The QB The Making of Modern Quarterbacks

by Bruce Feldman

  Instruction is handled by the Mannings—Archie, Peyton, Eli, and oldest brother Cooper (a former Ole Miss wide receiver till a spinal condition ended his playing career)—and dozens of their friends who are either former college quarterbacks or coaches from all levels of the game.

  “In seventeen years, the four of us have never missed a minute of the camp,” Archie said. “We’ve bought in. That’s a credibility thing. It’s meaningful to us. It’s the only time all year when we get four days together.

  “I think it’s just our passion for what the institution of high school football is, what it does for the life lessons that youngsters learn, and just the values it gives people. It’s getting attacked right now, more than ever. It’s our passion to try to have a good time with these kids, to help them get a little better and to understand that high school football can be a great experience for them. We really haven’t changed our concept awfully much. We still try—we always try—to make it a non-recruiting thing. That wasn’t its purpose. It wasn’t for blue chips necessarily. We don’t mind having the blue-chip players. That wasn’t the concept, though. We just tried to enhance the experience of high school players, particularly quarterbacks and receivers. Just the numbers, obviously growing and growing, which means our staff gets bigger. Actually, I think, because of that, it all just gets more fun.”

  From sunrise to sunset at the Manning Passing Academy, there were young quarterbacks being coached in every possible element of the game at a variety of stations seemingly on every corner of the Nicholls State campus. Clearly, it was also no mere vanity project for the Mannings. They were neck-deep in it when it came to hands-on instruction and interaction.

  On the evening before the camp officially kicked off, Archie and Peyton explained to their staff precisely how they wanted certain nuances of the game taught. For instance, on a 5-step drop, Peyton told his staffers, “Do drops on the yard-line, so it forces them to stay straight,” or on a 3-step drop, “When you put two in the ground, it should align your hips to throw the hitch to the boundary or to the field.” More than anything, for the price of $585 for three nights at the camp (it’s $440 for day campers), all the budding QBs—at some point during the week—will get hands-on access to Archie and his boys. And where else can a kid be taught the little details of playing quarterback by a five-time NFL MVP?

  “The Mannings really want to teach the kids, whether it’s someone who has never played quarterback a day in their life and just wants to come see Peyton, or the kid who is gonna get recruited to play D1 football, and everyone in between,” said thirty-year-old ex-Clemson starter Will Proctor, who first started coming to the camp as a high school junior but had since worked as a college counselor and later as a coach at the camp after finishing his playing career.

  For the two dozen college QBs, the camp provided them access to a unique fraternity.

  “The Mannings are football royalty,” said Oliver Luck, father to Andrew and a former teammate of Archie’s with the Houston Oilers, where both men were quarterbacks in the early ’80s. “They are our football royalty. They’ve done it with incredible grace and class and dignity. They’ve set the bar for everybody who plays the position, and it’s a very tough position to play. They’ve done it the right way.

  “The Democrats have the Clintons. The Republicans have the Bushes. We have the Mannings.”

  The “done it the right way” is big inside the football community. Archie Manning never played in a single NFL playoff game, much less made it to a Super Bowl, but there may be no more respected man among his peers than the former two-time Pro Bowler who was once selected as the NFL’s Man of the Year in 1977. Manning was often a one-man show, scrambling to extend doomed plays for the lowly New Orleans Saints, a longtime NFL punch line. Archie played more like Johnny Manziel than either Peyton or Eli. Off the field, Archie, a genuine SEC legend who married a beautiful former homecoming queen, emerged as one of the true gentlemen of the game. His legacy also was boosted by the way his boys turned out, especially Peyton, regarded as the gold standard of the cerebral quarterback and the man most identified with ushering in the NFL’s era of the advanced, “Problem Solver” QB.

  Florida offensive coordinator Kurt Roper was a young assistant coach at Tennessee when Peyton was the Vols’ quarterback. Roper, himself the son of a coach, said the college kid taught him more about preparation than anyone he’d ever been around. “When I played at Rice, nobody watched practice right after and took notes like he did,” recalled Roper. “Here, I am a [graduate assistant], and I’m asking him questions, thinking, ‘Lemme learn from this guy.’ I’d try to steal as much time with him as I could. ‘How are you determining coverages? What are fronts telling you pre-snap? What are you looking at on a given play?’ He was studying defense and what it was doing, so he could have a great idea what he was gonna do with the football pre-snap.

