“Ryan Leaf can’t play, and I know it,” said Jones. “Knowing he can’t do it, you call a different game.”
The next week against Seattle, Leaf had what would prove to be the best game he would ever have in the NFL, going 25 of 52 for 281 yards. “We have our final drive first-and-goal from the 3, down 27–20,” Jones said. “We have time for four plays. He misses every pass. I shouldn’t have thrown it, but we were struggling running the ball.”
A week later, at Kansas City, on the opening drive, Jones predicted to his team that they’d spring a receiver wide open on a deep route. Too bad Leaf overshot the guy by five steps. “The whole sideline’s crushed. I said, ‘Ryan, I don’t think I’m going to be here at the end of the year. I’m going to play this [backup Craig] Whelihan guy. You just take your licks and get ready for the next year.’ ”
Jones was correct. He was canned after the season, and Leaf went down as one of the biggest busts in NFL history. Jones left the NFL and has since become one of the most successful coaches in the college game. In his first season at Hawaii, he sparked the biggest improvement in NCAA football history. He led the Rainbows to a 23–4 record in his last two seasons at Hawaii before accepting the SMU head coaching job. In Dallas, he took over a team that went 1–11 in his debut season and the following year went 8–5, making a bowl for the first time in twenty-five years since before the Mustangs got slammed by the NCAA’s Death Penalty. Jones also had become one of Niednagel’s staunchest supporters, along with Danny Ainge, the president of the Boston Celtics, who said, “You can take Red Auerbach, Jerry West, Phil Jackson—I’d take Jon Niednagel.”
Jones had Niednagel “brain-type” his players at Hawaii and at SMU for more than a decade. Jones always had a list of seven or eight players for Niednagel to evaluate when the coach brought him out to his practices. The players were usually good athletes who should have won starting positions but hadn’t because they didn’t respond well, Jones said. Niednagel then gave him direction on what positional moves should be made to better fit each player to his more “natural” position.
“It’s fascinating stuff,” Jones said. “I had some guys playing positions who I thought should be better than they were. He talked with them and then told me, ‘OK, this guy [Reagan Maui’a] needs to be a running back,’ and I had him playing defensive line. He was a 380-pound backup nose guard. I went to him. He had one year of eligibility left. I said, ‘You’re gonna have to trust me on this. If you lose a hundred pounds, I’ll get you into the NFL as a running back.’
“[Maui’a] looked at me like I was crazy. But he lost a hundred pounds. I put him at running back, and he got drafted in the sixth round, and he’s still playing in the NFL. And he’d never played running back in his life.
“He’s been 100 percent right on every kid we’ve talked to him about.”
Niednagel said he could talk to a person and gauge how his mind was wired by his voice inflection and diction as well as by eyeballing his facial features.
“Their eyes are more hawkish or more narrow, which is a telling factor,” his son, Jeremy Niednagel, said of ESTPs. “Even their hair, their gait—whether they go up on their toes when they walk—are indicators.”
Niednagel, who worked out of a tiny south-central Missouri town (population: 453), met with much skepticism from the science community, who took issue with the fact that he had no advanced scientific degree. Instead, he had a BS in finance from Long Beach State and had previously worked as a commodities trader. But he was quick to point out that he’d had almost forty years of research. He maintained that 60 percent of athletic ability came from personality type, and the other 40 percent stemmed from external factors, including how they were coached. He first started noticing the variances in motor skills when he coached his kids’ Little League soccer and baseball teams. Soon, he was testing out his theories.
“I’d draft certain kids even though they’d never played before,” he said. “I’d talk to the kid. I knew that, by halfway through the season, just by my coaching him, he’d be better than a kid who’d looked ten times better in the workout.” Niednagel, then living in Southern California, had so much success as a Little League coach, there were stories about him in the Los Angeles Times. Word spread about Niednagel to pro sports teams always desperate for an edge.
Niednagel loved his connection to the sports world. Even though the Celtics paid him a reported salary in the six figures, Jones had never actually paid him for his guidance.
“I just fly him over,” Jones said. “Jon sensed that I got it, and he wanted to help, and that I was more open than any coach he’d ever talked to.” Jones, in his second season at SMU—after he’d led the Mustangs to their best season in twenty-five years—tried to get Niednagel hired as a professor in the Sports Management department.
