“How?
“Timing,” House said, answering another of his own questions. “Sequencing and mechanical efficiency,” he added before breaking back into the Franco-Latino accent, “If I know a fastball’s coming, I can hit a boo-lettt.”
TOM HOUSE WAS IN his mid-fifties before his coaching career found a new industry. Or, more specifically, the new industry found him. Whitfield’s old mentor in San Diego, Cam Cameron, then the offensive coordinator for the Chargers, was at a local basketball camp with his three sons (ages eight, six, and four), where House’s name kept coming up. That got Cameron—himself once a multisport athlete in college at Indiana University as a quarterback for Lee Corso’s football team and as a guard on Bob Knight’s basketball team—curious.
“Tom’s remarkable,” Cameron said. “I’d heard about his baseball work, so I went on the Internet to learn more about him. Then I read his books.”
Cameron showed up with his kids to watch House conduct one of his workouts in the San Diego area. Cameron was amazed as he watched House coaching Major League pitchers, guys rehabbing, high schoolers, and even Little Leaguers.
“He was everything I’d read and heard about, so I mentioned him to Brian Schottenheimer, our quarterback coach, and said, ‘Why don’t we introduce [Chargers starting QB] Drew [Brees] to Tom and see if they hit it off.’
“Eventually, we just said, ‘Hey, Drew, we’re not suggesting Tom. Just meet him. You might be interested.’ And those two formed a bond that’s been tremendous.”
House asked Brees what he thought he needed, strength-wise, to be a great quarterback.
“I guess I need a strong arm and strong legs for power,” Brees replied. House said from looking at Brees, he could tell the Chargers quarterback lacked some back-side shoulder strength.
“You’re very front-loaded,” House explained. “You have more muscle in the front of your shoulder than in the back, which has created an imbalance.” House added that if the front of Brees’s shoulder was strong enough to throw a ball 100 miles per hour, but the back could only muster 80, he was only going to throw 80, since you’re only as strong as your weakest link. Brees was amazed that House could ID all that just from observing his posture.
House also examined Brees’s diet. The former Purdue star thought he ate well, since he rarely touched fast food, but House had him take a food-allergy test. He had Brees and his wife fly up to Portland to see a specialist. The test revealed that Brees was, in fact, allergic to nuts, dairy, wheat, and eggs—many of the things he was eating, which caused him to often feel fatigued and have problems sleeping. House overhauled Brees’s diet as well as his musculature and, in the process, his throwing mechanics.
House has an acronym for his process: “STATT”—Screen Test Access and Then Training.
“First, we got him healthy,” House said. “We were far [enough] along with baseball to know you can only accelerate what you can decelerate. We had a mechanical model that was balance and posture and weight shift, opposite and equal. These things that were translating. Football and pitching are pretty similar, only a little bit different timing. We just took the pitching model and overlaid it on quarterbacking. Did a lot of mirror work, got him on the computer, and we did everything we do with pitchers. Problem identification is half the solution.
“Football players are more dynamic, but the same rules apply. Instead of it being a six-foot stride, they have a two-foot stride, so their timing and the foot strike has to be about one-third, but after the front foot hits—whether somebody’s chasing them or not—it takes .25 to .35 [seconds] to get the football out of your hand, and you have to do it with balance and posture. All the same things apply. So with pitching, it’s a very stable environment; with rubber and mound, it’s a very unstable environment, but all the same rules apply with dynamic movement as they do with static movement.”
Brees’s transformation was startling. In his 2010 book titled Coming Back Stronger, Brees detailed how he’d once lacked confidence and was afraid of making mistakes. He went from throwing 11 touchdowns and 15 interceptions with a 58 percent completion rate in 2003 to a 27 TD-7 INT year with a 66 percent completion rate that earned him a Pro Bowl invite in 2004. He went on to make seven Pro Bowl appearances in the next nine seasons, even overcoming major shoulder surgery.
“It was easy,” House said. “I’d like to say we helped him a lot, but percentage points is what we did with him.
