The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks (17 page)

After graduation, Whitfield figured that college coaching should be his next stop. He landed an entry-level job on Kirk Ferentz’s staff as a weight-room graduate assistant at the University of Iowa. However, after one season, the pull of being a quarterback was too strong. Whitfield worked managing a bar in Iowa while driving all over the
country to open tryouts at various levels of football. In 2004, he was one of 250 aspiring players who drove to Pittsburgh to try out for the Arena Football League’s Chicago Rush. Head coach Mike Hohensee kept only two players from the tryout. Whitfield was one of them.

“I remember specifically saying at the end of the camp, ‘Unfortunately, I’m only gonna keep two of you guys.’ George said to me, ‘Coach, when you said that, I was wondering who the other guy was.’ That’s how confident the kid was,” recalled Hohensee, who said that Whitfield had a good arm but probably relied too much on his arm strength at the time at the expense of his touch, which was more of a premium in the Indoor Football League for some of the “specialty” throws.

“He needed to learn the game,” the coach said. “That was his first experience with [arena football], so I recommended he play at one of the lower levels. He was a student of the game with a great attitude. He took coaching well, and he applied it quickly. He just didn’t have the experience. I remember, I made a couple of calls for him.”

Whitfield moved on to the Louisville Fire, where he threw a couple of TD passes in an exhibition game, but that was as close as he ever got to playing in a regular-season game.

Asked why his playing career never really took off as a quarterback past the Arena Leagues, Whitfield said that, as ironic as it might sound now, he never had the 30,000-foot view as a quarterback. He was a strong-armed, 220-pound guy with 4.5-speed, but he’d never been exposed to anything like the Elite 11. He’d only participated in a few local camps.

Law school started to sound good to him. Whitfield, who had relocated to San Diego, began studying for the LSATs. To help pay his bills, he applied for a marketing job with a local company, when he was presented with a different opportunity: The family that owned the business Whitfield contacted, the Green Flash Brewing Company, knew he played football and asked if he’d be willing to train their son. The dad had become the coach of a Pop Warner football team. His son was a fourth-grader and his team’s new quarterback. His mom told Whitfield they’d pay him $40 a session.

“It was about a forty-five-minute drive to get there, so I probably spent half the money on gas,” Whitfield said. The workouts took place on a Little League baseball field.

Whitfield’s efforts with the kid proved to be a hit. By the end of Mikey Hinkley’s Pop Warner season, Whitfield was coaching more than a dozen other kids. “I realized how cool it was whenever there was an ‘Aha!’ moment, when a little kid gets it,” said Whitfield.

Whitfield essentially stumbled into a profession he hadn’t even realized existed. He also had no clue that he had landed in perhaps the perfect spot to do it—in a QB haven with wealthy families and year-round sun that happened to be outside the driving distance of Steve Clarkson and Bob Johnson in the LA area. “I didn’t know who Steve Clarkson or Bob Johnson were,” Whitfield said.

He pulled the plug on his struggling playing career and on law school. His outgoing nature and gregarious personality also helped him get an internship with the San Diego Chargers in 2006, where he assisted offensive coordinator Cam Cameron, who also happened to be the son of a former Massillon football coach. Whitfield had actually first met him back when Cameron was Michigan’s quarterback coach and he was a thirteen-year-old QB who had talked his dad into letting him attend the Wolverines’ summer football camp. In San Diego, Whitfield cut film, charted practice, and got to observe how Cameron and the staff studied minute details that the former Arena QB had been oblivious to.

“It was like being a junior high science teacher sitting in at NASA, working with government scientists,” Whitfield said.

Details Whitfield had taken for granted as a player, he was forced to reconsider. These became his ‘Aha!’ moments. “A snap is a snap,” he said. “I just thought guys put their hands under however they’re most comfortable. But they [the Chargers] had a systematic reason for doing it a certain way.”

The Chargers would have one cameraman lying on his belly filming up next to the center, and a second cameraman, also on the ground, four feet behind, filming up through Philip Rivers’s legs to see exactly how the quarterback clasped the ball when he received it. The team would spend forty-five minutes twice a week filming these
exchanges during their OTAs, Whitfield said. Cameron became consumed by details dating back to his Michigan days in the mid-’80s, he told Whitfield, after learning how then-Wolverine baseball phenom Jim Abbott, despite being born without a right hand, excelled as a high school quarterback and never fumbled a snap.

