The QB The Making of Modern Quarterbacks

by Bruce Feldman

  That week, there was another group the Elite 11 staff got warned about—the NCAA. Dilfer announced to the staff that the NCAA would have two investigators there. “They’re from the gaming and compliance side of things,” he said. “These are the badasses for the NCAA. They’ll be disguised as Nike execs. They’re looking for one slipup. One coach talking to a player about an agent or something. These high school kids are going to be pros someday.

  “They [the NCAA] can’t believe we can pull something off like this clean. It’s our job to pull it off clean.”

  Brian Stumpf, a former Cal receiver who had helped run the Elite 11 and Student Sports, Inc., camps for a decade, interjected that another concern for the NCAA investigators was college influence and people swaying recruits. The issue had become quite a headache for the NCAA with the increased visibility of recruiting—who the recruits were, where they were going to camps, and whom they were interacting with—especially with social media providing much more of a window into it all than ever before. It wasn’t just concern about the college counselors doing some recruiting among the Elite 11 quarterbacks; since the event was attached that year to The Opening—another Nike-run event in which 160 of the nation’s top prospects were coming to Oregon later in the week to compete in the 7-on-7 tournament and linemen drills—it was also a reminder about not trying to sway prospects to a certain program related to the Elite 11 coaches, either.

  “This should be a good thing,” Dilfer added, “because I want them to hear your message.”

  That message had been refocused from the camp’s first few years under Dilfer. In the past, Dilfer said, they had tried to find ways to break the young quarterbacks or expose their weaknesses. That year would be different. “This Elite 11 is about getting them primed and ready,” he said. “Our job is to create an environment [in which] they’re aiming for peak performance.”

  Jordan Palmer was called up to the front. He spoke about a couple he had brought in from a children’s foundation he’d gotten involved with. Palmer had begun working with the foundation on Tuesdays (that’s the players’ off-day in the NFL) by visiting hospitals and helping sick children.

  “If we’re going to teach them [QBs] how they should keep their elbow up or read defenses, we’d be crazy if we didn’t also try to teach ’em how to become better men,” Palmer told the coaches.

  One thing that hadn’t changed about the Elite 11 was the sense of fraternity among the QBs.

  “I’m also here because I really want to help the kids get better,” Devin Gardner told me after the room started to clear. “When I was at the Elite 11 in high school, [then-counselor and UTEP QB] Jordan Palmer helped me so much.” Gardner said he’d really thrown a flat ball, and Palmer had tweaked his footwork and delivery.

  By early afternoon, the Elite 11’s hotel was overrun with QBs, both young and not so young. The group reconvened later in the afternoon on the sprawling Nike campus in the Bo Jackson Building for the event’s first official activity: Dynamic Athletic Yoga in a hot room.

  Along with the high schoolers, Dilfer assigned a couple of his coaches to join in. In fact, the first one whose mat was pooling with puddles of sweat was former Green Bay Packer Craig Nall, the thirty-four-year-old Dallas-area QB coach.

  At 4:45, QBs, counselors, and coaches had assembled on the football field in the middle of the Nike campus. All the participants stood up and introduced themselves and spoke about what they were hoping to get out of the week. Then the “Golden Gun” competition began, as QBs—and counselors—hustled all over the field, trying to fire a football through stationary targets in a variety of scenarios while the coaches studied virtually every move each quarterback made.

  “There is no defense for a perfect thrower,” Dilfer shouted out several times over two eight-minute sessions that must’ve felt like twenty-minute periods, as each player’s shirt was soaked with sweat.

  Texas A&M commit Kyle Allen, considered by many to be the top pure passer in the country, won the gold shirt for the day. Sean White, a QB from Fort Lauderdale, took second, although the uncommitted 6′1″, 195-pounder might’ve overtaken Allen, save for an inch or two on about four or five of his throws that rattled around the metal targets but didn’t go through. Other QBs who stood out in either how they handled the dynamic yoga or the field work—because Dilfer tasks his staff to keep tabs on everything: Florida commit Will Grier; Cal commit Luke Rubenzer; Texas commit Jerrod Heard; Vandy commit K. J. Carta-Samuels; Virginia Tech commit Andrew Ford; and Clemson commit DeShaun Watson, who impressed coaches with how he rallied from near the bottom of the rankings after the first round of the Golden Gun competition to finish third, battling through fatigue.