“That was two years, and then he got hurt during his free-agent year, and then we really got serious. Dr. [James] Andrews did the surgery and the rehab, and he wasn’t sure how he’d throw again. So we pulled out all the stops. And that was the beginning of Functional Fitness for Quarterbacks, just like we did for baseball. And then from there, Drew has success, he mentions my name here and there, and that leads to Tom Brady and Matt Cassel and Joe Flacco. We don’t market. It’s just word of mouth.”
House would like to say he had the foresight to know that this other avenue—training elite quarterbacks—was out there, but he said he didn’t. “A blind squirrel can find an acorn,” he said. And, as a lifelong baseball guy, he isn’t too proud to note the differences he found after working with both pitchers and QBs.
“Quarterbacks are way smarter,” he said. “Those elite guys are so friggin’ smart. You [only] have to tell them once. Pitchers you have to tell fifteen, twenty times.
“Until quarterbacks started coming by here, I had no clue who they were. And they’re all pretty good at what they do. They knew what to do, but not many knew why [certain] things were happening. We’re kind of the ‘Why’ guys. I’m not a quarterback coach. We’re what we call movement specialists or performance analysts. We complement, very much, what [Steve] Clarkson is doing and what Trent [Dilfer] is doing and what these quarterback coaches are doing. One of the guys who works with me, Adam Dedeaux, can tell you about footwork and route trees and stuff like that. I can’t. I just look at the body when it’s throwing and what it needs to be good at throwing a football.
“The reason why we’re at where we’re at is because we knew nothing about quarterbacking, but we knew a lot about throwing. There are rules you have to follow, but everybody looks different following those rules. Everybody.”
According to House, one of the big mistakes quarterback coaches make is getting too caught up in trying to make all their QBs throw exactly the same way. Bodies are different. Physiognomy. Conditioning-wise. “They’re wired differently. What you need to do is identify the critical variables. And do you have a fix for the variables that aren’t efficient? Then, if they’re efficient and effective and they’re repeatable, they play. And we do as well with quarterbacks who are just trying to get better to go to college as we do with Drew Brees and Tom Brady, who just want to get 1 or 2 percent better.”
The commonality among all top quarterbacks, he’s found, actually happens at their release point. “That’s when all the good ones look the same,” House says. “Eyes level. Release point is eight to twelve inches out in front of the front foot. Non-throwing hand is somewhere in front of the face. They all look the same, but how they get there is a little different. Brady has closer to a ‘classic’ delivery, whereas Drew Brees is a tiptoe guy, a short-armer who throws off his toes.”
Trent Dilfer calls Tom House sports’ greatest biomechanics guy to ever walk the Earth. His impact on what Dilfer taught and looked for in quarterbacks was significant. When Dilfer ramped up to try to become a presence in the quarterback coaching world, he first spent a couple of days observing House in Los Angeles.
“Even House told me, ‘Man, by accident you kinda understand the biomechanics of this,’ ” Dilfer said. “I’d never studied biomechanics. I don’t have a degree in anything. I’ve asked a lot of questions. Before I went to Tom the first time, I think I probably understood intuitively 70 percent of the biomechanics. I think Tom has filled in the other 30 percent. And it’s a very important 30 percent, because if you get 30 percent wrong, it’s gonna m
ess up the 70 percent.
“I think we both have very similar passions behind us.”
House said he is a big fan of the work Dilfer does with quarterbacks, too, especially since their perspectives are so different. “I think we’re going to work together one of these days,” House said. “I hope we do.
“Trent is really good, but he is guessing at stuff based on looking at video. When you look at video, don’t your eyes lie to you?” House asked, alluding to the fact that the speed of the video is inhibiting and, therefore, misleading. “I’ve been where he is, where he’s really good at what he does, but he’s not defendable. He can put it out there, and his instruction capabilities are off the charts. He can really teach it, but his information is based on his experience. But it’s not science coming from his side. We have science.”
House credited Greg Rose, from the Titleist Performance Institute, for opening his eyes. “He’s more responsible for me getting out of the box and changing my paradigm than anybody I’ve ever been around.” About fifteen years ago Rose called House out.