  “His work ethic and his ability to be singularly focused on winning from week to week and controlling his mind and preparing for his moment was amazing. Nobody I’ve ever been around, coaches included, have the drive that he has to prepare. He is just different than anybody else.”

  • • •

  OLIVER LUCK SAID HE wouldn’t send his son, Andrew, to any other quarterback camp or to work with other private coaches, only the Mannings’ camp. Luck, a onetime Rhodes Scholar finalist, spent five seasons in the NFL. He taught his son the proper way to throw a football when Andrew was around four or five. Just as he showed him the right way to throw a baseball or snowball, he said, adding that he was mindful of not overdoing anything, keeping football in perspective.

  “Like most things in life, you have to use discretion,” Luck said. “You can’t do too much, because then it becomes a Marinovich sort of thing.”

  Any Marinovich reference when it comes to trying to develop a child super-athlete is akin to being a “Little League father” on steroids. The real Marinoviches are father Marv, a former-NFL-lineman-turned-strength-coach who studied Eastern Bloc training methods, and son Todd, aka “The Robo Quarterback,” bred by his dad in a “perfect environment” free of fast foods or sweets. Todd made it to the NFL as a first-round draft pick, but he lasted less than two seasons as he battled a string of drug problems that had first come to light in his college days, when he was arrested for cocaine possession at USC.

  “I’ve always believed that if you’re a parent and you think you’ve got a talented kid—doesn’t matter what sport—encourage the kid, make sure the kid is getting quality coaching,” said Luck, “and, at some point, probably around their freshman or sophomore year of high school, the kid—boy or girl—has to have the fire in his or her belly to say, ‘I’m not doing this because my parents encouraged me to or because my girlfriend likes the fact that I’m a quarterback; I’m doing it because I just really like this stuff—the 6:00 a.m. practices, the hundred-degree heat. My goal was not to raise an NFL quarterback. I’m happy as a clam that Andrew is able to do what he’s doing in the NFL, but my wife and I just wanted to raise good kids with the proper values who followed whatever passion they had.”

  Years later, when Andrew was a star at Stanford, he also worked the camp as a college counselor. The college guys say they might benefit from the camp even more than the kids do, because they get to pick Peyton’s brain and know specifically what they’re seeking out, whereas the high schoolers usually don’t know what they don’t know and are just giddy that Peyton or Eli said something to them.

  Cody Fajardo, a quarterback at Nevada, who worked the camp in 2013, asked Peyton Manning, “How do you watch film?”

  “The thing about that is, they’re full-time NFL guys, and I’m still a college student,” Fajardo later explained the rationale for his question. “My time management is a little tougher, but Peyton told me on Mondays, he will watch all third downs. On Tuesday, he’ll watch first-and-tens and first-and-ten-plus. On Wednesdays, he’d watch all the blitz tape. On Thursdays, he’ll watch the complete game. On Fridays, he�
�ll watch the complete game again. On Saturdays, he’ll watch a bunch of cut-ups and what he wants to see in situational football. He’s got it all mapped out in increments, so it’s not boring. He’ll take notes. That’s what I’m gonna try to implement in my film study, so instead of watching an entire game in one sitting, you’re looking at stuff in increments and still getting good work in the film room.”

  The Manning camp also acted as an annual reunion for former college-QBs-turned-coaches. For some, like Will Proctor, the former Clemson quarterback now married to a FoxNews morning anchor and living in Manhattan, this was the one week a year when he got to be back on the field mingling with his old football pals.

  Proctor might have been the only former Manning camper who actually came for Buddy Teevens, the Dartmouth head football coach who doubled as the MPA’s associate director. Proctor’s dad and Teevens were teammates at Dartmouth in the ’70s. In 2000, the younger Proctor was the starting quarterback at an Orlando-area program so small that it had fewer members on its team than the school’s state-champion debate team had.

