The QB The Making of Modern Quarterbacks

by Bruce Feldman

  The show is a cross between The Real World and Hard Knocks, only starring seventeen-year-old jocks. College coaches privately try to pick Dilfer and his staff’s brains for intel on kids they’re recruiting.

  “When Andy asked me to take this thing over, it was already best-in-class,” Dilfer told the QB coaches. “There’s no doubt, the Elite 11 [camp] was best-in-class, but it had to be best-in-class and a TV show, and that’s not easy. It could not lose its authenticity. There’s people in this room who, two months into it, thought I was off my rocker, and I know who you are. They said, ‘You’re gonna get us all fired. It’s crazy, what you’re trying to do.’ But I kept pushing the envelope. I knew the player wanted more. I knew the coach wanted more. I knew the audience wanted more.

  “What’s happened over time is, what started as a camp has now become a cult. We’re making a change with the kids, and to me, that’s good. I settled for ‘good’ as a player. I was just good. Never great.

  “Good,” Dilfer repeated, with a tinge of disgust.

  “I am not going to settle for good with this. We’re going to be great. It is going to be great. We’re gonna take it to the community. At some point this is going to be a thirteen-week series. At some point this is going to be the second-biggest amateur sporting event in the country next to the Olympics. That’s where we’re going, but to do that, you have to start building internally.”

  Over the past few years, while he’s traveled the country working with young QBs, Dilfer and his staff also have been scouting private quarterback coaches.

  Several of the men seated around the room were former NFL backups who had noted the “quarterback guru” boom and decided to put up their own shingles.

  It was a niche business that had become a cottage industry catering to wealthy parents hoping that, with the right tutoring (at some $200 an hour), their sons could be the next Tom Brady. Or at least earn a $200,000 scholarship and be BMOC.

  The guy sitting right in front of Dilfer in the middle of the first row, twenty-seven-year-old Hunter Cantwell, spent three seasons in the NFL before being cut in 2011. Just ten feet from him was George Whitfield Jr., a San Diego man who once tightened up Cantwell’s mechanics and has since groomed everyone from Ben Roethlisberger to Cam Newton to Andrew Luck and been labeled by Sports Illustrated as “the Quarterback Whisperer.” From Ohio, Whitfield would fly down to Texas to work with his newest star protégé, Texas A&M’s Johnny Manziel, the 2012 Heisman Trophy winner. Behind Whitfield was Craig Nall, a Dallas-based coach who’d spent five seasons as Brett Favre’s understudy with the Green Bay Packers.

  Dilfer’s idea: to unify those coaches into his system, which was geared toward showing a quarterback a lot more than just how to throw a tight spiral.

  The QB-guru biz has been around for decades. Dilfer, though, was the first guy who ever tried to franchise it. And he had the cachet, the resources, and the platform of Elite 11—and ESPN—to try to make it happen. His vision would become a reality in a little more than twelve hours. Its name: TDFB.

  Billed as a “holistic coaching ecosystem that unites coaches & expands their influence,” TDFB’s rollout was doubling as Elite 11’s Super Regional at Ohio State. In addition to all the QB coaches in the room were: longtime NFL coach Norv Turner and his son, Scott, a wide receivers coach with the Cleveland Browns; the creators of eCoachSports, a video-analysis software system that conferences via camera, player, and tutor; the creator of Axon Sports, a high-tech, brain-training system geared to help quarterbacks process coverages faster; and Axon’s performance specialist, Joe Germaine, a former Buckeye and NFL QB who was the 1997 Rose Bowl MVP.

  “Tomorrow’s gonna be epic,” Dilfer said. “It’s gonna be epic, because at the end of the day, the person who benefits the most is the kid.

  “I don’t know if all of you totally get this. QB isn’t just the most important position in sports, but, ultimately, it’s also the most influential position in sports. What the dude with the ball does affects the lady in the office across the hall. It affects everybody. We’re talking about influencing the next generation of influencers. Tomorrow, we change the game.”

