The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks

by Feldman, Bruce

  Dilfer said he would never pick the kid—or allow him to get invited again.

  “Joey told me, ‘Trent, you’re really gonna struggle with this kid,’ ” Dilfer said. “Joey” was Joey Roberts, Dilfer’s twenty-six-year-old assistant. The onetime Elite 11 ball-boy-turned-undersized-wideout for Bob Johnson’s powerhouse Mission Viejo high school program makes a point of taking a three-mile walk with his old coach near his parents’ place just to talk high school football every time he returns home to California. Roberts’s title with the Elite 11 was general manager. He was also a right-hand man for Dilfer and ESPN’s NFL reporters Chris Mortensen and Adam Schefter. Roberts evaluated QB tape, just as the Elite 11 coaches did, and also had a keen sense of the personalities of the quarterbacks.

  Roberts was right. The kid arrived at the week-long Elite 11 event in Southern California and recoiled at the competition. At one point, the QB even retreated to a bench along the sidelines and just sat there observing while the other blue-chippers kept playing.

  Asked if the young quarterback was reachable, Dilfer leaned back in his chair. “No,” he said. “Maybe he might be three years from now, but he wasn’t at the time.”

  Dilfer said the problem went deeper than a lack of maturity.

  “I think that’s ‘nature’ at home, like the environment you grow up in,” he said. “There are some of these kids who have, like, 25,000 Twitter followers. So 25,000 people are telling them how great they are. Even if 10,000 were haters and 15,000 were admirers, they[’d still] grow up with this weird perspective or paradigm that ‘I’m better than everybody.’ ”

  Dilfer was done inviting kids like that. In his first season with the Elite 11 in 2011, the staff had already invited the QBs. They had selected another five-star “recruiting guys’ guy.” In the presence of the other touted quarterbacks and coaches, that kid wilted, too. “He turtled,” said another Elite 11 staffer, invoking a now-often used MMA term for when guys just tuck their heads to avoid battling and wait for someone else to end things mercifully.

  It used to be that the highest-ranked high school QBs in the star system were pretty much guaranteed invites to the Elite 11. The staff felt that they essentially had to have the high-profile kids there for political reasons or to quell outrage from fans questioning the authenticity of the camp if some five-star guy was neglected. Those days were over, Dilfer said, adding that event founder Andy Bark loved the fact that “we don’t have to invite anybody.”

  Perhaps more than anything else, Dilfer wanted quarterbacks with “DQ,” as he’s termed it, as part of his ever-expanding QB glossary.

  Dude Qualities.

  Those other two five-star quarterbacks who made it through the old Elite 11 screening process weren’t Dudes. They were just guys.

  Guys don’t lead. They don’t inspire. They don’t draw people to them. In coach-speak, there’s a term for average players—JAGs. As in “Just a Guy.” Guys don’t have presence. A Dude does.

  DQ is a handy Dilferism that old football personnel folks might have classified under the scouting umbrella of “intangibles.” There is no position in sports more dependent on the intangibles than quarterback. Competitiveness. Toughness. Leadership. Resilience. Moxie. Grit. There are all sorts of buzzwords coaches use when it comes to sizing up the man they’d feel most confident flipping the keys of their livelihood to. Of course, none of those traits can be measured with any stopwatch or tape measure, which is a big reason the draft, much like the college recruiting process, is such a crapshoot, especially when it comes to quarterbacks.

  Dilfer spoke a lot about quarterbacks either being “thermometer” leaders or “thermostat” leaders. If you’re a “thermometer,” you react to the climate of the room. If you’re a “thermostat,” you set the climate. Different coaches have different gauges for this quality. Broadway Joe (Namath), Joe Cool (Montana), and Tom Brady all had It. Little Russell Wilson has It, too.

