The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks (11 page)

Clarkson chuckled when asked if the $75,000-a-week price tag was accurate. “That would make it legendary,” he said. “It wasn’t nearly that much—but I was paid very well.”

Steve Clarkson’s marketing savvy resonated with eager parents
and
with media hungry for hyperbole and the next big thing, and it made him a go-to guy. In truth, he wasn’t just marketing his protégés but himself as a brand, too. He credits reading the 2001 Bernard Goldberg book
Bias
for opening his eyes to handling the media. “I don’t read many books, but it’s one of the greatest books ever written,” he said. “It talks about how media basically runs the world. I truly use it as a practice. You can almost anticipate how emotions will turn before it actually happens.

“There is a story line and a script that you have to create, because there’s too many kids out there. How do you say this kid is better than that kid? I mean, who the hell knows? You don’t really know till they get up there [to college] and play, and then you have to hope they get to a program where their coach believes that this kid’s talent is gonna help get them their contract extension or their next big job. And if they don’t have that, they’re just another guy.”

Clarkson’s Sistine Chapel was quarterback Jimmy Clausen, the youngest of Jim Clausen’s three boys. Before owning an insurance business, Jimmy’s dad was an assistant coach at Cal-State Northridge. Jimmy’s oldest brother, Casey, and middle brother, Rick, were quarterbacks
at Tennessee, and both were longtime Clarkson projects. Casey was a four-year starter for the Vols, but he had underwhelming physical tools. Scouts saw him as an immobile pocket passer lacking arm strength, which was backed up by Casey’s going undrafted.

Clarkson loved to tell the story for reporters about how he noticed young Jimmy’s prodigious arm in the distance while sitting with Jim Sr. at one of the Clausens’ high school games after the kid supposedly took an errant pass and fired it back—on a rope, 55 yards across the field, according to
ESPN The Magazine.
“Who the hell is that?” Clarkson asked.

“That’s my other son,” said Jim, referring to his fifth-grader. “He wants to be a linebacker.”

“He’s a better quarterback than both your other boys right now,” Clarkson replied. Once Jimmy got into the seventh grade, he, too, started training with Clarkson. It’s worth noting that Jimmy, like Jim Clausen’s other sons, was considerably older than the other students in his grade. Jim Clausen started Jimmy in kindergarten late, at age six, the same age his other children had been. He also held Jimmy back in the sixth grade, again to allow his son to mature more, just the way he did with Casey and Ricky. It was as if Clausen Sr. was redshirting his kids in grade school. Twice.

By Jimmy Clausen’s sophomore year of high school in 2004, Steve Clarkson was practically writing the headlines for journalists. “If there were a LeBron James for football, it would be Jimmy Clausen,” Clarkson told the
New York Times.
“He’s truly a freak. It’s ridiculous.”

Cynics snickered at the quote, especially the part where Clarkson used the word “ridiculous” in comparing Clausen and a basketball prodigy who’d already earned Rookie of the Year honors and become the youngest NBA player to ever score forty points in a game. A year later, Clarkson evoked the names of other iconic athletes to describe his latest high school QB project.

“Jimmy has the leadership of Casey, the intangibles of Rick, and the skills of Dan Marino,” Clarkson told
Sports Illustrated
in 2005 for a story titled “The Kid with the Golden Arm.”

The elder Clausen wasn’t shy about giving Clarkson credit for
making his sons into college quarterbacks and conceded to the
New York Times
that all three of his sons were actually average athletes. “Steve Clarkson is a dream maker,” Jim Clausen said, using a term he also used about Clarkson in
Los Angeles Magazine
’s 100 Most Influential People issue. [Clarkson liked the description so much, he changed the name of his company from Air 7 to Dreammaker.] “There’s no way that any of my three sons ever get an opportunity to do the things they’ve done and have the experiences they’ve had if it isn’t for someone like Steve Clarkson.”