Another example of the level of attention to detail: All his life Whitfield had been coached to drive off his back foot in his delivery. With Cameron and San Diego QB coach John Ramsdell, it was “drive off the
inside arch
of your back foot.”

Whitfield began to grasp the mechanics of things he had never contemplated when he was in the middle of doing them as a QB. For instance, how a quarterback’s whole body needed to be engaged, starting from the inside of his right shoe (if he is a right-handed quarterback), and then the hip goes through. Then the core goes through as he rides that energy, and then his arm rolls into it.

“They were splitting hairs, splitting atoms—everything,” Whitfield said. “There was a science to it, because if you’re not specific, something can mean different things to different people.”

THE FIRST TIME WHITFIELD
flashed onto the national radar as a private QB coach was in 2009, at the Nike high school football training camp being held on the USC campus in Los Angeles.

Whitfield, then thirty-one, was part of a caravan of four carloads of QB hopefuls who made the two-hour drive up from San Diego. Among the quarterbacks Whitfield brought was the guy many of the recruiting analysts expected to be the top quarterback at USC that day, a chiseled 6′5″, 220-pounder from San Diego with J. Crew looks who reminded scouts of a young Brady Quinn. Pete Thomas reportedly had scholarship offers from Maryland, Arizona State, and Northwestern, among others.

Whitfield explained to one of the two camera crews working on a pilot that would eventually become ESPN’s
Elite 11
TV show that he had been training Thomas since the kid was in the eighth grade. Whitfield also gushed about another QB he’d brought, a spindly 6′6″ quarterback with zero offers. But the kid was about to break out,
“like a submarine ready to rise,” Whitfield said. Penn State coaches were coming in the next week to check him out.

Whitfield was engaging, a natural on camera. He certainly appeared a lot more relaxed than his protégés were that afternoon: Thomas struggled with his accuracy. The other quarterback, the sleeper Whitfield was touting, was overwhelmed by the scene. At one point during the day the kid wandered into the group of top QBs the camp’s coaches had put together after about an hour of observation. The main coach overseeing the drills noticed the taller kid trying to blend in before getting his turn to throw. He called the kid out and told him to point out who had sent him over. The kid pointed in the general direction of about twenty people, but when the coach demanded who, specifically, the kid dropped his head and slunk away to a group of younger kids. It was a heartbreaking scene to watch a kid get crushed like that.

Whitfield, at the very least, seemed like a heck of a salesman, but was that all he was? Just another fast-talking character in the growing fringe surrounding the college football world?

IN 2010
,
A FIFTEEN
-
MINUTE
video Whitfield posted online got some traction with the national media fixated on Florida star Tim Tebow’s transition to the NFL.

“My name is George Whitfield, and I’m a quarterback builder,” he said as it began.

Whitfield broke down Tebow’s mechanics, as well as drills that he explained would shorten the Florida star’s elongated throwing motion via some before-and-after clips of adjustments he’d made with former Louisville QB Hunter Cantwell and other former college QBs.

Tebow’s camp never contacted Whitfield, but later that year, after Ben Roethlisberger was suspended for the first four games of the 2010 season and was prohibited from working with the Steelers coaches, he hired Whitfield to keep his skills sharp. Roethlisberger’s agent became sold on the coach after seeing his work with Cantwell, one of his other clients.

Whitfield learned plenty from the Pittsburgh Steelers star, too.
He studied with Roethlisberger and realized how much the QB did “off-script”—in situations where plays broke down because there was so much conflict in the pocket, Whitfield said.