“If he was a professor, I could run the recruits by him, but they wouldn’t let me do it,” Jones said. “[Niednagel] wanted to do the science to give validity to what he was doing, and being a professor at the university would do that for him. [SMU athletics director] Steve Orsini approved it, but we didn’t have the money in the department to do it.”
Jones had become well-versed in the sixteen personality types from Myers-Briggs, which were at the root of Niednagel’s work. The letters are based on the pairings of psychological attributes:
E-extraverted versus I-introverted.
F-feeling versus T-thinking.
J-judging versus P-perceiving.
N-iNtuitive versus S-sensing.
Niednagel tweaked the older verbiage and came up with his own terminology, which he officially went with in 2011 when he published a book about parenting. Extraverted (E) became Front (F); Introverted (I) became Back (B); Sensing (S) became Empirical (E); iNtuitive (N) became Conceptual (C); Feeling (F) became Animate (A); Thinking (T) became Inanimate (I); Perceiving (P) became Right (R); Judging (J) became Left (L). Niednagel also reduced the profiles even further with numbers, as if the players were dishes off a fast-food menu, along with one buzzword. “ESTP,” the type Peyton Manning is, became “FEIR”—Front Empirical Inanimate Right—or a #5, the “Opportunist.” The full definition: “smooth operator,” deal-maker, tactical, enterprising, adaptable, persuasive, energetic, seeks fun and excitement, athletic, enjoys the moment, realistic, good-natured, self-focused, body- and clothes-conscious, entrepreneur, negotiator, promoter, fine motor skilled.
“I took it out of that bogus Myers-Briggs world and tried to take it into the brain and what it’s really representing,” Niednagel said. “More than anything now, I just use numbers, 1–16. They all have a logical sequence in terms of the mind and the motor skills. And it’s more memorable. I’m finding that dumbing down as much as I can helps them to learn it and retain it better.”
Jones could rattle off the names of all the great quarterbacks who were ESTPs (FEIRs): Joe Montana, John Elway, Johnny Unitas, Joe Namath, Jim Kelly, Troy Aikman, Terry Bradshaw, Fran Tarkenton, and Brett Favre. An eye-catching majority of the Hall of Fame quarterbacks who played in the past thirty years are this one personality type. So were other Super Bowl–winning quarterbacks Ken Stabler, Phil Simms, Joe Theismann, and Trent Dilfer. Jones used the famous NFL Films anecdote of Joe Montana, the moment before beginning a last-minute, game-winning, touchdown drive in the Super Bowl, walking into the huddle and matter-of-factly pointing out John Candy in the crowd to one of his linemen as an example of a guy wired to thrive under pressure.
“ESTPs, under pressure, play their best,” said Jones. “Whether it’s a two-minute drill or we have to win the game on this drive, they play their best. Manziel—I would guess that he’s ESTP. When the game is under pressure, he makes a lot of plays. I watched him in the Alabama game, and he made big play after big play. I’m pretty sure he is.
“I had this conversation with [former Denver Broncos head coach] Dan Reeves. He wanted to get rid of John Elway. He said Elway couldn’t learn the playbook. But guess who was so great in the two-minute dril
l? John Elway. Guess who was calling all the plays then? John Elway.
“Can another guy who doesn’t have the same brain type perform at a very successful level? Yes, he can, but you have to know that he’s not one of those guys, and you have to be able to manage the game so that you don’t put him into situations to lose the game, and you take some of the weight off him in pressure situations.”
The latter is a key point that both Jones and Niednagel stressed. As much as it was ideal to find an ESTP quarterback, it was vital to ID what kind of personality type your QB had, so you could alter accordingly how you coached the guy.
Peyton Manning had the “best QB package of all time, thanks to his smarts, tactical spatial logic, peripheral and stereoscopic vision, body balance, and fine motor fluidity and prowess and decision making, etc.,” Niednagel wrote on his blog on braintyping.com. “These DNA attributes also radically separate him from baby brother, #2 BT Eli, who we predicted from his NFL start would never consistently play to the excellence of prodigy Peyton.”
Jones was stunned when he learned that Tom Brady wasn’t ESTP (a #5) but rather an ENFP (a #9). ENFPs typically are too smart and empathetic to thrive as quarterbacks, because they have so much exuberance and passion. They, too, like ESTPs, are right-brain dominant, meaning perceiving and not judging. Translation: He was less likely to dwell on things and freeze at crunch time. The left brain has a more methodical bent, Niednagel said. “It is self-critical, and when it makes a mistake, it dwells on it.” Drew Brees also is an ENFP.
