The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks

by Feldman, Bruce

It had been decades since the area produced a group as highly touted. The benchmark for all Southern California QB classes was the 1979 group, led by future Hall of Famer John Elway of Granada Hills. That class included, among others, two other QBs who ended up in the NFL: Tom Ramsey and Jay Schroeder. Steve Clarkson, a record-setting quarterback at Wilson High, was a part of that class, too. That group, especially given the magnitude of Elway’s career, would seem tough to beat. Some analysts, including Scout.com’s Greg Biggins, a guy who spent over a decade evaluating quarterbacks for the Elite 11 staff, said the 2015 class had a chance to become the best crop of quarterbacks the area had ever had. The class’s emergence came on the heels of some growing skepticism about the merits of SoCal QBs.

  “Since Elway, the quarterbacks from that region have been little more than a series of flops,” wrote Jason Cole of Yahoo! Sports in 2013. “While Carson Palmer, Alex Smith, and Randall Cunningham have had solid careers in the pros, they are the best of an otherwise sad group.”

  The piece, titled “Sorry SoCal story: Abysmal run of QBs from region has NFL personnel searching for answers,” detailed a run of duds taken as high draft picks that began with Todd Marinovich (Santa Ana) and Dan McGwire (Claremont) in 1991 and continued in the twenty-first century with Kyle Boller (Santa Clarita); J. P. Losman (Los Angeles); Matt Leinart (Santa Ana); Mark Sanchez (Mission Viejo); and Jimmy Clausen (Westlake Village).

  Asked for his supposition on the SoCal QB struggles, Clarkson reasoned they stemmed from the myriad 7-on-7 teams that ended up taking away from a high school program’s off-season continuity. “Nowadays coaches are essentially held hostage, because they don’t know who is even gonna show up,” Clarkson said. “And that’s led to a lot of dissension and selfish actions that have caused a rippling effect. In Texas, the high school coaches have a lot more control over their players. The high school association in California is a joke. In Florida and Texas, if you go in there to try to run your own program, you’ll get strung up.”

  The most common theories were that many of these products of the private Southern California quarterback gurus like Clarkson had been coddled, over-programmed, and over-hyped at a key time in their development, which often bred a sense of entitlement. Perhaps because of all that, there was already plenty of skepticism in the college coaching world brewing around the touted SoCal Class of 2015.

  Brian Stumpf, who had been scouting talent for the Elite 11 and traveling the country while helping run the Nike football training camps for fifteen years, suspected that many touted Southern California quarterback prospects fizzled out due to a “burnout factor with guys who have been in QB training since fifth or sixth grade and going really hard, and maybe that’s pushing some kids away,” he said, “because at that point, you really don’t even know if they truly like football.”

  Two of those top-three-ranked quarterbacks were once groomed by Clarkson. Ricky Town Jr., who played at St. Bonaventure in the valley, was originally from Walnut Creek, California, in the Bay Area. A bio of Town was still up on a DeBartolo Sports website with Steve Clarkson’s logo. Town’s measurables were 5′4″, 110 pounds—from when he was in sixth grade. Among the info covered in the Q&A, Town said his favorite college teams were Texas and UCLA, and his favorite cereal was Fruity Pebbles.

  “I got him to move to Southern California as a seventh-grader,” Clarkson said. “He was a regular. He would fly in once or twice a month into Burbank, and he’d stay with me.” Clarkson stopped working with Town about three years after he moved from Chaminade High to Bonaventure. “Distance was an issue,” Clarkson said. Instead, Town trained with Clarkson’s son, Anton, a onetime quarterback at Oregon State, and later with Donovan Dooley, another LA-area QB coach.

  Town committed to play for Alabama in the summer of 2013, weeks before his junior season began. However, a few coaching moves shook up his recruitment. First, USC canned head coach Lane Kiffin early into the 2013 season and later replaced him with Washington’s Steve Sarkisian. Then, Crimson Tide offensive coordinator Doug Nussmeier left Tuscaloosa for the same position at the University of Michigan. Then, Alabama replaced him with Kiffin. Two weeks later, Town de-committed from Alabama and announced he was committing to USC, which still had a commitment from another 2015 quarterback, David Sills V, who had fallen off the recruiting radar and wasn’t ranked by any of the online recruiting sites among the top ten QBs.

