The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks

by Feldman, Bruce

  “Mechanics are the easiest things to teach,” House said. “Conditioning? Well, it takes no talent to get in shape. Nutrition is the toughest sell, because these kids can eat cotton balls, and they’ll survive. When it comes to the mental/emotional [development], unless you tell stories and recruit the audience, they’ll gloss over on that. I went ahead and got my PhD in [Sports Psychology] because too many guys were failing with mental, emotional issues, and I had no clue what to do. I figured if I could bring in some academic help, maybe that’d give me some direction on what to do with my practical experience.”

  House, though, is skeptical of many of the sports psychologists who have flooded the marketplace in recent years: “A lot of them are useless. They talk about visualization without explaining what it does. Seeing versus feeling.”

  House said he could transform an average high school kid into a college quarterback.

  “And there’s research behind this, too. It’s called Windows of Trainability,” he said. “If your base [of knowledge] is broad enough, you can teach anything. You heard about the two Indian kids, right? That was us here. They’d never thrown a baseball in their lives. and then six months later, they signed pro baseball contracts.”

  House’s “two Indian kids”—Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel—were the first athletes from India to sign a professional baseball contract. They were the products of a reality show, The Million Dollar Arm, the brainchild of J. B. Bernstein, a sports agent from LA.

  Bernstein figured that in a country with more than a billion people, there had to be some baseball talent. The two nineteen-year-olds were picked from a group of more than 37,000 who tried to throw a baseball in all sorts of curious ways. Singh and Patel, both former javelin throwers, each clocked faster than 85 mph on the radar gun to earn a ticket to Southern California, where they’d end up being trained by House for six months. Five years later, Singh was still with the Pirates organization, and Disney made a movie called Million Dollar Arm starring Jon Hamm as Bernstein and Bill Paxton playing House.

  Asked if, knowing what he knows now, he could have turned himself from an average high school quarterback into an NFL quarterback, House said no chance.

  “I didn’t have the physical tools. I didn’t have the arm speed. I might’ve been able to throw [the ball] accurately, but I couldn’t throw it far enough. An 82-mile-per-hour fastball doesn’t translate into a 75-yard pass. Foot speed, arm speed, being able to jump—those genetic things—I could refine it and make it very efficient, but my top end would be on the low end of what was acceptable.”

  HOUSE WAS SURROUNDED BY believers. The fifty-something-year-old guy who stood behind him jotting down key points on a sandwich board while House gave his morning lecture was really in the import/export business. He’d been helping House out for three years. He got into it after he brought his son, who had become a pitcher at USC, to him. House’s “football guy” was twenty-seven-year-old Adam Dedeaux, whose grandfather was legendary USC baseball coach Rod Dedeaux, the man the stadium was named for. The elder Dedeaux won eleven national titles before passing away in 2006, when his grandson, Adam, was a left-handed freshman relief pitcher for the Trojans. The younger Dedeaux was a product of Orange County’s storied football-powerhouse program Mater Dei High, the high school that produced Heisman Trophy–winning QBs Matt Leinart and John Huarte. Dedeaux had been a quarterback until Jason Forcier, one of a trio of brothers from San Diego whose family had spent thousands of dollars on private quarterback training, transferred in, prompting Adam’s move to tight end. Dedeaux majored in policy planning and development at USC, figuring he’d go into real estate if a career in sports didn’t work out. In essence, he’s gotten a graduate degree in coaching from being at House’s side for the past five years.

  “Going to school would certainly be beneficial, but I’m essentially learning everything I could possibly want from him,” said Dedeaux.

  House was at his best when his students had just enough knowledge to be informed on a topic but not spot-on. That created the epiphanies, when 300-level students became 500-level students, exploring the nuances, much more than the basics of top athletes.

  HOUSE: What’s the most important pitch in baseball?

  “Strike one,” replied one of the minor league pitchers. Sounded like a good answer.