“I thought I was a science-based coach. He said, ‘Tom, you’re a great coach, but you’ve got a little bit too much BS in your system. You have no science.’ So Trent is where I was. He’s doing all his empirical research with his eyes and with current technology in high-speed video. Science is basically hypotheses that you test with an IRB—an institutional review board—looking over your shoulder, so you’re defendable with a peer group. That’s the thing that separates us. We are science-based with our conditioning, with our nutrition, with our mental and emotional and our biomechanical stuff. I think we offer the only independent coaching in the world. Now there’s medical research and academic research, but I think we’re the only real coaches to do research and actually come up with hypotheses and protocols and defend them and do a number of studies and reviews. Not many coaches write books or get published. We do.”
HOUSE’S OFFICE AT USC was two cubicles above the third-base bleachers. The back cube looked as if someone was ready to move out. The desk was bare save for two radar guns aimed at each other. A half football that is a staple of House’s training regimen sat on a shelf. (The ball, which is pointed on one side and flat at its widest end, is ideal for throwing into a trampoline, since it’ll bounce right back to the thrower.) On the floor in one of the corners were two large black cases the size of dorm-room refrigerators. Inside was $220,000 worth of technology that processes House’s data-capturing and motion analysis. Next to that were five hard drives. “That’s thirty years of shit right there,” House said sheepishly. “The cool thing is, people can argue with me, but they can’t out-research me.”
The front cube had a coffee table, and its walls were covered with poster-sized action shots of past pitching clients, including Nolan Ryan and Randy Johnson. On the wall closest to the door was a smaller framed photo of Brees. The building used to be the Trojans’ old snack shack, which led House to joke that he had come full circle. His mom used to work the snack stand when he was growing up in California. House’s father was a civil engineer. They taught him, “Don’t ever be embarrassed to ask why,” House said, “and ever since I was a little kid, we asked, ‘Why? Why are we doing this?’ What do I need to do to get an A?’ I think ‘Why?’ kinda shortens your trials.”
That sense of wondering—and asking why—explains how a lot of athletes end up as coaches, House said.
“Superstars don’t have to be that way, you know?” he said. “Most of the elite athletes are unconsciously competent. And they’re really, really good. If you’re not an elite athlete but you’re trying to be, you have to know why things work or why they don’t work. I think people like me, who struggle every day to survive—they have to know why.”
House was always looking for any edge to elevate what he believed was his below-average arm. He was a self-described “pitch-backwards” guy. He relied on his off-speed stuff and then would finish with a fastball. “None of my pitches were any good, but in combination I was OK,” House said. “Sinking fastball, curveball, screwball …”
He also got a little creative, and that included taking performance-enhancing drugs.
“We tried everything,” he said. “Our basic tenet was, ‘You don’t get beat, you get out-milligrammed.’ If someone was beating you, you found out what they were taking, and you took more of it. That was the ’60s and the ’70s. It didn’t work for me. I got bigger, but I didn’t throw any harder. I was off PEDs before it became the thing to do. I took Dianabol, which was primitive, but it was what weight trainers were doing. We didn’t know.”
House tried PEDs for two and a half years, he said. He bulked up from 180 pounds to 220.
“It didn’t help my fastball. I’ve had seven knee surgeries. I had too much weight for my structure.” But that doesn’t mean he’s against the PEDs in baseball under different circumstances. “In retrospect, I would level the playing field and say, take whatever you want to take under a doctor’s care,” House said. “Telling them not to take them—well, there is that risk-reward: If they have a good year, they get a $100 million contract, and then you fine them $2 million.”
After he got released by the Seattle Mariners in March 1979, House tried working in the “real world.” He sold signage on buildings and made between $300,000 and $400,000 in six months, he said, but when an old baseball friend, Bob Cluck, offered him a job as a minor league pitching coach in the Houston Astros organization, House jumped at it. For the next eighteen seasons, House worked as a pitching coach for the Astros, San Diego Padres, Texas Rangers, and the Chiba Lotte Marines of the Japanese league. He also coached in Latin America. In 1984, the year before he was hired by the Rangers, House got a call from a buddy named Coop DeRenne, a third-generation professional baseball player and also an academic.