  Seventeen-year-old Blake Barnett from Santiago High in Corona, California, was actually the first quarterback invited to the 2014 Elite 11 after he won a golden ticket at the January regional held at Santa Monica College. Barnett had spent the previous week training in Arizona, where Dilfer’s TDFB protégé Dennis Gile was headquartered. Barnett had been working with Gile since the past summer and considered him like an older brother, he said. Their focus: shortening his release and improving his footwork. “It was mainly in preparation for the Elite 11 camp,” Barnett said. “I wanted to be on top of my game for it.”

  Gile, who had been connected with Dilfer for about a year, has seen his business take off. He had helped groom some standout Arizona QBs, including UCLA star Brett Hundley, Kyle Allen, and Luke Rubenzer—two Elite 11 quarterbacks in 2013—but in recent months he’d seen his profile extend beyond his own backyard. One of his newer clients, he said, was the son of a billionaire in Texas who made his fortune off some sort of pain cream. Another new pupil, who he called the “best eighth-grader I’ve ever seen,” had a dad who “owns a gold mine” in Nevada.

  Golden ticket or not, after Barnett’s performance at the Elite 11 regional, Gile told the high school junior he didn’t think he deserved the invite, that he was trying too hard. “I promise you, he’s better than that,” Gile said.

  Barnett described his selection for the Elite 11 as a relief. “I was getting too nervous and tense,” he admitted.

  Barnett said that before the start of his junior season, his name “was nothing” and “not relevant at all” in the recruiting world. Then, in the season opener against Brady White’s team, Hart High, Barnett threw for 5 touchdowns and also ran for 100 yards. Barnett’s team lost, 56–49, as White completed 35 of 46 passes for 471 yards. The game was nationally televised on FOX Sports West, and soon college coaches were coming to Santiago to check out Barnett. UCLA offered him a scholarship a few weeks later, as did Notre Dame, which he said was a perfect fit for him, both academically and athletically. When news of Barnett’s commitment to Notre Dame broke around Thanksgiving of his junior season, Clarkson told the South Bend Tribune that ND was getting “a kid that comes around once every twenty years with that skill set. He’s got a huge, huge ceiling.” In the story, it said that Clarkson had been working with Barnett for about three months.

  Clarkson’s being linked to Barnett riled up Trent Dilfer and Gile, who said Clarkson’s game was “just blowing smoke up their ass.”

  “He’s so bitter,” Dilfer said of Clarkson. “Now he’s going after Gile. Now he’s going after George. Now he’s going after [TDFB coach] Craig [Nall]. These are my guys. I’ve chosen these guys for a reason, and I’m gonna defend them to the end.

  “Take this Blake Barnett kid. He’s really talented, a good kid—6′4″, runs 4.55, he’s the real deal, and it’s Gile who’s been training him, but Clarkson was trying to get to the dad, and now he’s taking all the credit for the kid going to Notre Dame.”

  Asked if he’d worked with other private quarterback coaches before, Barnett’s reply was, “No, not really.” He said he only threw with Clarkson two or three times and did so because it was “in the middle of the season, and I just wanted to get some extra work in, and he was out here. It’s local, and it’s not a six-hour drive to go to Arizona.”

  Barnett acknowledged that “it was awkward for a little bit” that Clarkson’s name was attached to him, especially given the young QB’s relationship with Gile and knowing Gile and TDFB’s animosity toward Clarkson.

  Clarkson knew he had become a target for many rivals, especially a
s more and more private quarterback coaches entered the business. He cited the recent 60 Minutes profile as validation, as if it was some form of a prime-time televised audit. “They’re looking into every nook and cranny, and if they find that you’re not truthful, you’ll get roasted,” Clarkson said of 60 Minutes.

  “You don’t call 60 Minutes. They call you, and usually it ain’t good. When they called and said they wanted to do this story, I felt comfortable. I had nothing to hide. I gave them carte blanche to do what they needed to do. They started to see these younger kids, and then the question became, ‘How young is too young?’ Well, the market has really changed, and I saw this six or seven years ago. When I first started, I usually didn’t get kids till they were sophomores and juniors in high school. But now, with all of these camps and combines and things like that, for the most part, if a kid is not good enough by his junior year, it’s already too late for him. And if he is good enough by his junior year, they already spend so much time traveling on that circuit, they really don’t have time to train as much. So your work is really done by that point. Nowadays, I really don’t take kids who are juniors anymore, because if you gotta come to me at that point, it’s probably too late.”