  Day One of the Elite 11 ended, perhaps fittingly, with an audible.

  For as much thought as had gone into scripting every hour of the week, a power outage forced Dilfer to do some adapting. Instead of meetings in the air-conditioned rooms of the hotel, the group ended up in the roundabout outside.

  Shit happens, right?

  No matter. Dilfer brought up Palmer, who talked in more detail about the “impact” guys in their position—star quarterbacks—can have on their communities. Then, Palmer introduced the evening’s main speaker, Erik Rees, the CEO of NEGU (Never Ever Give Up), a charity inspired by his daughter, Jessie Rees, a twelve-year-old who had battled a brain tumor for ten months before passing away in 2012. Despite her ominous prognosis, she was always concerned with why some kids in the hospital didn’t have visitors and wanted to focus on spreading joy to other kids fighting cancer. Her attitude and efforts inspired a movement, Rees said. His daughter knew that having cancer made people feel lonely and isolated, so she decided to spread love to them through her JoyJars, a care package of sorts.

  Later, Palmer told the campers that one of the Elite 11 QBs from the 2012 group, Johnny Stanton, now a Nebraska Cornhusker, was committed to being the NEGU ambassador in Lincoln, spurring the movement to help sick kids and families there. Palmer then made a parallel that seemed to register with many of the young men looking up at him.

  “Think about Jessie’s stats: working with 240 hospitals and reaching 55,000 children,” Palmer told the young QBs sitting with their legs crossed on the pavement in front of him. “Now think about your stats: yards, touchdown passes. Pretty insignificant, right? This isn’t really just about NEGU; it’s about your opportunity [to contribute something].”

  Many of the campers nodded. It had been a long day. Most had flown across the country to get there. They’d met a lot of new people in the past twelve hours and had a bunch of information thrown at them. And now they had finished the night on a very emotional turn. They each were given a flashlight as they filed back into the darkened hotel. Turned out, the power wouldn’t come back on for another hour.

  Saturday would bring new challenges. Starting at 4:30 a.m., Dilfer had them beginning the day by climbing a mountain.

  THE COLLEGE COUNSELORS WERE able to sleep in and skip the climb. But Saturday was a big day for them, too. That’s when the Counselor’s Challenge was scheduled.

  Every year, a half dozen or so college QBs also came to the week-long camp to compete against one another in addition to their roles assisting the Elite 11 staff. The 2013 group was the most star-studded batch of college counselors the camp had ever had. There was Johnny Manziel; Devin Gardner; Tajh Boyd, the ACC’s Player of the Year; San José State’s David Fales; Georgia Tech’s Vad Lee; and Louisville’s Teddy Bridgewater, a guy many were projecting to be the first overall pick in the 2014 NFL Draft. Gardner and Boyd came to Oregon a few days early just to get in some extra work with Whitfield.

  The opportunity to compete against the Heisman winner and the possible first overall draft pick had the other guys fired up. Especially Boyd. “That’s all he’s been talking about for two days,” said Gardner.

  It’s doubtful Manziel would’ve even bothered to come halfway across the country for the event had George Whitfield not been helping coach. Manziel
was there because of Whitfield. And a few of the other college QBs were there because of Manziel.

  The six quarterbacks competed in a series of different passing drills, testing their footwork and accuracy. Manziel and Bridgewater were touted by most at the Elite 11 as the favorites. The other remaining Elite 11 coaches pegged Boyd, the most talkative counselor, as the winner. In the Clemson quarterback’s last game, against eighth-ranked LSU on New Year’s Eve in the Chick-fil-A Bowl, Boyd showed how “clutch” he could be when he converted a fourth-and-sixteen throw into tight double-coverage from near his own goal line to spark a last-minute, come-from-behind victory. Boyd was telling anyone who would listen that he was going to win the Counselor’s Challenge.

  David Fales, the San José State quarterback, was on the other side of the spectrum. In a camp full of alphas, Fales was the quietest quarterback on the Nike campus. In truth, none of the other counselors had ever heard of Fales till that week. Even though Fales led the nation in completion percentage (73 percent) and carried the Spartans to a Top 25 finish in 2012, it was not as if he’d arrived at college with much buzz. San José State only had to beat Indiana State to get him out of junior college. Before Fales’s stint at Monterey Peninsula College, he was at Wyoming (for less than a month) and Nevada and was buried on the depth chart at both places.