In 2006, when Jimmy Clausen announced that he would be attending Notre Dame, he did so at a news conference at the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend after arriving in a stretch Hummer limousine with a sixteen-person entourage. There was a press release touting the news event. Clausen waved around three bulky high school championship rings. “In terms of entrances, Jimmy Clausen outdid Don King, Don Corleone, and Don Quixote combined,” wrote
CBSSports.com
’s Dennis Dodd.

Clausen never did get any championship rings at Notre Dame. The best he could do was lead the Fighting Irish to a Sheraton Hawaii Bowl victory, and his team went 16–21 in his three seasons in South Bend. He had a good career but hardly a great one, throwing 60 touchdowns against 27 interceptions. His team was just 1–6 against ranked opponents. After the 2009 season, he entered the NFL Draft and was taken in the second round. The NFL career of the QB once compared to LeBron James amounted to 3 touchdown passes, 9 interceptions, and 9 fumbles for a Carolina Panthers team that went 2–14. Two seasons later, Clausen was cut.

Jim Clausen may have paid Steve Clarkson a small fortune for a decade-plus of private QB lessons, but he probably made that money back in unspent college tuition, thanks to all three of his sons getting scholarships. After Jimmy Clausen signed with Notre Dame, Charlie Weis even recommended Clarkson to Fighting Irish legend Joe Montana, who was looking for someone else to train his own sons. The Montanas flew Clarkson out to their place in Calistoga Ranch, watched him work with their eldest boy, Nate, and after ten minutes were sold and told him he had the job. Nate Montana transferred to
longtime Bay Area powerhouse De La Salle but couldn’t win the starting job. He attempted just 19 passes as a backup for his senior season and was completely off the recruiting radar. Well, almost completely.

“When I moved back to California as the new head coach of UCLA, Steve Clarkson calls me,” Rick Neuheisel recalled. “He wants to make deals. If I take Montana’s kid, he’ll make sure that we get the next great one he’s got to come to UCLA. I said, ‘I can’t really do that, Steve.’ ”

Nate Montana ultimately decided to be a walk-on at his dad’s alma mater but then transferred to Mount San Antonio Junior College in California, then to Pasadena City College, before re-enrolling at Notre Dame. He lasted there one season before ending up at West Virginia Wesleyan, a Division II school. (Montana also had a short stint at the University of Montana, too.) His younger brother, Nick, also became a Clarkson disciple and even transferred down to Southern California in high school to play at Oaks Christian, Jimmy Clausen’s alma mater.

Asked to size up the ability of the younger Montana for an
ESPN.com
story about the famous sons on the Oaks football team in 2009—Joe Montana’s son, Wayne Gretzky’s son, and actor Will Smith’s son—Clarkson replied, “How good is he? He’s Joe. He’s Joe with a stronger arm.” Nick Montana also ended up bouncing around in college, beginning his career at Washington before he, too, transferred to Mount San Antonio Junior College and then resurfaced at Tulane.

The run of Jimmy Clausen stories in the media also caught the eye of a wealthy commercial developer and contractor in Delaware, who kept calling to ask Clarkson to train his nine-year-old son, David Sills V. Clarkson says he was initially reluctant, because he’d never worked with anyone quite that young, but he eventually relented, because the “experiment” of seeing how much the kid could retain intrigued him.

Even though Clarkson and his new protégé lived three thousand miles apart, they met regularly, usually for one weekend a month, weekly in football season. The coach often was flown back east, but sometimes the Sillses trekked to California to visit Clarkson. Other times, they connected at various places in between, depending on
wherever Clarkson was conducting a clinic. By the time Sills V was an eighth-grader, his dad estimated he’d already spent around $100,000 on Clarkson.

Soon, Clarkson was gushing about his “Next Big Deal.” One of the people who listened was then-USC head coach Lane Kiffin. Clarkson and Kiffin were chatting over the phone about recruiting, and the “dream maker” told the Trojan coach that he had a thirteen-year-old kid who was going to be better than Jimmy Clausen and Matt Barkley, USC’s starter at the time. Before saying good-bye, Clarkson directed Kiffin to a YouTube video.