  Clarkson said the criticism and comments from rivals were laughable. “I’m probably one of the few guys who still teaches a guy at a young age and brings him up,” he said. “Now we’re in the ‘Day of the Instagram Coaches,’ as I call ’em, where they can get a photo op with the guy, and the next thing you know, they’re responsible for the guy being the first pick in the draft. That I find hysterical.

  “Let’s look at Elite 11, for example. I encourage my kids to do it if they can do it. I just try to temper their expectations. ‘Look, there is some seriousness, but there is also a show element to it. At any time you can’t have just eleven great guys. It’s a show. There’s always the guy no one else could find or no one knows. They have to be the ones who ‘discover’ him. That’s just the way it is. And then, there’s gonna be a guy who is really good, but he’s gonna come out of there not as good. If you go through the Elite 11, and the top eleven are who everybody expects them to be, then how is that a show? Is it anything that we didn’t know? Andy Bark is a friend of mine, and he started that a long time ago, and I’m a supporter of it. But in that process, he’ll have coaches who’ll coach a regional camp, and they will watch a guy take a few reps, and then they’ll take a few pictures with him, and the next thing you know, they ‘coach’ him. I understand that.

  “A lot of these guys—Dilfer and everybody else—they have platforms that were built on networks. If you put him on ESPN, and he’s an analyst, then all of a sudden, he has the biggest platform of all—the four-letter network. I built a platform that essentially built their platform. When we started back in 1986, none of [those coaches] would even be here. That’s the way we look at it. I’m probably the only guy who has his own platform based all on his own, not having millions of viewers to help get them started.”

  Not all the TDFB guys viewed Clarkson in a negative light. “I’ve never met him,” said Jordan Palmer. “Therefore, I have nothing against him. All I know is, I heard he made $600,000 off one quarterback over a four-year period. He’s helped a lot of guys have success, though. Matt Leinart won a Heisman and two national championships.”

  Whitfield and Clarkson had only crossed paths once, at a park where both happened to be training quarterbacks. Whitfield described the meeting as brief and cordial. Clarkson and Dilfer have actually never met, Clarkson said before adding, “But I heard he hates me. You’d have to ask him.”

  Dilfer and Clarkson did share a mutual friend—Perry Klein. The gymnast quarterback, who was Clarkson’s first client, was also big into the volleyball scene, the same as Dilfer, who happened to be taken in the same draft Klein was.

  After the NFL, Klein returned to Southern California and joined the family business, Classic Components. He still kept in touch with Clarkson. He has observed how the business that technically wasn’t a business when he was the first protégé had boomed. He’s also noticed how some others have “basically stolen Steve’s act” and have networked better, he said. “But, to take a raw guy, turn him into a legit quarterback—I don’t know if any of these other guys have done it,” Klein said. “Steve’s done it more than once. The problem with Steve, though, is that he’s too boisterous. It’s hard for him to take direction.

  “Everything I know about playing quarterback I learned from Steve. The one thing I think he hampered is that he made the game very simple. Guys complicate it, so it looks like they’re doing something way above. In the end, I had bypassed a lot of steps, and then I struggled to learn the basics later on—the steps that Steve skipped. I had to learn how to take a snap when I got to college.

  “Steve is overselling the dream. Every dad thinks their kid is gonna be in the NFL. They all believe in it. And when that dream doesn’t happen, and he moves on, people feel slighted.”

  To some around Los Angeles, Perry Klein was still “infamous,” he said. He realized that after he took his kid to pre-season, and someone asked him ‘Are you gonna transfer pre-schools?’ Now, Klein got why, because no one else back then was transferring around the way he was or getting the publicity he did. He vividly recalled how a news copter flew over his house one day to report on his story and how people talked about him as “this rich white kid taking advantage of these inner-city kids. On top of that, I was cocky back then and didn’t think of the ramifications. Maybe Steve even liked it: ‘Any publicity is good publicity.’ ”

  A SLEEPY-EYED, 6′4″ KID in a Vans hat and mid-calf-length socks with Lakers great James Worthy’s picture on them watched the first Elite 11 regional of 2014 from the sidelines. This was the quarterback Dilfer’s staff most hoped to see throw; however, Josh Rosen was nursing a shoulder injury that he’d played through while leading St. John Bosco to a 16–0 season and the California state championship weeks earlier.

