The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks (22 page)

House was just one of many private quarterback coaches who had a crack at “fixing” Tim Tebow. Coming out of Florida, Tebow worked with college QB coach Noel Mazzone (who was the offensive coordinator at Arizona State at the time) and his son, Taylor. In 2013, he spent a few weeks training in Bradenton, Florida, at the IMG Football Academy with former Florida State Heisman Trophy winner Chris Weinke, who tweaked how Tebow’s feet were aligned when he began his motion. There was also a stint with David Morris, Eli Manning’s
backup at Ole Miss, who has a quarterback-training business based in Mobile, Alabama. Then, before Tebow went to camp with the Jets, he trained with Steve Clarkson, who said he solved Tebow’s slow, “looping” throwing motion by changing his footwork and incorporating some Tai Chi into the workouts. A few weeks later, more Tebow coaches spoke out about their tweaks with the former first-rounder. Dennis Gile, a protégé of Trent Dilfer, and Mike Giavondo told reporters they’d worked with Tebow for three months in Arizona, while Clarkson actually only came down for one day and went to the media claiming credit.

“We are getting tired of Clarkson taking credit for guys, going on radio stations,” Gile told the website SB Nation. “I don’t want to get in a war with him. We put in a lot of time and effort for nothing to really help this guy. [Tebow] became a good friend of ours, and he is a good guy.”

NFL teams probably didn’t doubt whether he was a good guy. A good quarterback was a different story. Worse still, he was a quarterback who came with a legion of media in tow. That had become Tebow’s baggage. And that made him not worth all the drama.

“Everybody’s afraid of Tim,” House said. “There’s too much stuff that comes with Tim. When he showed up here, he was 10,000 reps behind any other NFL quarterback. He’d never been given a tool kit on how to fix [his mechanics]. With good intentions, he wasn’t getting any help. Everybody pulls for him, but good intentions with bad information is just as bad as no information at all.”

For the first month of training sessions, Tebow asked House not to allow people into the stadium, because the former college star didn’t want anyone to know he was there. House didn’t bother to look at Tebow’s old film.

“I don’t look at bad film,” he said. “We work with what our statistical model has validated, and then we work from there. It’s what we’re supposed to be dealing with right now. We know for a fact that he had premature rotation issues on the front side, and his back foot came off the ground too soon, but that shows up when he’s throwing. You don’t have to look at it on film.”

House also examined Tebow’s diet and determined that the QB
was taking in too much protein and didn’t have enough balance. House wanted to make his body more “quarterback specific, so he doesn’t look so much like a linebacker anymore.”

For his entire life, Tebow’s will had been seen as his greatest attribute. It was celebrated in many features written about him. In truth, House believed, it also had been a detriment.

“He probably has been in muscle failure most of his adult life,” House said. “We talked about prepare, compete, and repair. You’re more efficient when your body repairs before you start asking things of it.” It took a good six weeks before Tebow’s body got acclimated. They eventually gave him Wednesdays off to recover.

House picked up on what a “pleaser” Tebow was. House and Dedeaux would tease Tebow sometimes; they’d whisper gibberish to each other out of the quarterback’s earshot.

“Hey, what are you guys saying?” Tebow would ask. House and Dedeaux would laugh.

“Feedback is huge for him,” House said. “But he doesn’t like bullshit.”

House dismissed a lot of reasons why people said Tebow struggled, from being too stiff in his neck and shoulders to a penchant for over-striding. “There is no such thing as over-striding, but there is something about not having the right timing in the foot stride,” he said. “Guys like Brady and Carson Palmer have much bigger strides than Tebow, but they had better timing with those strides. When we start teaching, we look at timing first, then kinematic sequencing, and then the mechanics of the throw. So if you’re not timed right, no matter how good you are with the mechanics, it’s gonna look weird. It’s called the step-wise regression analysis.

“All of the stuff that they’d criticized him about—there was actually no basis for them to criticize him. The only thing that held true was that he was not accurate. He knew that. [Bill] Parcells knew it. Everybody knew that.”

