The QB The Making of Modern Quarterbacks

by Bruce Feldman

  “I ended up behind two Super Bowl–winning quarterbacks,” Nall said. “We know Favre is going into the Hall of Fame, and Rodgers is on his way. Had I gotten drafted someplace else, who knows? Had I gone to Florida instead of LSU, who knows? But I don’t have any regrets. I try not to let myself go there, because it could be maddening, since there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  DILFER, A GUY WHO played with, among others, Ray Lewis and Hall of Famers Warren Sapp and Walter Jones, called Aaron Rodgers the “most confident human being I’ve ever been around.”

  Observing the Elite 11 quarterbacks, Rodgers said he couldn’t believe how good some of the QBs were. It didn’t take much for him to recall being their age. Of course, when he was, nobody wanted him as a quarterback, which had actually turned out to be a very useful thing for him. Rodgers, now thirty, said he still had the letter a Purdue assistant once sent him that said, “Good luck with your attempt at a college football career,” after he’d mailed the Boilermakers his high school tape.

  “You really need to remember where you came from and have appreciation for the journey that you went on,” Rodgers said. “I think a lot of kids these days, especially with the outlets we have, the exposure that we have, where a lot of these young guys are ‘blue-chippers’ from the time they’re in high school to the time they get drafted, there’s not a ton of adversity that they go through. I dealt with adversity on every level, from not getting recruited out of high school to going to junior college, to being a backup in D1, to falling farther than I thought I would in the draft. For me, it was great, because I got to sit and learn and be with the disappointment. Those experiences can either strengthen your character or make you really bitter. Thankfully for me, it really strengthened my character and gave me a good resolve.”

  Rodgers, like Dilfer, credited Jeff Tedford with enabling him to become a first-round pick: “Jeff’s a perfectionist in nature, and that rubbed off on me a lot,” he said. “He challenged me to be perfect in my footwork, in my preparation, in my reads, and in my execution. It’s that kind of mind-set that allows you to never be complacent, even in your greatest games. I owe Jeff a lot. I often felt like I had to prove to him every single day that I was mentally tough, I was physically tough, and I was good enough to be his quarterback.”

  The metamorphosis of Rodgers’s game early in the QB’s career in Green Bay that Dilfer spoke of was actually inspired by none other than Brett Favre. Not long after Rodgers arrived in Green Bay, there were numerous reports of friction between the two. Rodgers said the relationship was “mischaracterized. To be an older player like myself, ten years in now, it would have been difficult to have your successor picked before you’re ready to give it up. He played three more years when I was there, and then he played three more after that.” Still, fitting in on Favre’s team, in his town, was challenging, but Rodgers soon realized how fortunate he was to have a firsthand, close-up look at one of the most extraordinary talents to ever play the position.

  “He did things so differently than what I was used to,” Rodgers said. “I had three years to really practice all those things and figure out what I liked. I’ve been reading Hank Haney’s book about Tiger Woods. What I found interesting was when Tiger’s talking about ninety percent of the things that he hears, he throws out. Five percent he works on and then throws out, and then the other five percent he incorporates into his game. For me, it was absorbing a lot of information from Brett, watching him, listening in the meetings, listening to him in the huddle, watching him in practice, and trying to figure out what I wanted to absorb into my game and what I wanted to change and do differently or do better.

  “It also challenged me to play around with some things, and I had the luxury of not having been thrown in there right away to try to help the team win. I got the chance to hone my skills and incorporate some things and change some things that I wanted to in order to be successful. Those three years were crucial to me in becoming a better player. Here I was, looking at a guy who was unorthodox at times and trying to figure out why. Jeff Tedford taught us things, and when he did, he told us to ask the ‘Why.’ I think that is the most important question a quarterback can have, because once you figure out why you’re doing it, then you can really figure out how to make it work for you in a clutch situation. I watched Brett for years … [and] I would figure out the Why—why he would offset one way and throw back the other way; why he would load his leg one time and not another time; why he would use a certain footwork on a certain drop. And when I was able to figure out why he was doing it, it made sense to me. Then you can really take it and make it useful in your own game.”