  Yogi Roth, the former USC-assistant-coach-turned-Pac-12 Network-announcer/Elite 11 staffer, had scouting reports made up from his own film study on all the top quarterbacks going into the event. Among his notes on Rosen: “Deals off platform … Textbook mechanics …‘SoCal Personality’… Franchise guy … Had Macklemore on his highlight tape.”

  However, due to Rosen’s ailing shoulder, the Elite 11 staff had to wait two months to see him work in person. By the time the top prospects on the West Coast gathered for the Nike Football Training Camp at Redondo Union High in early March, Rosen had generated more buzz than any recruit in the country. One offensive coordinator at a Top 25 program who had been to one of Rosen’s games said he already threw better than some NFL quarterbacks he’d seen. Rosen’s pedigree was also a curiosity on the recruiting trail. Both of his parents were champion ice dancers. His mom, Liz Lippincott, a six-foot-tall Princeton grad, comes from the Wharton family—as in Wharton, the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious business school. Rosen’s dad, Charles Rosen, a six-foot-two Penn grad, is a prominent spine surgeon.

  Most interesting of all: Unlike nearly all the other touted QB prospects, Rosen hadn’t spent hundreds of hours by the side of any personal quarterback coach. He actually hadn’t spent any time with them at all. His mother had heard stories about how David Sills V made his pilgrimages from the East Coast to see Clarkson and thought it was “ridiculous.” Besides, she said, Josh had ended up with perhaps an even better method of honing his skills as a quarterback.

  By the time he was six, Rosen had been immersed in the world of competitive tennis. His parents took him to a weekly private lesson and for two other regular workouts. On weekends he had tournaments. At age ten, the pace of his tennis training had already escalated, and so had Rosen’s profile on the youth tennis circuit. By twelve, he was the number one ranked player for his age group in Southern California and was top fifty in the country, known in the tennis community for his blazing 105-mph serve and his creative game. The USTA was pushing for him to
enter its Player Development program, where many of the kids his age end up being home-schooled.

  As much as the kid loved the idea of not having to go to school, he didn’t like the idea that he’d be leaving his friends behind. He already had been active playing basketball and baseball on the side with his buddies. Rosen kept training in tennis, but he wanted to “stay a normal kid,” his mom, Liz Lippincott, said. A friend’s parent, who was a local Pop Warner coach, asked Lippincott to let him play football. Many of his other friends lobbied him to play, too. Rosen told his mom he really wanted to try football.

  “I just thought he’d try it and get it out of his system,” she said. “But then I saw this other person emerge. He was so into it, and after the season was over, he asked, ‘Mom, can I do another season?’ ”

  Rosen admitted he did better than he’d thought he would at football. “At that moment I felt like I should probably pursue it,” he said.

  On the courts, though, Rosen still excelled, but he was growing weary of the lonely tennis lifestyle. His older sister had emerged from the rigors of tennis and become a top player at Emory University, but he grew to resent the sport. “Football is a cakewalk compared to tennis,” Lippincott said. “It’s tough on the body, because the repetition is relentless. It’s year-round [training]. We had a whole summer of flights and national tournaments, and finally he just said ‘Yuck!’ and quit it cold turkey.”

  Rosen was invigorated by football. “The misery ended” was how he described leaving tennis behind. “Tennis was a tough time for me, but then I came into my own. A lot of this [football] recognition is pretty nice. It is just a really fun sport. You’re bringing all these people to a game instead of just your parents. It’s just a different energy.”

  His arm strength turned the heads of other kids and high school coaches. He was recruited to Southern California high school St. John Bosco and was so impressive quarterbacking the Braves’ JV team as a freshman that Fresno State offered him a scholarship. Rosen’s mom is convinced his skill set as a quarterback was actually honed by those thousands of hours on the tennis courts.