  Great coaches could bring the Dude out of some quarterbacks, Dilfer believed. He felt he was proof of that. Dilfer played high school ball about a decade before the star system was in place, but if it had been, he wouldn’t have been even close to a five-star prospect. He was a big athletic quarterback who played in a Wing-T offense, meaning he threw the ball about ten times a game. He didn’t even make all-league his senior year. The first-team all-league QB ended up as a punter at San José State. Dilfer landed at Fresno State after one of the assistants saw something in him. In 1992, in his first full season as a starter, the Bulldogs were preparing for their next opponent, Louisiana Tech, when FSU offensive coordinator Jeff Tedford summoned Dilfer into his office the Tuesday before the game. Tedford was watching film of Tech’s D, which had just held Alabama, the defending national champs, to its worst offensive game of the season. The Tide managed just 167 yards of offense and 0 offensive touchdowns in a 13–0 Bama win.

  “We were ranked near number one in the country in offense at the time, and he goes, ‘I’m gonna be honest with you. I trust you, but I don’t know if we can get a first down on ’em,’ ” Dilfer recalled. His heart sank. His own coach didn’t even think he had a shot?

  Three days later, Tedford called Dilfer to his office again. Dilfer, a self-admitted “knucklehead” in those days, figured he had gotten into some sort of trouble. Jeff Tedford said it wasn’t anything like that.

  “I want you to know something,” Tedford said. “I never should’ve said that to you Tuesday, because what I didn’t remember about this game is that we have you. We have the best player in college football, and that’s you. And we’re gonna go beat these guys because of you.”

  Dilfer went out and threw 5 touchdown passes against Louisiana Tech the next day, including a 57-yard touchdown pass less than one minute into the game. Fresno State won, 48–14. “I played perfect football,” said Dilfer, who called that week a signature moment in his life. “And was I the best? I wasn’t even close to the best player in college football. But I was the best player that night.”

  Fresno State went on to lead the nation in scoring that year. FSU began the next season ranked in the Top 25. The opener was at Baylor. The Bulldogs took a 20–0 lead as Dilfer was on his way to a 31-of-38 performance with a career-best 483 passing yards. “The [fans in the] stands were chanting ‘Dildo, Dildo …,’ and that’s a rough crowd for a Christian school,” Dilfer said. “We lose the game on a reverse pass where I fumble and I separate my throwing shoulder. I’m crying like a baby up in the rehab room, because it was bad, and it was the first time I had really gotten it bad. Everybody’s panicked. I’m a Heisman Trophy candidate, and the coaches are all throwing things. Jeff [Tedford] comes in and looks at me. ‘You need to stop crying,’ he said. I was, like, ‘It hurts so bad, and I love the team, and I’m not gonna be able to play.’ ”

  Tedford asked Dilfer if he wanted to play the next week against Oregon State. Dilfer, who couldn’t even lift his hand off his hip, nodded that he did.

  “OK, now stop crying, because you’re probably going to really be crying in the next few days as we try to get this shoulder right,” Tedford told him. “You gotta trust me.”

  Tedford had Dilfer do a grueling set of arm raises with weights while the QB’s whole body was shaking. “I’m tearing up, I’m in so much pain,” Dilfer said. “He kept saying, ‘Trust me.’ That Thursday, I threw. Friday, I was cleared, and Saturday, I played against Oregon State.”

  Dilfer threw 4 interceptions and only 1 touchdown pass, but the Bulldogs were so fired up, they hammered the Beavers, 48–30.

  “I’ll never forget his teaching after that game,” Dilfer recalled. “ ‘Nobody knows what you did to play in this game, and we would never have won without you.’ I didn’t play good. But his point was that you’re awesome because of what you did leading up to it, not in the game. Of course, I remember the next Monday and him just ripping me for the four interceptions, but I also remembered what he’d just said after that game, and that was genius. I listened.”

  D
ilfer only tossed one more INT over the next ten games, while throwing 25 touchdown passes to lead the nation in passing efficiency. After the season, he opted to skip his senior season to enter the NFL Draft and was selected by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers with the sixth overall pick in the first round.

  During Dilfer’s time at Fresno State, Tedford refined his mechanics, tightening up his motion—and his mind-set in the pocket—coaxing the big QB to use his legs to buy time, opting to try to find the twenty-yard pass play rather than the six-yard scramble. Dilfer called Jeff Tedford the best coach he ever had in his football career.