  Rodgers had three years to study up on Favre’s preternatural on-field geometric wizardry. He was able to distill some of the uncanny and unconventional off-script plays that had become Favre’s trademark. Even Favre’s own coaches had given up trying to explain how the three-time NFL MVP ended up doing some of the remarkable—and often ill-advised—things he could pull off on a football field. Rodgers, though, not only figured out Favre’s rationale, he found his own way to mimic the maneuvers.

  “The one thing I really learned is, you have to have a real, innate sense about how each throw affects your body and really harness that instantaneous feeling/reaction about how each throw feels,” he said. “So when you’re making a throw on the run to the left, eventually you learn you have to aim a little bit inside, because your body is moving hard to the left, and then you compensate. Well, it’s the same thing in the pocket, when you throw a ball off your back foot or throw a ball moving hard to your left or up in the pocket—you really want to capture that feeling. I think that is what Brett did so well. He was really able to harness that feeling in his mind about how to put the ball in a spot he wanted based on what his body was doing and disconnecting often from his upper body and his lower body. He was able to harness those feelings and then could recall them in a split second to make the proper throw. As incredible as that might’ve looked sometimes, to Brett, I don’t think it was that difficult, because he knew what that felt like, and he had that muscle memory ingrained in his mind so he could repeat that on multiple occasions, and that’s what gave him his advantages.”

  The depths Rodgers went to expand his game sometimes didn’t sit well with the Green Bay coaches. In his rookie season of 2005, Mike Sherman’s team would have “Feel Good Friday,” a no-pads practice with shorts and helmets, leading into the weekend.

  “The defensive coaches wanted me to throw the ball to this certain guy every single time on the scout team,” Rodgers said. “What it really meant was, they wanted me to throw an interception every single time. As a competitor, I just couldn’t do that. I told our guys, ‘You just run to the proper spot, and I’m gonna no-look almost every throw.’ So, one, I was working on, can I no-look a throw and put it in the proper spot? Two, the competitor in me is saying, ‘I am not gonna throw a pick. I don’t care if Coach Duffner is coming over to tell me to, if Jim Bates is coming over to tell me to throw it, or if Speedy Washington is telling me to throw a pick. I’m too much of a competitor to throw a pick every single time, even if it is practice on a ‘Feel Good Friday.’ Finally, after five or six weeks of doing that and ticking off the defense, Sherman pulled my QB coach, Darrell Bevell, aside and said, ‘Tell the young kid to stop doing that.’ So they tried to put a stop to that (ha-ha), but it didn’t really work.”

  Five seasons later, Rodgers earned Super Bowl MVP honors for leading the Packers to a victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers in Super Bowl XLV. A big reason for Green Bay’s title and the subsequent NFL MVP trophy Rodgers won the following season stemmed from all those hours he’d spent deconstructing Brett Favre’s magic, experimenting at the Packers facility, reinventing himself—and the quarterback position.

  HEADING INTO THE 7-ON-7 tournament, Dilfer posted a leader board ranking the top eleven quarterbacks. To Blough’s surprise, he was number one.

  The dynamic of how the event unfolded, with the
Elite 11 quarterbacks having the run of the Nike campus for a few days before The Opening kicked off, provided Dilfer with another window into his kids’ DQ. “You had a bunch of other alphas, and other cultures came in, and now, all of a sudden, they’re surrounded by 150 of the best Dudes in the country. How big were they?” Dilfer said of his QBs. “Which ones got with their teams and just owned it? And which ones were intimidated and said, ‘OK, who am I gonna follow?’ I really saw those ‘thermometer’ leaders kick in. Half our quarterbacks become thermometers. They did it when they saw that stud [defensive back] Tony Brown or that stud receiver or that big Polynesian lineman show up. ‘They have a bigger personality than me. They have more stars than me, so I’m gonna follow him.’ But David Blough, who had two stars coming into this thing on his team of thirteen studs, he owned it from the second he got into the room with them. There was no doubt who the captain of that ship was.”