  HOUSE: Wrong. The next pitch. The best pitch in baseball is strike one. What’s the most important count?

  “1–1,” the Yankees exec in the wraparound shades answered. “You either go way ahead or way behind.”

  The guy was correct. But … House was quick to quantify what way ahead or way behind actually meant.

  “A .250 hitter becomes a .300 hitter if you throw a ball,” House said. “If you throw a strike, he becomes a .200 hitter.”

  House’s questions came rapid-fire, sandwiched in a mix of science, psychology, and personal anecdotes. “What are the four outcomes based on process? Do you have any idea?” he asked, looking around the weight room. “In a game of failure coached by negative people in a misinformation environment, you have to create your own confidence. What’s the difference between being confident and cocky?”

  Silence.

  “If you take care of process, results are going to happen,” House said. Results, yes. Good results, not necessarily.

  House’s breakdown of process:

  If you have a bad process and end up with a bad outcome, well, you deserve it.

  If you have a bad process and end up with a good outcome, you’re lucky. Ever been around a player who says, ‘I’d rather be lucky than good?’ Run from ’em.

  If you have a good process and end up with a bad outcome, you’re unlucky.

  If you have a good process and end up with a good outcome—”

  House doesn’t finish the sentence. Instead, he downshifts. “How do you succeed in baseball?”

  “Fail one time less than your competition,” said the minor leaguer/substitute teacher.

  HOUSE: Say it again.

  “Fail one time less than your competition.”

  “Let’s go broader,” House said. “Can anybody tell me the difference between stress and anxiety?”

  “One’s panicking, and—” answered one of the pitchers.

  HOUSE: Stress is a ten-pound load for a five-pound box. Anxiety is hormonal. Stress is physical. Anxiety is adrenaline and all that good stuff. You want to be a little anxious. It’s the feeling you miss the most. When you’re walking between those lines, and you’re going EREREAAAA! That doesn’t happen in the real world. Choking is thinking too much, and panicking is not thinking enough. If you think you can or you think you cannot, you’re right.

  How many thoughts do you have a second? Forty. Your subconscious processes eleven million a second. What’s gonna win, your thinking or your feeling?

  I did better up than I did down. You have to know yourself. Is it OK to be afraid? Yes.

  That led into the “Thinking Triangle”—the person you are, the person you want to be, and the person people see.

  “Why did coaches leave me alone?” House asked.

  “Because you threw strikes?” one of the younger pitchers responded.

  HOUSE: Because they didn’t give a shit. I was the tenth or eleventh guy.

  “The thing that screws all you guys up is, you care too much about what other people think. You care more about results than process. How much time do you care about the last pitch? Thirty seconds? We call that ‘anchor.’ And then you’re not ready for the most important pitch of your life. The only pitch that matters is the next pitch.

  “One of the best things about Nolan Ryan is, right after his seventh no-hitter, he went to the ice and the bucket and started preparing for the next one. He told the media, ‘I’ll talk about it, but this game is over.’ Brees had one of the worst games of his career Monday night in Seattle. We’re texting back and forth. Their plane had a mechanical failure. They were sitting on the tarmac at 7:00 a.m. He wasn’t sitting on the l
oss. He knew, ‘We have a short week.’ He was already looking at game film of Carolina.”

  [Brees led the Saints to a 31–13 win over Carolina in the game by completing 30 of 42 passes for 313 yards and 4 touchdowns.]

  “Why is Drew Brees so good? His process. He manages the process. It didn’t happen last year. He threw back-to-back pick-sixes last year. He’d never done that before. He called me and said, ‘This is driving me nuts. I can’t figure out what I did wrong.’

  “I said, ‘Believe. Close your eyes. What’s the difference between visualizing and seeing? Try this, and look at the pick-six, and turn it into a touchdown. Ninety trillion cells aren’t anchoring on a pick-six. We just reprogrammed a touchdown.’