  Will Proctor didn’t have much sense of just where he ranked as a college prospect. After all, Trinity Preparatory School had never produced a Division I football player till Teevens, then the Florida Gators’ QB coach, offered Proctor a scholarship. At the Manning camp, Proctor’s confidence grew. The camp had such a different vibe from all the other football camps Proctor had attended. Everyone just seemed so approachable, whether it was Archie or Peyton or Eli, who at the time was an Ole Miss Rebel. One night, the sixteen-year-old Proctor found himself in a lounge near his dorm room in front of a TV chatting with Major Applewhite, the starting QB at Texas; Ben Leard, the starting QB at Auburn; and Tyler Watts, the starting QB at Alabama.

  “We’re talking about our favorite college uniforms, and I remember just sitting there thinking, ‘Wow, this is so cool! I am being treated like a peer by these guys,’ ” said Proctor.

  “I remember asking Major Applewhite, ‘What’s with the helmet? Why do you pull it down so low?’ Tyler and Ben were, like, ‘Yeah, why do you do that?’ He goes, ‘I like to have some shade.’ And he put his hand up like the brim of a hat.”

  During one of the quarterbacking stations, Watts, an option quarterback, was assigned to teach “Deep Ball.”

  “He’d say ‘If you’re ten yards apart, picture a ten-yard wall in between you guys, and you have to throw it over that wall and try to get the nose to turn over. Now the wall is twenty yards high. You gotta get it over that wall.’ I remember watching him not be able to get the nose to turn over, and I’m thinking to myself, ‘I throw the deep ball better than him at sixteen.’ I’m thinking, ‘I’ll be able to make it, because this guy starts for the Crimson Tide, and he can’t do the drill he’s trying to teach.’ ”

  Proctor, a onetime CFL teammate of former Texas A&M offensive coordinator Kliff Kingsbury, actually coached Johnny Manziel at the camp four years earlier, when no one knew who the undersized Texan was. Proctor himself didn’t even recall that he coached Manziel during the camp’s 7-on-7 tournament.

  “I had this complete stud who was playing safety and getting interceptions, playing wide receiver and catching all these touchdowns. He was doing everything. He just said, ‘You tell me what to do. I don’t care.’ He just loved to play and compete. The kid was a freak athlete.

  “Then, one day, someone tells me at the camp, ‘Remember that kid who was on your team last year? He’s at A&M now.’ ”

  For the dozens of other coaches working the camp, it also had become a ripe networking opportunity, said former UCLA head coach Rick Neuheisel. “I tell every aspiring coach, ‘If you want to get into this business, don’t send résumés. Don’t try to get at guys where they’re working. You need to go to their camps. That’s when they’re letting their hair down, and when you go there, you need to volunteer for every shit job there is, because they’re always looking for people to do stuff, because everybody else wants to go have fun. If you’ll be that guy, and they notice your effort, that’s how you get a foot in the door.’

  “I used the guys who did that in my camps, the guys who said, ‘I’ll do bed-check. I’ll do this. I’ll do that.’ Those are the guys I kept my eye on, because they’re the worker bees that you really want. Nepotism is alive and well in the football industry. If your dad’s not one of the coaches, this is how you get in.”

  Neuheisel’s impression from his time working the Manning camp?

  “It’s a factory,” he said. “Some coaches work. Some don’t. You get ten to fifteen kids under your wing, and it’s your job to make sure they have a great experience, but it’s all the luck of the draw regarding how hard your guy is gonna work. And how much does he really know? The Mannings, to their credit, are ambassadors. Cooper is classic. He’s funnier than hell, and it’s his chance for everybody else to see that he is still that brother, the one who tells the other two what the hell to do. Peyton takes over on the field, and Eli has no problem letting Peyton take over.

  “It was a great experience to see it in living color. My son and I were gonna be living in the dorms. We get in our room, and it’s Spartan, really Spartan. We turn off the lights, and on the ceiling of the room, there’s this black-light picture of a scrotum with the words ‘Ghetto Balls’ in neon. I said, ‘Jerry, get your stuff. We’re going to a hotel.’ You wouldn’t have seen it till the lights went off.”