  The 7-on-7 passing competition had become a staple of off-season football. It was especially big on the high school summer scene, where traveling club teams had sprung up all over the country, much to the dismay of many high school coaches fearing it would have a similar influence to what AAU programs did in high school basketball. The “7-on”—tied in with Nike’s The Opening event—were new parts to the Elite 11. Nike provided plenty of colorful uniforms, while ESPNU provided more than its share of national TV exposure.

  There were six teams in the tournament. Dilfer’s Elite 11 protégés, his TDFB guys, coached the teams. They had a draft to select the top eighteen quarterbacks. Even though there were no helmets or pads, the spotlight on and the trash-talking among rival blue-chippers ramped up the intensity. When one of the QBs on Blough’s team, who had struggled all week in Oregon, threw a pick-six with fifteen seconds remaining in the first half to turn a 13–0 deficit into 20–0, the kid looked crushed as he slunk back to the sideline.

  Dilfer, observing the action, walked over to put his arm around the young quarterback and then yelled back to Dennis Gile, the staffer coaching the losing team.

  “Let’s go, Dennis! Have some energy!” Dilfer called in a voice scratchy and hoarse after five days on the field. On the sideline, one of the defensive players on the team that was leading asked the kid next to him if Dilfer was “Stone Cold” Steve Austin.

  Going into the final day at the Elite 11, Blough had dropped in the rankings from number one to number three. Another unheralded prospect, Sean White, one of the final two QBs selected for the Elite 11, surged in the coaches’ eyes. “He’s telling the other QBs what to do; he’s making these guys better,” said former NFL QB Charlie Frye, White’s coach on the team called the Field Generals. “Just talking about him, I’m getting goosies. He had nine incompletions and five TDs, and he also had a dropped TD.”

  The Field Generals began the tournament by losing their first game by almost 40 points, but that was a game White didn’t play in. Led by the Fort Lauderdale native, the Field Generals rallied to win the 7-on title after White led them on a last-minute touchdown drive for a come-from-behind 21–14 win over Team Alpha Pro. The championship carried White—who ended up committing to Auburn two weeks later, a school he didn’t have an offer from before coming to Oregon—to MVP honors of The Opening and the Elite 11.

  Blough finished number six. “It was bittersweet,” he said. “I wanted to prove to myself and prove to the coaches at Purdue that they didn’t make a mistake. I was tired of being overlooked. The first two days I was killing it, and I look at that like the first half, but I slacked off toward the end, and I look at that like the fourth quarter. I’m not sure why that was. Being out in front, being the favorite, is something I had to get used to. I’d never been the favorite. My high school was always the underdog. I had to learn how to be at the front of the pack. I guess I was probably a little complacent. That won’t happen again.”

  Dilfer’s advice to Blough: “Don’t you ever buy into the fact that you should live in reality. You keep living in this pretend world, because that’s where you thrive.”

  “In his world, he’s the biggest, the baddest, the toughest, the strongest, the best,” Dilfer said. “I said, ‘You live there. You have to be a legend in your own mind; you don’t have to buy into this reality that you’re six feet tall and all this other stuff.’ ”

  The final selection of which of the eighteen quarterbacks made the actual Elite 11 was announced in front of a lake on the Nike campus. It was a made-for-TV moment, as all the campers were outfitted in matching neon yellow Elite 11 shirts with black shorts and neon yellow socks. They all stood shoulder to shoulder in front of an elevated platform as Dilfer addressed them. He got choked up talking about what the group meant to him before he approached each QB individually to tell which to stand up on the platform, which ones had made it. That day also happened to be a very emotional one for Dilfer beyond the happenings in Oregon. It was his twentieth wedding anniversary. On top of that, his wife, Cass, was in Texas with all three of their daughters, as his two oldest girls were competing at the USA Volleyball Girls’ Junior National Championship. Dilfer later said he would’ve loved to be with his family, but he’d already committed to the Elite 11 and that his wife understood how important that was to him.

  He recalled the day at his home about five months earlier when he and his wife discussed his scheduling dilemma, “the defining moment when I knew I was in my sweet spot,” he said.

  “As painful as it was, it was so defining for me that I knew I was exactly where I was supposed to be. That I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. I think they know I’m better as a husband and father, and as a man, when I’m whole. Now, I think I’ve learned what makes me whole. They have [also] identified what makes me whole, and this is part of it, so I think they’ve embraced it, because they know this is part of my wholeness.”