  “It’s the ‘Optimism Bias.’ You can’t change reality, but you can change your perception of reality. The people who can take reality and put a positive spin on it—and that’s called ‘Learned Optimism’—they’re the guys who survive in baseball if all things are equal. You’re your own island. Not every coach has your best interest at heart. Remember Occam’s Razor: the simplest solution. Don’t overthink it. The best players don’t always win. The best prepared players always win.”

  Near the end of House’s lecture, he asked for everyone in the room to say one thing they’d learned from the session. He later said he learns from the kids more than they learn from him. “Why do I ask questions? Sender-receiver feedback. You can learn from people who aren’t even quite right.”

  Just as House’s students got off their weight benches to begin their workouts, his most famous protégé entered the weight room wearing a Jockey T-shirt. A muscular 6′3″, 230-pound Tim Tebow stood out from all the tall, lanky pitchers with their faces barely visible under their ski hats and ball caps pulled down to the bridges of their noses. Tebow arrived beaming. He literally couldn’t seem to stop smiling. House was busy chatting with a thirty-one-year-old pitcher from Australia and didn’t notice that Tebow was in the building until he heard the laughter.

  Tebow broke out his Tom House impression for the import/export guy. It was equal parts House and the old Dana Carvey SNL spoof of John McLaughlin.

  “Tim, what is a hot girl?” Tebow asked himself. “Well, Tom, it’s any girl who is at least an eight—”

  “WRONG! It’s a …”

  House laughed for a few seconds. Then shook his head, saying, “The fact that he’s making fun of me means I’m getting through to him.

  “OK, Tim, what do you want to do today?”

  TEBOW: Get better.

  HOUSE: How are you going to get better?

  TEBOW: By working on the process. Harder.

  That was exactly the kind of answer House wanted. He smiled as he exited the weight room while Tebow began to stretch.

  BY EARLY DECEMBER, AS NFL teams geared up for the playoffs, Tim Tebow had been in LA training with House for three straight months, going at least four times a week. The former first-round draft pick showed up right after he got released by the Patriots. Prior to his stint with New England, Tebow had spent one season with the Jets before they released him.

  “I will remain in relentless pursuit of continuing my lifelong dream of being an NFL quarterback,” Tebow wrote on Twitter.

  The merits of Tebow as an NFL quarterback became the most polarizing topic the league had had in years. In college at Florida, Tebow was a hero to many. He helped spark the Gators to two national titles. In 2007, he won the Heisman. His style was that of a throwback. A bruising runner, Tebow was the Gators’ power back, bulling his way for yards in an offense that often operated like the old Single Wing with a few modern-day wrinkles tacked on.

  Tebow’s throwing mechanics, with his elongated motion, left many football men shaking their heads, but he still put up gaudy numbers, leaving college as the SEC’s all-time leader in passing efficiency, and he was second on the NCAA’s all-time list. Tebow also was the SEC’s career leader in completion percentage and touchdown-to-interception ratio. NFL analyst Jon Gruden, a former Super Bowl–winning coach, told the Orlando Sentinel that Tebow could “revolutionize the game.” Another Super Bowl–winning coach-turned-TV-analyst, Tony Dungy, said he would use a Top 10 pick to select Tebow, even though he “doesn’t have the classic throwing motion” and “doesn’t have the accuracy.”

  Others were more skeptical. Jimmy Johnson told Sporting News Radio, “I don’t think Tebow can play in a pro style of offense—not quarterback,” adding that he viewed the former Florida star as more of a candidate to play H-back. The anonymous quotes from NFL personnel men were even less flattering toward Tebow, whose well-publicized religious views only made him that much more of a hotbutton debate subject. For many, Tebow resonated because of his clean-cut image and because he was devout. He spoke about his faith in public settings, visited prisons, and even referenced Bible verses in the eye black he wore on his face during college games. He was a bona fide phenomenon, but that came with an undertow. Many recoiled at Tebow—or at least the idea of Tebow—as if he was some over-saturated pop-music act. He was like a one-man version of Duke basketball or Notre Dame football.