  • • •

  THE COACHES WEREN’T THE only ones who had traveled long distances with big aspirations for the weekend at Ohio State. Brandon Harris and his family had driven almost a thousand miles from their home in Bossier City, Louisiana, to get to Columbus. Football experts in the Bayou State regarded Harris, at the time a 6′3″, 180-pound junior at Parkway High School, as the most gifted QB prospect Louisiana had produced in more than a decade. The Internet recruiting analysts from Rivals.com, ESPN, and 247Sports each regarded Harris as one of the top five quarterbacks in the Class of 2014.

  Two months earlier, Harris had gone to the Elite 11 regional at the Dallas Cowboys practice facility and, by his own admission, struggled. The drills he was put through by the Elite 11 staff were new to him, he said. Harris graded his performance as a C. Harris, though, was optimistic that that weekend he’d earn a spot to the nationally televised Elite 11 finals.

  Harris acknowledged that the status of being anointed “an Elite 11 Quarterback,” given its history and exposure—and the fact that so many fans, especially on Twitter, gauge your worth by it—mattered to him. Truth be told, such things—such as whether a kid is ranked as a “five-star” or a “two-star”—are a big deal to most high schoolers, even if some are reluctant to admit it. Then again, the number of one’s Twitter followers often has meaning to people twice Harris’s age.

  Regardless, Harris wasn’t lacking for college scholarship offers. LSU, Texas A&M, and Ohio State were among the powerhouses in pursuit. The home-state Tigers waited until after they observed Harris throw during spring practice before offering him.

  “[LSU offensive coordinator and former NFL coach] Cam Cameron told me afterward that he’s been out to see four quarterbacks now, and I was the best of the group,” Harris had told reporters earlier in the spring. “He thinks I’ve got big-time NFL potential.”

  Harris had arrived a day early in Columbus for an “unofficial” Ohio State visit. He was hosted by Urban Meyer and Buckeyes offensive coordinator Tom Herman.

  “Coach Meyer said he really wants me to be the quarterback at Ohio State,” said Harris.

  Turned out, Meyer wouldn’t be the only big-time college head coach Harris saw on the trip to Ohio State. LSU head coach Les Miles and his assistant, Cam Cameron, made the trek to Columbus for Elite 11, too. Even though college coaches are not allowed by NCAA rules to attend any such camps, both Tigers coaches were in the clear, since their sons, Manny (Miles) and Danny (Cameron), a pair of high school sophomores in Baton Rouge, also were taking part in the Elite 11.

  The Elite 11 staff was curious to see how Brandon Harris performed. There were no doubts about his arm strength or his athleticism, although the staff wanted to see more polish on his passing skills instead of his being a “one-pitch pitcher,” relying on his fastball.

  “The big concern with him is about his mental makeup,” said one of the coaches. “When we saw him in Dallas, he kept telling people how he’d never really been coached before. Like, he was using the same excuse, the same crutch, on people. He sounded rehearsed. You wonder if he’s the guy who makes excuses when the chips are all on the table and things aren’t going right. You wonder how he’d carry a locker room. Will kids see right through him?”

  The critique, the kind you might hear an NFL scout offering his bosses while sizing up a college prospect, underscored how much the Elite 11 process had changed under Trent Dilfer. Before he took over, the selection process was largely reduced to rounding up the kids with the most recruiting buzz. Dilfer incorporated “war room” settings as part of the Elite 11 and its reality show, where the head coach (Dilfer) and his staff debated the merits of each QB. This can be a tricky proposition, given how many different schemes high school teams use and the wide variance in the level of the competition they play against. Or how good the coaching
these kids have had.

  THE LIST OF QUARTERBACKS who auditioned for the Elite 11 and didn’t make it over the past decade is as impressive as the group that did. Robert Griffin III, Colin Kaepernick, and Johnny Manziel all tried out for it but didn’t get selected—although Dilfer and his staff factor in anyone who went through an Elite 11 workout as part of their history. The Elite 11’s pedigree that Dilfer rattled off is heady stuff: 71 percent of the NFL’s quarterbacks in 2012 came through the Elite 11 process, including six of the past seven Heisman Trophy winners and five of the last seven number one overall picks in the NFL draft.