“Brady and Brees are very atypical for their wiring,” Niednagel said. “Most #9s end up as major busts. Brady was as good as anybody Belichick could ever coach as a #9. He’s a team guy who wants to please, whereas Peyton [Manning], because of the way he’s been raised, wants to please, too, but his inborn nature is more tough-minded in the moment, and he wouldn’t be as apt to not toe the line [the way] Favre was. That’s why when [then-Packers Coach Mike] Holmgren said in Super Bowl XXXI, ‘Don’t you dare mess with the plays,’ and then on the second play, Favre audibled, and they scored a touchdown. That’s just the nature of #5s. It’s how they function in the moment. They have incredible vision. They don’t script anything. They just can improvise. That’s why Peyton Manning is so superior at the line of scrimmage. Peyton Manning just has that tactical mind-set that is off the charts. #5s are not super-cerebral typically. Peyton is regarded as that, but of course he was taught by his dad, an NFL player who is a #13.”
Niednagel’s example of Favre’s Super Bowl audible proved to be one of the biggest moments in a Hall of Fame career. Favre, then twenty-seven, uncorked a 54-yard touchdown pass on the game’s second offensive play to torch Bill Parcells’s New England Patriots defense in what would become a 35–21 Packer win.
The play was supposed to be 322 “Y” Stick, a pass designed to go to tight end Mark Chmura on a short, sideline pattern, but instead Favre opted for “74 Razor,” which enabled him to connect with receiver Andre Rison on a deep post pattern.
“As I came to the line, I saw the safeties cheating up, and the linebacker over [Chmura] looked like he was coming,” Favre told Sports Illustrated. “I figured they had seven guys rushing me. Incredible. We had never seen this from the Patriots on film, and if I couldn’t get out of the play, we’d be in trouble. I checked to see that we had enough time on the clock to audible—you need at least seven seconds to change a play and get everybody to hear you—and we did. I knew I had to check to something with great protection and something that attacked the area the safeties were leaving open.
“It’s not like I have a Rolodex in my head and just flip through plays till I get to one I like. After you’ve been in a system for a while—boom—the right play just comes to you. And 74 Razor just came. [Chmura] and both backs stayed in [to block]. And the second I took the snap, both of the safeties charged to cover a back and [Chmura]. The linebackers came. They had seven guys rushing and only two corners covering deep. That second, I thought to myself, ‘Yeah! Just what I expected!’ ”
Even more curious about Favre’s audible was, according to Packers assistant coach Gil Haskell, the team hadn’t even practiced 74 Razor one time all season.
Jones actually was the Falcons’ offensive coordinator when the team drafted Favre in the second round in 1991, years before he’d ever heard of Jonathan Niednagel. Favre lasted one season in Atlanta before he was traded to Green Bay for a first-round pick. He attempted four passes, had two of them intercepted, and the other two went incomplete.
“I thought Favre was inaccurate and drunk for eighteen straight months. [Atlanta starting QB] Chris Miller was in the Pro Bowl, and we needed help on defense,” recalled Jones, who wasn’t surprised to learn that Favre was wired to thrive under pressure. “If you go back in college, he won so many games on the last drive. In two years, I think he had thirteen wins, like, ten of them came on the last drive.”
Jones said if he knew then what he knows now, the Falcons never would have traded Favre to Green Bay. “I[t] would’ve been different if I knew and I knew how to coach him,” he said. “In two-minute situations, let him call his own plays. In those heated situations, Kelly went no-huddle; Favre, Elway, Marino—they all called their own plays. Let them lead.”
Jones has never had an ESTP in college. He admitted he tried to type guys all the time, especially quarterbacks, and he always ended up wrong. “They all end up my brain type, ENTPs. I’ve looked for ’em. I tried to find ’em, but I haven’t had one, but what Jon [Niednagel] does, which is really important for coaches, is he can tell you how to say things to a particular brain type that will be received better, and they will respond better. Basically he teaches you how to coach them better. He’ll tell you, ‘For him to play at the highest level under pressure, this is what you need to say and how you need to say it as a coach. Don’t tell him what to do. Ask him what he thinks, even if you don’t want to do that; then you trigger it this way to get him to see it in a timely fashion.’ I did that with [NCAA career passing leader] Timmy Chang, and it really changed him.”