  Neuheisel had his own favorite story about youth football camps and Peyton Manning, but it actually came from a Bill Walsh football camp at Stanford. Peyton was a senior at the time and attended the camp in Palo Alto.

  “Bill Walsh had been on the brochure saying, ‘Learn the West Coast offenses from one of the best coaches in football,’ ” Neuheisel said. “At the end of the camp, when Walsh is asking if anyone has any suggestions, Peyton stands up and says, ‘Coach, if you’re saying this in the brochure, I’d suggest you be here more than one day.’ Archie later made Peyton call Bill Walsh and apologize.”

  “MEDIA DAY” FOR THE Manning Passing Academy was on a Friday morning and was scheduled for a thirty-five-minute window, which was reminiscent of how, in Caddyshack, “Caddy Day” at the Bushwood pool welcomed caddies from 1:00 to 1:15. According to the camp’s PR director, it was the only opportunity for the media to speak with any of the Mannings or the college quarterbacks staffing the camp. A half dozen camera crews packed into the Century Room, the tight media area inside Nicholls State’s Guidry Stadium. On average, there was usually only about half as big a media turnout, but Governor Bobby Jindal had made an appearance to honor the Mannings and announce that Nicholls would receive $1.2 million in appropriations to make improvements to the twenty-acre stretch of land the Manning camp used for its twenty-five football fields.

  In the back half of the room, metal folding chairs were placed against the walls. Above each was a small sheet of paper with each of the college counselors’ names. Before the Mannings and Jindal were finished with their remarks, a few reporters had already staked out spots next to the chairs of Johnny Manziel and Alabama’s AJ McCarron.

  Asked what he was hoping to learn from being around the Mannings, McCarron pointed out that it was actually his third year of coming to the camp. “I think it’s more of an off-the-field type of help than on-the-field for us in terms of how to handle yourself, how to carry yourself with everyone watching you and everything,” he said. “The way the world is nowadays, social media is everything. It’s really how to handle yourself off the field, and I’ve learned a lot about that here.”

  Within five minutes McCarron was asked about his relationship with Manziel, seated ten feet away behind a half dozen reporters.

  “We’re friends,” McCarron said. In fact, they were rooming together at the camp. “He knows if he ever needs anything—advice—I’m here for him and vice versa. People try to make the football thing a competition. When we’re inside the white lines, yeah, we’re both playing to win the game. But football’s just a gam
e. It’s not life, so us being friends is a lot better than us being enemies, because we’re not gonna get anything out of us being enemies.”

  The relationship of the two SEC stars would take an odd, public twist while they were in Thibodaux. A little more than twenty-four hours later, word started to circulate around the camp that Johnny Football had been booted from the camp. Later that night, a blog, Rumors and Rants, reported that Manziel was asked to leave after he “enjoyed himself a little too much Friday night and rolled back into the camp” around noon. ESPN reported that story was “inaccurate,” according to camp officials, who said he went home to Texas because he was feeling ill. Paul Manziel, Johnny’s father, told the Dallas Morning News that his son was resting as he recovered from “dehydration.” Problem was, several people had tweeted seeing the Aggies star out in bars in College Station after midnight.

  Days later, Rumors and Rants posted another account, alleging that Manziel threw McCarron “under the bus by forcing him to answer questions about why he didn’t wake him up on Saturday morning,” and that Manziel was seen on Bourbon Street in New Orleans (more than an hour from the Nicholls campus) around 4:00 a.m. However, a quarterback who was out with Manziel late that night said they actually never left Thibodaux.

  “That story about him being in New Orleans is 100 percent BS,” the quarterback said.

  In truth, it didn’t seem to matter much whether Manziel was out drinking on Bourbon Street or at a bar in Thibodaux—although it did give the story more shelf life and made it sound a bit sexier. It also didn’t matter much if he was hungover or got all of eight minutes of sleep, either. The only thing the Mannings would’ve cared about was that Manziel managed to be accountable enough to show up on time for their morning meeting, which he wasn’t. That was Manziel’s real offense, said an NFL friend of the Mannings.