  After a forty-five-minute dinner break, members of the TDFB brass addressed the room and threw more staggering numbers at the QB coaches. However, this data didn’t relate to the past but more toward the opportunity in front of the folks in attendance.

  Stenstrom returned to the podium to hammer home the TDFB landscape. One of the slides he put up on a big screen read, “Across all sports, coaching is a $5.9-billion industry,” a stat that drew a few “oohs” from the room. He also noted that “75 percent” of coaches below the high school level coach because of availability, not ability.

  “That is staggering,” he said. “They’re not bringing expertise. You guys can tell ’em how to coach. You can get them ready and school ’em up.”

  Taylor Holiday, a former minor league baseball player, was handling the marketing side of TDFB and the Elite 11. “We’re gonna generate five million impressions in the next forty-eight hours,” he said, throwing out a projection that seemed unwieldy for a group of private contractors, many of whom didn’t even have websites. Still …“generate … five million … forty-eight hours.” Sounded big.

  Rick Hempel, an old IBMer, said he’d sold a golf-simulator company he’d built for $100 million. His new company, eCoach, was a TDFB partner. Hempel had seen the potential for his new venture after sending his fourteen-year-old son to a football camp. The week had cost Hempel $695. His kid loved it, but the downside: there was no follow-up with the instructors.

  “A lot of business opportunities [have] been left on the table,” he told the coaches. “Now you can tether to them.”

  Aside from Trent Dilfer, the speaker who did the best job of captivating the crowd was Jason Sada, the president of Axon Sports, a company billing itself as “the leader in athletic brain training.” Sada’s example of a person driving the same route so often, their mind seems to slip into autopilot mode to the point where they barely recall the act of driving, resonated with many of the coaches. Sada later evoked author Malcolm Gladwell’s ten-thousand-hour rule. In Gladwell’s New York Times best seller Outliers, he wrote that ten thousand hours of practice in your dedicated field is sufficient to be at your peak, citing the Beatles and Bill Gates as examples for his “Ten thousand hours is the magic number for greatness” claim.

  Operating off a similar principle, Sada and his colleague Joe Germaine, the former star Ohio State Buckeyes QB from the mid-’90s, showed the coaches a large video screen that flashed defensive alignments and coverages for a quarterback to identify and diagnose in rapid-fire sequencing.

  “You can get ten thousand reps without subjecting your body to wear and tear,” Germaine said, adding that many top NFL quarterbacks had trained on Axon Sports products at their headquarters in Arizona.

  “Guys,” Dilfer said, “this is really, really cool stuff right here.”

  What wasn’t offered over the course of the four-plus-hour meeting were some other sobering stats about the quarterback world: that in the twenty NFL Drafts prior to 2013, fifty quarterbacks had been selected in the first round, and about 40 percent of them proved to be busts, while only six of those fifty ever started—and won—a Super Bowl: Joe Flacco, Aaron Rodgers, Ben Roethlisberger, Eli Manning, Peyton Manning, and Trent Dilfer. Or that since 1990, there’d been twenty-seven QBs selected among the top five picks of the draft, and only six of those quarterbacks made it to more than two Pro Bowls.

  His Super Bowl ring notwithstanding, Dilfer was haunted by stats of quarterbacking futility. He spoke a lot about being on a “journey” that had begun late in his playing career, in 2006, his thirteenth year in the NFL—seven years after he won a Super Bowl with the Baltimore Ravens. He’d looked at Brett Favre and kept asking himself, “Why did he end up great, and I ended up average?”

  Dilfer, despite being 6′5″, 225 pounds in high school, probably wouldn’t have gotten a sniff from the Elite 11 people if it were around in his day. Or at least he wouldn’t have in its earlier format. Dilfer played in an option offense in Northern California, where he only threw about ten passes a game. Oregon and Colorado State wanted him as a tight end, but the coaches at Fresno State were intrigued by his arm and his athleticism.

  Dilfer blossomed at Fresno, leading the nation in passing efficiency in his junior season. He opted to leave early for the NFL and was selected number six overall in the 1994 draft by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He made it to one Pro Bowl, in 1997, but ended his career having thrown more interceptions (129) than touchdowns (113).