Curious, Kiffin called Clarkson back after watching the clip to find out more about Sills. Clarkson explained that the boy had been training with him for three and a half years. A few hours later, Kiffin was on the phone with the kid and his parents, offering a scholarship that wouldn’t become a reality for another five years. None of these scholarship commitments are binding until the player puts his signature on a National Letter of Intent on Signing Day, which comes on the first Wednesday in February of his senior year of high school. Regardless of all that, the story of Kiffin offering a scholarship to a thirteen-year-old seventh-grader became national news, and Steve Clarkson and his Dreammaker brand swelled even bigger.

 
4.

Trent Dilfer cringed as he
started to discuss the five-star quarterback he’d let his staff talk him into inviting to the 2012 Elite 11 in his second season running the event. Dilfer lamented that he wasn’t at the Elite 11 regional where the QB had worked out. Instead, he was attending one of his daughter’s volleyball matches.

“The kid was the recruiting guys’ guy,” Dilfer said, referencing a prospect who gets so hyped by the online recruiting analysts so early that the kid practically gets anointed, which often skews his self-worth and breeds a sense of entitlement. This dynamic had only become thornier as the social-media world had grown. Five years ago, thousands of fans weren’t flocking to some seventeen-year-old’s Twitter feed, fawning and telling him how much their school needed him. It was bad enough that high schoolers had become mindful of their status being measured in recruiting stars; now they could quantify it in a different metric: followers.

Dilfer said he would never pick the kid—or allow him to get invited again.

“Joey told me, ‘Trent, you’re really gonna struggle with this kid,’ ” Dilfer said. “Joey” was Joey Roberts, Dilfer’s twenty-six-year-old assistant. The onetime Elite 11 ball-boy-turned-undersized-wideout
for Bob Johnson’s powerhouse Mission Viejo high school program makes a point of taking a three-mile walk with his old coach near his parents’ place just to talk high school football every time he returns home to California. Roberts’s title with the Elite 11 was general manager. He was also a right-hand man for Dilfer and ESPN’s NFL reporters Chris Mortensen and Adam Schefter. Roberts evaluated QB tape, just as the Elite 11 coaches did, and also had a keen sense of the personalities of the quarterbacks.

Roberts was right. The kid arrived at the week-long Elite 11 event in Southern California and recoiled at the competition. At one point, the QB even retreated to a bench along the sidelines and just sat there observing while the other blue-chippers kept playing.

Asked if the young quarterback was reachable, Dilfer leaned back in his chair. “No,” he said. “Maybe he might be three years from now, but he wasn’t at the time.”

Dilfer said the problem went deeper than a lack of maturity.

“I think that’s ‘nature’ at home, like the environment you grow up in,” he said. “There are some of these kids who have, like, 25,000 Twitter followers. So 25,000 people are telling them how great they are. Even if 10,000 were haters and 15,000 were admirers, they[’d still] grow up with this weird perspective or paradigm that ‘I’m better than everybody.’ ”

Dilfer was done inviting kids like that. In his first season with the Elite 11 in 2011, the staff had already invited the QBs. They had selected another five-star “recruiting guys’ guy.” In the presence of the other touted quarterbacks and coaches, that kid wilted, too. “He turtled,” said another Elite 11 staffer, invoking a now-often used MMA term for when guys just tuck their heads to avoid battling and wait for someone else to end things mercifully.

It used to be that the highest-ranked high school QBs in the star system were pretty much guaranteed invites to the Elite 11. The staff felt that they essentially had to have the high-profile kids there for political reasons or to quell outrage from fans questioning the authenticity of the camp if some five-star guy was neglected. Those days were over, Dilfer said, adding that event founder Andy Bark loved the fact that “we don’t
have
to invite anybody.”

Perhaps more than anything else, Dilfer wanted quarterbacks with “DQ,” as he’s termed it, as part of his ever-expanding QB glossary.

Dude Qualities.

Those other two five-star quarterbacks who made it through the old Elite 11 screening process weren’t
Dudes.
They were just
guys.