  “He simply turned the light on,” Dilfer said. “He enlightened me that consistency comes with doing the little things, mechanics, discipline; all that will allow your athleticism to come out. You can’t just run around and be an athlete, be tough, have crappy mechanics, be inconsistent.”

  Years later Dilfer’s family repaid Jeff Tedford. Dilfer’s stepdad, an old football coach, had a former player whose son was pretty good. That kid, Garrett Cross, played tight end at Butte College. Dilfer’s stepdad told Tedford, then the head coach at Cal, he should check out Cross—at a junior college in Northern California—to recruit the tight end. Tedford liked Cross but loved the quarterback. Aaron Rodgers was 5′2″ when he began high school and didn’t sprout to be 6′ until his senior year, and by then it was too late for him to get on college football recruiting’s radar. Locally, no one doubted his arm—he was clocked at 91 miles per hour on a radar gun—and he had a 3.9 GPA. Regardless, Rodgers didn’t receive a single scholarship offer coming out of Pleasant Valley High School in Chico, California.

  At Butte, Rodgers threw 28 touchdowns and just 4 interceptions in his freshman season. Tedford offered him a scholarship as soon as he had a chance to visit him. To say that Rodgers emerged from the recruiting process with a chip on his shoulder would be an understatement.

  “A huge chip,” said Dilfer.

  Dilfer himself lost the edge he’d had at Fresno State once he made it to the NFL. “The biggest mistake was feeling like I’d gotten there,” Dilfer said, “like it was about the culmination of the hard work instead of the beginning of the hard work.

  “I had the worst three years any quarterback’s ever had in his first three years [in the NFL], and then I was humiliated, and from humiliation comes humility, and then I worked really hard, got back to who I was.” He earned a trip to the Pro Bowl in his fourth season, becoming the only Tampa Bay QB in franchise history to get selected, and led the Bucs to their first trip to the playoffs in fifteen years, but two seasons later he was benched for journeyman Eric Zeier by Coach Tony Dungy.

  The knock on Dilfer in Tampa, according to a St. Petersburg Times columnist in 2001 was: “The greater the pressure grew, the tighter he seemed to play. It is generally acknowledged that Dilfer is sometimes too smart for his own good. He overanalyzes his life. He thinks, when he should react.”

  Dilfer said he’d agree with the criticism after the first sentence. “I actually played pretty well in big moments if you look at my career,” he said in regard to a column written days before he became a Super Bowl–winning quarterback for the Baltimore Ravens. “But I do think I overanalyzed. I out-thought the room. Very true. I did tighten up, but I still won games. If I could go back and change anything, I’d try to be more reactive, more instinctive. Less analytical. Looser in big moments. My tightness wasn’t pressure. It was more people-pleasing. I tried to do it the right way instead of doing it the way that works.”

  Dilfer had signed as a free agent with the Ravens in 2000 as a backup to Tony Banks before taking over the starting job at mid-season. Despite the championship season, Baltimore still opted to sign free agent QB Elvis Grbac to a $30-million deal. Dilfer signed with the Seattle Seahawks, where Matt Hasselbeck was the expected starter. Dilfer won the starting job, but a knee injury and then a ruptured Achilles tendon derailed him again. He bounced from Seattle to Cleveland to San Francisco, starting twenty-nine games before retiring and joining ESPN as a commentator in 2008. His biggest contributions to some of his NFL teams came in locker-room pep talks, such as the one he delivered before Super Bowl XXXV.

  “I was always scanning the room, monitoring,” Dilfer said. “I’ve always had that awareness [of], ‘OK, what needs to be said? What is everybody waiting to hear? What do people need to have?’ I love self-help books and love reading great speeches and quotes. Those things resonate with me. I think they resonate with most people, just not all the time, right? So I’m always looking to give you the one thing that resonates in the now for you.”

  Dilfer was a natural on TV for some of the same reasons folks reasoned he struggled in his NFL playing career. He was analytical and thought before he reacted. He wanted to talk about the smarter stuff in the game of football but present it in a way that someone who didn’t play could grasp what he meant.