  “I was so disappointed in my career,” Dilfer told the coaches. “You get late in your career, and you go, ‘Man, I wish I would’ve done it differently.’ And, a lot of the ‘Man, I wish I would’ve done it differently’ circled back to knowledge. In 2006, I said I’m gonna go on this journey to figure out all this stuff that I don’t know, from the X’s and O’s side but especially the developmental side.”

  Dilfer came to the conclusion that many of the shortcomings of NFL quarterbacks, including his own, were rooted in a perspective that was flawed from the inside, where people, QBs included, got hung up on the wrong things. The young players and the young fans were growing up with a truly false perception of what made great quarterbacks great and how to appreciate very good quarterback play when they saw it, he told me days before heading to Ohio State. “I know this because I bought into it for the first half of my career.”

  Dilfer tried to hammer home that point to his new protégés in Columbus.

  “It’s the most influential position in sports and probably the most poorly evaluated position, too,” he said. “People dumb it down by using height, weight, arm strength, and a forty. That is how the majority of America has dumbed down the evaluation of the quarterback position. Well, everybody in this room who’s played knows your soul has more to do with your success than your arm strength. Your ability to ‘chunk’ and process large amounts of information in real time is probably more important than how quick your feet are. How about your ability to walk into a room and everybody in there feels your presence? How about when you’re 1–4, and you’re getting booed out of the stadium—I’ve had binoculars thrown at me as I’ve walked out of the stadium—how do you handle those situations? To me, those things are bigger than a lot of stuff that we’ve dumbed down the evaluation of the quarterback to.

  “To me, it’s QBA—Quarterbacking Architecture. We’re going to build better quarterbacks, so it’d better start with their soul. The essence of who that person is—their competitive disposition.”

  Dilfer described himself as a onetime “high-ceiling” guy who had all-world talent, but he said that by the time he was about thirty years old, he’d been reduced to a “game manager.” Or, worse still, a guy who played to not make a mistake, instead of making a play.

  “The QB position had been minimized by many of my coaches,” he said, “and my aggressiveness and intuitive feel for the position had been stripped away by years of ‘Don’t screw it up,’ negative-reinforcement coaching.”

  Dilfer has often said he believes in “nurture” over “nature.” Maybe that goes back to the optimistic bent he derived from being a quarterback all his life. That doesn’t mean he buys that anyone can be developed, even with the best coaching, to become the next Aaron Rodgers, but he’s convinced his group will create better QBs and better people. It’s part of what he’s getting at when he signs off on all his e-mails to his TDFB disciples with the tag �
��Coaching beyond the X’s and O’s.” That’s why every coach who becomes part of TDFB, even if they were an NFL starter, has to get certified by Trent Dilfer.

  “The accreditation process isn’t so we can put a stamp on you,” Dilfer told the coaches. “It’s to give you tools. There’s a lot of opportunities to make a lot of money and have a lot of influence. This is a thirteen-year study. And when I say I’ve geeked out on quarterbacks, it’s kinda pathetic. This is, at three o’clock in the morning, watching Tom Brady’s, Aaron Rodgers’s, and Philip Rivers’s fourth step on a five-step rhythm drop and trying to find a commonality. This is going into the mental side of the game and spending hours and hours with the greatest human-performance coaches in the world. Reading books. Studying the mind. Studying the soul. All built around the quarterback.”

  One of the biggest criticisms of the private-QB-coach business is that most of the drills the players work on don’t translate to the game on the field. That’s a pet peeve of Dilfer’s, too.

  “I don’t want any driving-range quarterbacks,” he said. “I don’t want grass basketball. Nothing pisses me off more than when one of our critics says we’re making them good ‘camp quarterbacks.’ That’s why every one of those stations has been thought out for hours about how it’s transferable to a gamelike situation.

  “Everybody in this room is good enough to pick some slappo off the street and teach him how to take a five[-step drop] and throw a hook. We can throw square-outs out the yin-yang. That’s easy. It’s hard to create environments that are transferrable to real football. That’s what we’re gonna do.”