  8.

  MANNINGLAND

  JULY 11, 2013.

  An hour before the eighteenth annual Manning Passing Academy began, ninety minutes north at LSU, Tommy Moffitt, with his barrel chest and Parris Island voice, was getting nostalgic. Asked about Peyton Manning, the Tigers strength coach took a big gulp of air before reaching into his desk and pulling out a bright orange folder with the name MANNING scribbled across the front.

  Moffitt, the strength coach at Tennessee when Manning was the Vols star QB in the mid-’ 90s, had shown all Tiger freshmen when they reported to school this frayed old folder that contained pages of the workouts he’d prescribed for the quarterback during the summer going into his senior season. Inside, the printed sheets of paper were covered with notes Manning had jotted down, showing the player’s attention to detail and indefatigable level of preparation. There were some crossed-out poundages of prescribed workout routines where Manning pushed himself to do five or ten pounds more than Moffitt had anticipated. Everything was accounted for and documented with check marks and pluses along with margin notes such as Threw good outside 1 on 1 … 7x Hills Threw … Agilities/Sand.

  Moffitt told all his newcomers at LSU that he had never—in twenty-five years—seen anybody as meticulous in their preparation as Peyton Manning. The weathered orange folder was Exhibit A, an artifact worthy of its place in Canton once Manning took his place in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

  “I tell them all, ‘Right now, you’re a better athlete than Peyton Manning ever was or Peyton Manning ever will be,” Moffitt said. “But this—THIS!—is what makes him so special. His preparation and his attention to detail and the things he does that nobody else told him, that, ‘This is what you have to do to be great.’ ”

  Moffitt’s favorite highlights of Manning’s career didn’t take place in Neyland Stadium. They happened around the Vols’ football complex at odd hours, when almost no one else was around. Such as the time Moffitt heard a tap on the window to his office. Manning was outside. He needed help. Said he had a bunch of VHS tapes in his SUV that needed to go upstairs. Moffitt came outside to Manning’s old black Oldsmobile Bravada and did a triple t
ake when the senior quarterback opened the trunk.

  It was jammed with tapes of every practice, every game, every opponent. Tight copies. Wide copies. End zone copies. Four years of film study. The ingredients to Manning’s secret sauce. They ended up with two full shopping carts and kept unloading and filling.

  Or the time Moffitt watched from his office window a nineteen-year-old Peyton tying a surgical cord to a goalpost and the other end around his waist so he could work on his drops from center. Back and forth. Back and forth. For what seemed like hours. Moffitt had never seen any other quarterback do that, and certainly not doing it on his own, without any coaches or teammates around.

  “Nobody here told him to do that,” Moffitt said. “Maybe Archie did.”

  Nope. It wasn’t Archie’s idea, either, according to the head of America’s First Family of quarterbacks.

  “I didn’t lead him there,” Archie Manning said, chuckling. Then again, he kind of did, in a roundabout, Peyton sort of way.

  “Peyton told me once he wanted to be a good player,” Archie said. “I told him the good players I know work at it. That’s all I told him.”

  That was Peyton Manning, always figuring out a way on his own to get better. Moffitt said that was why the guy would be a first-ballot Hall of Famer. It was also a big reason why more than 1,200 kids and some two dozen college QBs made the trek down annually to the Manning family’s week-long camp in stifling humidity in Thibodaux, Louisiana.

  The camp was Peyton’s idea, Archie said. Peyton, then a young quarterback at Tennessee, noticed the high school box scores in the newspaper, with teams getting blown out and their QBs going 1 for 4. Peyton wanted to have a camp to boost the level of quarterbacking in the local high schools. That first year, the Manning Passing Academy was held at Tulane University and had 180 campers. That first year, there were three college counselors helping out: Peyton, Jake Delhomme from what was then called Southwestern Louisiana, and his receiver, Brandon Stokley. Peyton’s baby brother, Eli, was a high school camper. It didn’t take long for the MPA to outgrow the place, shifting to Southeastern Louisiana before relocating to the Nicholls State campus in 2005.