even my wife agrees we have some similar features,” Nall said, adding that he soon realized that the resemblance afforded him a way to get a jab at Rodgers. Whenever he’d hear someone call him “Aaron” or “Mr. Rogers,” he’d laugh to himself at the thought of blowing them off and leaving fans thinking, “That Aaron Rodgers, what a dick!”

  After the 2005 season, Nall opted to sign a three-year contract with a $1-million signing bonus with the Buffalo Bills. The starting job was open. On the second day of training camp, he went the entire morning practice without one of his passes hitting the ground, he said. Then, on the second to last play of practice, he tried to outrun a linebacker to the corner of the end zone and felt his hamstring give. “That hamstring was the beginning of the end for me,” Nall said. “I was inactive number three the rest of the year.” One year later, he was out of Buffalo and on the Texans’ roster before ending back up in Green Bay in 2007. Nall lasted one more season in the NFL, with the Houston Texans, before retiring. He’s proud to note that he’s somewhere in the Packers’ record book for having thrown the most passes (48) without an interception.