  Fales later admitted that he’d always wondered how he compared to the other top QBs in the country. Turned out, at least in that kind of setting, Fales was more than capable of holding his own. His pinpoint accuracy, particularly while throwing on the move, had all the Elite 11 coaches and campers hooting and hollering with every perfect pass as he jumped to a big-points lead over Boyd. Manziel, constantly trying to fire up Fales and Boyd—and himself—rallied to close the margin and put the pressure on the San José State QB. Fales, though, never cooled down and hung on to win the competition.

  “It’s eye-opening,” Fales said later, before qualifying that the competition was not like an actual game, though.

  “It really doesn’t matter. It’s all hype kinda, but it did help my confidence.”

  So, yeah, maybe it did matter.

  EACH NIGHT OF THE Elite 11, Dilfer and his staff retreated to their office on the sixth floor of the hotel for a war-room session that sometimes dragged on for four hours. Dilfer had framed his rating system around four categories to rank the eighteen quarterbacks: competitive temperament, functional football intelligence, passing proficiency, and trainability on a scale of 1–5. Dilfer mandated that a grade of 5 should be rare.

  “Jameis had unique competitive temperament,” Dilfer said, evoking the name of the star of the 2011 Elite 11, Jameis Winston. “That’s a 5.”

  Dilfer also wanted to incorporate some sort of new quarterbacking metric into the Elite 11 evaluation, which would rely on the statistical data.

  Almost all the ratings in the first hour were 3s or 4s with plenty of qualifiers. After a half hour of discussions, Dilfer put the name of David Blough, a 6′1″ Texan committed to Purdue, on the big screen at the front of the room. Joey Roberts, Dilfer’s ESPN protégé-turned–Elite 11 general manager, made a compelling case for the week’s first 5 in regard to Bough’s competitive temperament.

  “I talked with Kyle Allen, Jacob Park, and DeShaun Watson [three of the camp’s highest-rated recruits] and said, ‘Who’s the alpha in this group?’ Blough was the one commonality,” Roberts said.

  Blough was an unheralded recruit till he’d caught the eye of the Elite 11 staff at the regional camp in Texas and then made them believers in Chicago one month later. He had zero scholarship offers at the time. He learned that he’d landed a golden ticket to the Elite 11 finals while sitting in his fifth-period Technologies class. A buddy told him to check Twitter. Blough tapped at his smartphone and noticed a tweet from NFL star Drew Brees mentioning him: “On behalf of coach @TDESPN the fifth golden ticket to the @Elite11 Finals goes to fellow TX QB @David_Blough10 Welcome to the fraternity David.” A few days later, Brees’s old college became the first to offer Blough, who accepted one month later.

  Blough studied the previous Elite 11 shows on TV and bought in to Dilfer’s message. In one of the earlier events of the week, the high schoolers had a pre-dawn, 4.4-mile run up a hill that concluded with a last-man-squatting competition. Blough outlasted everyone and remained in the squat position for six minutes just to prove a point.

  “I learned it’s about a lot more ‘mental,’ the leadership and being able to adapt and make plays work,” Blough later told me. “It’s a lot more than just being able to throw the ball; it’s all about how you’re wired, how you work. A thousand kids can throw the ball, but it’s the intangibles that separate you.

  “They really stress it. That was something I had to focus on if I wanted to be noticed. I was slapping people’s hands when they caught a pass for me; I tried to bring high energy, and it seemed to work. So it’s stuck with me.”

  Months later, Dilfer was told about how years of watching Elite 11 had affected Blough; he was not only parroting Dilfer’s message but said he was trying to live it. “That’s why I pushed for the TV show,” the former NFL QB said. “It’s great that we’re nominated for an Emmy. It doesn’t make me more money. I’ve lost a lot of money on the Elite 11. A lot. The TV show is important to me because it’s the way we message the next generation, because I want these kids to understand, this is nurture, not nature. You are not born to be a quarterback. That is the stupidest argument I’ve ever heard. There are kids who are born to be leaders. There are kids born with more talent than others. They are not born to be Tom Brady, to be Peyton Manning. A lot of that is nurture, and the TV show is part of the nurturing process for the next generation. They get to see what is emphasized, and they get to see it played out the year or two before they get to go through it.”