Roethlisberger was just improvising and solving problems on his own. Whitfield realized how all those conventional, regimented drills that QB coaches had been doing for years often ran counter to the reality of the game. They just weren’t applicable. Whitfield started scripting situations that were the
un
scripted scenarios of actual football. Whitfield showed Roethlisberger a bunch of new drills, one in which Whitfield simulated oncoming rushers swarming the big QB by swatting at him with a garden rake that he’d bought at a local hardware store. (Whitfield covered the talons in some pipe foam to avoid the risk of gouging the Steelers star.) The drill—“Chaos,” as Whitfield titled it—was something he’d picked up from watching former Nebraska assistant Shawn Watson at a camp years earlier. Watson had swept a broom along the grass to get his quarterbacks to move their feet. Whitfield had seen other coaches chuck volleyballs at their QBs. Whitfield combined the two concepts. It was a way to influence a quarterback without being up on him, simulating evading pressure with his feet or with his upper body while he kept both hands gripping the ball up at his chest with his eyes focused downfield.

Roethlisberger loved the drill. He went on to lead the Steelers to the Super Bowl, and Whitfield finally had a big-game client on his résumé; but more than that, the 6′5″, 250-pounder was a big, play-making quarterback. Whitfield was able to sell his handling of “Big Ben” to football’s latest phenomenon at the time, Cam Newton. Days after Newton finished leading Auburn to the national title, he and his father, Cecil, tabbed Whitfield to orchestrate the Heisman Trophy winner’s pre-draft training.

With Newton heading to be the first pick in the NFL Draft, the spotlight on Whitfield grew, and his unconventional training methods became a curiosity inside the growing industry. His training regimen targeted a quarterback’s base and stressed footwork. Whitfield was creative in his ways to develop those elements. One day he brought Thomas and another high school protégé out to train on North Pacific Beach. What better place to work on their drops than in the soft,
thick sand, Whitfield figured. Once there, Whitfield noticed how the surfers struggled in the water, walking with their boards, and got another idea. Why not have his QBs practice their drops in the ocean, where the waves would surge in and rush them at mid-thigh?

“You can’t take any step for granted in there,” Whitfield said. “With the ocean, there are gonna be times where the waves come in on you in mid-drop, and are you strong enough to continue dropping [back] against the weight of that water? If your steps aren’t true, you’re gonna fall in.”

Whitfield’s training philosophy was emboldened after he watched
Moneyball.
“That movie was such an eye-opener,” Whitfield says. “I loved how
Moneyball
let what happened on the field set the course.”

The movie, based on Michael Lewis’s
New York Times
best seller about how Billy Beane transformed the hapless Oakland A’s franchise by relying on new-age analytics, dovetailed with something Whitfield had picked up that winter from an AFC scout at the NFL Combine in Indianapolis. The veteran NFL personnel man told Whitfield that his team had done a study and found that only 48 percent of the time had his team’s quarterback taken his prescribed drop from center and run the pass play as drawn up. More times than not, the QB had to adjust—or escape pressure and then try to unload the ball.

“And that guy was with a team that had a good offensive line, so I’m thinking, in college, the percent where the QB has to improvise and scramble out of trouble is probably even higher,” Whitfield said. “I was thinking about that scene in
Moneyball
, where Brad Pitt [playing Beane] and Jonah Hill are at the backstop, and he goes, ‘So, do you believe in it or not?’

“It was alarming to me. So we tried to build in a protocol. We had to teach them the proper response and throw all these variables at them—slide, move, dodge, retreat, now hop over something. We talk about matador escapability. You gotta be just like that matador, so when the bull gets about a foot away, you make one subtle, decisive move, and that bull rumbles past, and you’re still right there. You gotta get as close as you can in what you practice to it seeming as real as possible.”

To remedy that, Whitfield came up with drills he called “Havoc,” “Chaos,” and “Surge” and used brooms, tennis rackets, rakes, and bean bags to enhance them.

At Andrew Luck’s Pro Day in 2012, televised from Stanford live on ESPN, Whitfield made his national TV debut. To most sports reporters he was simply “the Broom Guy,” the dude built like a linebacker chasing—and flailing at—the expected number one overall pick of the 2012 NFL Draft.

“[Andrew] Luck being pressured by a guy with a broom while he throws. Really. Hilarity ensues among press corps,” tweeted one NFL writer.

“Unexpected development: Man w/ broom is charging Luck as he throws, simulating pressure of a very skinny NFL defensive end,” wrote another NFL reporter.

But by the end of the day, Whitfield had some ninety messages from college coaches and quarterbacks asking if he’d have time to train them, too.