“There’s this new thing called motion analysis,” DeRenne told House about the system Kodak had developed.
They both thought the concept was really cool. “Three dimensions, a thousand frames a second,” House recalled. “Your eyes lie to you. We only see thirty-two frames a second. When you look at TV or standard video, you only see thirty-two frames a second. Now we know all the critical parts for a rotational athlete in the throw or swing or kick; it takes places at about .250 of a second to about a .700 of a second. We’re coaching on what we think we see, but we’re really not looking at it.
“The Kodak system was great, but it wasn’t user-friendly. Six months later, we ran into a guy named Gideon Ariel at Coto De Caza [California] with [Hall of Fame tennis coach] Vic Braden. We looked at his system, and it was actually user-friendly. So we got a system. We mortgaged houses. Borrowed money. Whatever. And we started capturing data. Had no clue what we were doing. I probably had two years of data before I started to realize, ‘OK, there are some common denominators here.’ But just because you have motion analysis doesn’t mean you can do anything with it. The next step in our progression was coming up with the instruction.”
House’s penchant for always asking why didn’t just lead him into areas beyond the expanding technology. He once wrote a six-hundred-page doctoral thesis on the “Terminal Adolescence Syndrome” of professional athletes, which was something he had observed from his six seasons riding buses in the minor leagues to his near decade as being, in his own words, a “marginal-to-horseshit” major league relief pitcher. The root of his findings were how, in the world of big-time athletes living lives of privilege and entitlement, a staggering percentage were unequipped to cope with life as ex-athletes, when real losses take place. The impact of a life born essentially out of being “rewarded for what they are and criticized for who they are” rendered most players “dysfunctional heroes.” House said that all professional athletes have OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder)—since they essentially have to. If they didn’t, they would not have gotten as far as they did, but the “checkpoints in pro sports” are not what they are in the real world, since those are merely a function of what happ
ens on the field. Then again, to most pro athletes, House noted, that is their real world, especially since such adolescent behavior is the norm inside the locker-room culture. House also cited divorce rates that were below the national average during the players’ career, when they seemingly were awash in temptation, yet in their post-playing career soared beyond the norm. In 1989, House had a version of his thesis published, titled, The Jock’s Itch: The Fast-Track Private World of the Professional Ballplayer.
The book was about five hundred pages shorter than what House had submitted for his thesis. “There was a lot more to that book than they printed, because they [Contemporary Books] didn’t want another Ball Four, with all the sexual stuff, the drug stuff, the alcohol stuff, though I wasn’t naming names.”
House’s own marriage also became a casualty of his baseball life. His first marriage had lasted twenty-two years. “She wanted a real life as the kids were getting older,” said House, who has since remarried. His life, though, even in his mid-sixties, is still centered around sports—and the question why.
“This is my vocation, avocation, and passion,” he said. House stopped short of saying that his circumstances as a marginal pro athlete and the time he came along were part of some grand plan to make him a pioneer in the field of athlete development. “I wish I could say there was some master plan, but I think I just stumbled into it. Right place, right time. I know I’ve been an avid learner, and I’m always searching for a way to get better.”
The biggest misconception about House as a coach is that he’s just a biomechanical expert. Actually, even referring to House as a “coach” feels like a misnomer. He rolled his eyes at the “guru” label, although of late that has become a handy way for media folks to ID a guy who seems about as far removed as possible from having a whistle around his neck. He’ll tell you he’s “a rotational-athlete evaluator,” but that also seems too limited, even though he’s quick to point out that the title opened his shingle up to baseball players, football players, golfers, tennis players, and so many others, since all rotational athletes have similar timing and kinematic sequencing—hips, shoulders, arms, and implement. But, as Drew Brees learned, there are many other components to House’s program.
The QB The Making of Modern Quarterbacks Page 15