  Dilfer shifted into a story about another high school QB, this one a blue-chip prospect, whom he’d “loved” on tape. “I’d invite him off of tape,” he said. “NFL body. NFL arm. NFL pedigree. [The prospect] had seen the shows, and he cowered [at one of the Elite 11 regionals]. He disappeared. He brought nothing. I talked to a couple of coaches who’d recruited him. They both said when they talked to him on the phone, there was nothing there. He was so soft and unsure of himself. When that happens, it is a red X. You have seen what is important to us. You have seen what we emphasize. My talk is the same. ‘I don’t wanna hear you. I wanna feel you. Thermostat and thermometer,’ to the point people roll their eyes. There has to be a major paradigm shift for this kid to survive in a college locker room, let alone in an NFL locker room.”

  AFTER DAVID BLOUGH’S FIRST two days in Oregon, it sounded as if Purdue had gone into Texas for another recruiting coup, as the Boilermakers did in the ’90s when they plucked out Brees after the big in-state schools passed on the Austin native.

  Craig Nall mentioned that after he took a baseline test on AXON, measuring his ability to instantly deduce defensive looks, Blough approached the old ex-NFL quarterback, inquiring what his score was. Nall said that Blough, who had the highest initial score among high schoolers, looked genuinely disappointed to find out that the onetime LSU Tiger had topped him. Nall felt compelled to point out to the kid that he did have a bit of an advantage on the test: “I reminded him, I did play in the NFL.”

  One of the coaches chimed in to say that Blough had approached him earlier to report, “Coach, I haven’t taken the elevator yet.”

  A coach from the back of the room pointed out, “Everything he does is an A+. He’s just locked in.”

  Another said, “NFL evaluators look at joint structure. With his wrists, hands, and knees, he has 6′5″ joints in a 6′1″ body.”

  Dilfer observed, “When we went around that circle introducing ourselves, I swear he wanted to say, ‘I’m here to kick your asses. I’m not here to make friends.’ ”

  Palmer added, “It’s ironic that he’s going to Drew Brees’s school.”

  For as much as David Blough had made
a glowing early impression in Oregon, a taller, much more touted QB with one of the strongest arms in the camp had turned off several of the coaches.

  “He’ll throw a touchdown on a ball he shouldn’t have thrown,” said one of the younger coaches. “He’s arrogant to other people, and he turns his back to me when I know he can hear me.”

  One of the coaches said that the teen was “the least-liked person here.”

  DILFER: What scares me is, he has an “I know more” attitude, or it’s like he doesn’t trust that he can do what you’re asking.

  PALMER: You almost feel like he’s asking, “Do I need this?” And that’s a danger zone.

  For Dilfer, the quarterback was treading into the direction of the two other blue-chip recruits who had recoiled when faced with the challenges of the Elite 11. The forty-one-year-old still cringed about how those previous situations had deteriorated, and he was determined not to let it happen again.

  • • •

  THERE’S A FLOOR-TO-CEILING PICTURE of one of Nike’s newest breakout stars, Colin Kaepernick, in a second-floor classroom inside the Bo Jackson Building. Back when Kaepernick was a high schooler, he was off the national college football recruiting radar. He was a lanky pitcher who doubled as a quarterback in the run-heavy Wing-T offense; he threw the ball sidearm. Kaepernick tried out for the Elite 11 at two regionals, one in Vegas and one in Berkeley, in 2005. Stumpf recalls that Kaepernick was pencil-thin but showed off a powerful whip of an arm, although he was too raw to get the invite to the national camp in a class that featured Matthew Stafford, Jake Locker, and Tim Tebow.

  Chris Ault, the former coach at Nevada—the only FBS program to offer Kaepernick a scholarship—said he wouldn’t have offered based on film. Kaepernick competed at the Wolf Pack’s summer camp, but even after that, Nevada didn’t pull the trigger. It wasn’t until months later, after figuring that Kaepernick could probably be a good free safety or wide receiver if he couldn’t make it at quarterback, the Wolf Pack offered.