  Despite all the speculation that Tebow didn’t have the skill set to be an NFL quarterback, the Denver Broncos traded up to select him with the 25th pick of the draft. He started three games as a rookie in 2010. Tebow began the 2011 season as the Broncos’ backup QB, but after a 1–4 start, Kyle Orton was benched at halftime, with Denver trailing the Chargers by 16 points. Tebow rallied the Broncos, but they ended up losing 29–24. Tebow, though, emerged as Denver’s new starter, and the struggling team started winning. With Tebow starting, the Broncos won seven of their next eight games, even though his passing skills were, at best, shaky. Denver even made the playoffs and won its wild-card game over Pittsburgh after Tebow connected with Demaryius Thomas on an 80-yard touchdown pass in overtime. The next week, Denver was blown out by New England, 45–10. Tebow finished the season with the lowest passing completion rate (46.5 percent) in the NFL. Two months later, he was traded to the Jets for a couple of middle-round draft picks but was cut after one season, being used primarily as a special teamer.

  Right around the time word started to spread that Tebow had been cut by the Patriots, House got a call from Tom Brady: “I think Tim is gonna call you, because he feels like you might be the last option he has.” Two days later, Tebow showed up at USC ready to work. Tebow had actually worked with House for a week in 2012 right before he went to the Jets.

  “We actually had him throwing correctly, but he didn’t have enough reps, and he went right back to the old neuro-pathway programming as soon as the intensity hit,” said House. “He was worse when he showed up this time around than before he went to the Jets. He was all over the place.”

  House was just one of many private quarterback coaches who had a crack at “fixing” Tim Tebow. Coming out of Florida, Tebow worked with college QB coach Noel Mazzone (who was the offensive coordinator at Arizona State at the time) and his son, Taylor. In 2013, he spent a few weeks training in Bradenton, Florida, at the IMG Football Academy with former Florida State Heisman Trophy winner Chris Weinke, who tweaked how Tebow’s feet were aligned when he began his motion. There was also a stint with David Morris, Eli Manning’s backup at Ole Miss, who has a quarterback-training business based in Mobile, Alabama. Then, before Tebow went to camp with the Jets, he trained with Steve Clarkson, who said he solved Tebow’s slow, “looping” throwing motion by changing his footwork and incorporating some Tai Chi into the workouts. A few weeks later, more Tebow coaches spoke out about their tweaks with the former first-rounder. Dennis Gile, a protégé of Trent Dilfer, and Mike Giavondo told reporters they’d worked with Tebow for three months in Arizona, while Clarkson actually only came down for one day and went to the media claiming credit.

  “We are getting tired of Clarkson taking credit for guys, going on radio stations,” Gile told the website SB Nation. “I don’t want to get in a war with him. We put in a lot of time and effort for nothing to really he
lp this guy. [Tebow] became a good friend of ours, and he is a good guy.”

  NFL teams probably didn’t doubt whether he was a good guy. A good quarterback was a different story. Worse still, he was a quarterback who came with a legion of media in tow. That had become Tebow’s baggage. And that made him not worth all the drama.

  “Everybody’s afraid of Tim,” House said. “There’s too much stuff that comes with Tim. When he showed up here, he was 10,000 reps behind any other NFL quarterback. He’d never been given a tool kit on how to fix [his mechanics]. With good intentions, he wasn’t getting any help. Everybody pulls for him, but good intentions with bad information is just as bad as no information at all.”

  For the first month of training sessions, Tebow asked House not to allow people into the stadium, because the former college star didn’t want anyone to know he was there. House didn’t bother to look at Tebow’s old film.

  “I don’t look at bad film,” he said. “We work with what our statistical model has validated, and then we work from there. It’s what we’re supposed to be dealing with right now. We know for a fact that he had premature rotation issues on the front side, and his back foot came off the ground too soon, but that shows up when he’s throwing. You don’t have to look at it on film.”