“Type #13s are typically the ace on baseball pitching staffs, but their wiring isn’t optimum for quarterbacks,” Niednagel said. Still, it seemed that as the NFL was becoming more open to mobile QBs, more and more #13s were thriving. Aaron Rodgers was a #13, and so were Andrew Luck, Russell Wilson, Colin Kaepernick, and Robert Griffin III.
“Most of those #13s have squirrelly mechanics, because they don’t have dominant motor skills,” Niednagel said. “They’re so loosey-goosey. They can get a whip [motion]. They have the biggest serves in tennis, the longest drives in golf. When they learn, with a lot of practice, how to use their whole bodies, they can get a whip in terms of club-head speed or arm speed—that’s why they can get their fastballs to move a lot.”
According to Niednagel, Johnny Manziel—despite Jones’s suspicions—was a #13, too. So was touted UCF quarterback Blake Bortles.
Niednagel said he wasn’t surprised that Tim Tebow struggled in his NFL career: “He’s a #1, which is what a lot of great running backs are. Walter Payton and Emmitt Smith are #1s. Randall Cunningham and Donovan McNabb are #1s, too, but most #1s are busts, because they don’t think the game real well. That type needs to be really relaxed to loosen up the big muscles. They need to be in the flow. Quarterback is not the consummate spot for Tebow, because he won’t see the game the way the Mannings and Favres and Marinos do. When [#1s] get nervous and uptight, the feelings take over, and they can go haywire. With Tebow being left-handed—when you use the left side of the body, the right hemisphere is triggering so much of that; it’s one thing to be a right-handed #1, but it’s another thing to be a left-handed #1—it made him much more cumbersome in his delivery.”
Jones was perplexed that he couldn’t find ESTP quarterbacks anymore. He asked Niednagel, who offered up a theory. “He said, ‘June, if you and I went to the juvenile-detention home, 50 to 60 percent of the kids are ESTP.’ ” Jones at first thought Niednagel w
as joking but found out he wasn’t. Niednagel explained that ESTPs often hate school and recoil at structure. Jones thought back to many of the great quarterbacks he knew and was convinced.
“Even look at Joe Montana’s career at Notre Dame with [head coach] Dan Devine,” said Jones. “That’s why he didn’t play for a while there.”
Even if, as Niednagel said, ESTPs do recoil at structure, many of them have proven to be some of the world’s greatest leaders. Winston Churchill, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, George S. Patton, Douglas MacArthur—all were ESTPs. So were Malcolm X, Dale Carnegie, L. Ron Hubbard, and Ernest Hemingway. Studies estimate that somewhere between 4 and 10 percent of the population are ESTPs.
Jones thought Neal Burcham was an ESTP, “because every time I put him in a live setting, he completes every ball,” Jones said a few months before the QB’s freshman season. “I’m very anxious to see him play.” Turns out, the young quarterback was actually ENTP, another right-brain dominant profile and the most common of all the personality types. Burcham ended up starting the Mustangs’ final two games of the 2013 season, both losses, throwing 1 touchdown pass and 3 interceptions.
“I made a mistake in how I handled him,” Jones said. “I should’ve slowed the game and talked to him between plays and nurtured him. I didn’t do that, and he failed miserably. Against UCF, I told [SMU QB coach] Dan [Morrison], I’ll go back to what I know works. He completed over 70 percent of his passes. I’m convinced if he didn’t have a concussion with eight minutes to go, we[’d have] beat[en] UCF, and we’d be talking about him a lot more. I know he would’ve made a couple of plays for us.”
But Jones has another quarterback on his roster, who he now thinks is an ESTP, a freshman named Kolney Cassel.
“He reminds me, with how he acts in the huddle, of Jim Kelly [whom Jones coached with the USFL’s Houston Gamblers]. Jim was [an] ESTP,” Jones said. He said by the fourth day of training camp in 2013, he turned to his QB coach, and both of them started believing Cassel might be an ESTP. “He didn’t have any idea of what we were doing but still completed all the balls when we ran no-huddle. Even though I’m frustrated that he’s not picking it up as fast, and he’s not where he should be, he has something about him. He doesn’t care. He thinks he’s the best. Same thing Jim Kelly had.”
The QB The Making of Modern Quarterbacks Page 11