  “I think a lot of people make the mistake [of] trying to show how smart they are,” Dilfer said. “That’s not the goal. I don’t care how smart they think I am. I want you to love football more than you already do. Because I love it. I love the purity of it. I want you to love it as much as I do.”

  He referenced again the 2001 St. Petersburg Times column observing that he was sometimes too smart for his own good and overanalyzed his life: “A lot of my core values come from that, and I’ve been very transparent. I teach 95 percent from my failures, not my successes.

  “I can handle all the criticism as a coach and as an analyst, but I hate it when I get criticized in a way of, ‘Oh, he thinks he was better than [the player he was discussing], so that’s why he said that.’ I never come from that [place].”

  Dilfer was complimentary about all the former-QBs-turned-analysts, from Troy Aikman to Phil Simms to Ron Jaworski, and he also said he was grateful to studio hosts Rich Eisen, Chris Berman, and Trey Wingo, but the guy he said he learned the most from about TV was Mike Holmgren—his old coach in Seattle—a guy who had never done TV.

  “Mike Holmgren is the most gifted person I’ve ever been around at taking the super-complex and making it digestible,” Dilfer said, adding that the two of them would laugh all the time, because he often did the opposite. “I could overcomplicate anything—still can to this day, if I want to.

  “I can sit and talk to the Malcolm Gladwells of the world, or the professors, and talk these highly theoretical, complex, multilayered things, and I love it. It’s stimulating to me. Nobody else gets it; you’re living in a little bubble in these conversations, right? Mike could take a Fire Zone Blitz and the genesis of it from [longtime Pittsburgh Steelers defensive coordinator] Dick LeBeau and make it sound simple. And here I’d be, where I would give you the whole history of it, the different shades they used and disguises and why, and he’s just, like, ‘At the end of the day, this is what they’re doing.’ ”

  Mike Holmgren, like most of those close to Dilfer during his playing career, figured he’d go into coaching. Jeff Tedford tried to hire him for his coaching staff at Cal. Other NFL friends offered him coaching jobs, too, but Dilfer declined all of them. He told Tedford it was a job he was not ready for. Dilfer recognized that he didn’t have the ideal temperament for coaching at that level.

  “All these great head coaches, they’re so patient,” he said. “Holmgren is so patient with dipshits.”

  In the first two years after his football career ended, Dilfer spent much of his time—when he wasn’t on TV or on the golf course—taking inventory of his life. His office inside his Saratoga, California, home was littered with yellow notebooks filled with Dilfer’s random thoughts probing the issue of “What am I supposed to be doing?”

  Steve Stenstrom, the former NFL quarterback who took over as the president of Pro Athletes Outreach (PAO), a Christian program for athletes and coaches, became a mentor for Dilfer. Stenstrom also lived in Northern California and had kids around the same ages as Dilfer’s. They’d go out to eat and discuss what would be the best direction for Dilfer’s energy and s
pirit. The more they spoke, the more Dilfer came back to coaching, because, as much as he relished being as connected to football as he was while doing TV, there was still a void for him. That was right about the time ESPN asked Dilfer if he’d like to be involved with their program Elite 11, which the company had bought from Andy Bark. Bark had studied Dilfer’s work on TV. He was blown away by Dilfer’s knowledge of quarterbacking and his ability to communicate it.

  “I think he knows the position better than anyone I’ve ever been around,” said Bark, who had been around a long list of coaching innovators over the past three decades.

  Dilfer was fascinated by the opportunity. He’d always believed he could be a good coach but that he could be an even better mentor. The Elite 11 setting afforded him a chance to do that, but if he was going to get involved, he wanted to flip the model on its head.

  TO DO THIS THING right, to make the Elite 11 even more substantial in its space, Dilfer said, he had to incorporate some “soul-building stuff” into the process. “That was, without a doubt, the number one thing I wanted to address,” he said. “I wouldn’t be part of a ‘camp,’ because camps are lame. Camps determine whether you’re good at camping or whether you’re good at drills. There are very few transferable traits that come from traditional camps. You learn how to thrive in controlled environments without random elements being thrown at you. I said, if I was gonna do this, I wanted to discover the soul of the player as much as the talent. I wanted to create environments where you’d see them fail. That way I could find out about them.