TEBOW WAS THE FIRST
high-profile product of House’s new 3DQB business, which launched in the summer of 2013 to help leverage the
momentum the former Major Leaguer had in the QB-development world. House admitted he didn’t know much about the quarterback-coaching space as a business, but Adam Dedeaux did.

“I’m not much of a marketer,” House said. “He is. He’s helped me in how to market and how to relate to this current generation of athletes.

“There are some really good quarterbacks coaches out there, like the Whitfields, but nobody teaches the throwers, the rotational athletes, like we do.”

House was mentoring Dedeaux just as the kid’s grandfather once mentored him when he was a USC pitcher back in the ’60s. One of House’s mantras—Fail Fast Forward—about athletes not being afraid to fail, was something he’d learned from the legendary Trojan coach. In addition to the work they were doing on the USC campus, 3DQB also was branching out into the youth-camp model, which former NFL quarterback John Beck, the other member of the business, was shepherding. They had already done camps in Boston and Utah, and had another one lined up in Arizona in the spring.

“John’s helping build a camp model for us, so we can reach more kids, because there’s only so many hours in the day,” said Dedeaux.

House wanted to throttle down his pace by the time he was seventy and have Dedeaux become the face of 3DQB, he said. That way, he could do more research; House had noticed that things had only gotten more hectic for him in the past year than ever before.

He was at USC every day during the week and then traveled to give similar lectures on weekends. “I just did a golf thing at Ojai Country Club for twenty-five seniors like myself,” he said. House mostly stayed in a condo across the street from the Staples Center at L.A. LIVE, a ten-minute drive from USC. He had gotten a nice home on the beach down in Del Mar but lamented that he only got to live in it about two or three days a month.

“I’m surprised how quickly it’s grown,” House said of his business. “I was happy with three or four guys, and now we have fifteen to twenty. It’s cool, because we don’t advertise. It’s all word of mouth. We’ve only been pushing [the quarterback business] hard for about a
year. I was dabbling in it for fourteen to fifteen years, but it’s become a real business with Adam and John.

“Our biggest wish is to be too busy, and our biggest nightmare is to be too busy to deliver a product. I think we’re on overload right now. Adam wants size. We’re not gonna be a babysitting group, though. I’m not gonna do large numbers. But the most important [thing] to me is that when someone leaves here, they’re better.”

THE
“
FIXING
”
OF TIM
Tebow, the quarterback, would take some three months. House’s diagnosis of why Tebow was inaccurate all came back to timing issues with his body. Once they could get his body in sync, the mechanics were actually pretty easy to fix, the former Major League pitcher said. “He still does what he’s always done with his throwing arm. We just fixed the front side and gave him a better posture to do it and made him time it better.” Beyond that, House said Tebow learned why he would misfire whenever he did, which “The Professor” said was vital for anyone to be at their best.

“We allowed him to understand why the ball goes right or left, why the ball goes high or low and how to spin the ball and how to physically prepare from feet to fingertips and to take it out and make the dynamic movement work for you and not against you. Does the term ‘muscle-head’ make sense? He muscled everything. He can muscle it when he needs it, but now he’s got kinematic sequencing. He’s muscled down for efficiency.”

Another underlying problem that tied into Tebow’s issues in the NFL that House IDed: the former All-American quarterback had no confidence in his throwing ability.

“He didn’t think he could make that throw, so he went to what he was confident in, and that was his legs.”

Dedeaux added that Tebow was particularly flummoxed by timing routes: “If he’s supposed to hit a corner, and he thinks, ‘Well, maybe I can hit or maybe not, or I can just roll out and let everything become chaotic, and then I’ll find somebody.’ That’s where he found his strength to be.”

“He’s gone from chaos to total repeatability,” House proudly interjected.
“If I had never seen him throw before, and then I watched him throw on Tuesday in the Coliseum, I’d say he was right up there with the guys we work with. Is he quite at the level of Drew Brees, Brady? No, but it’s pretty frickin’ good. He can make all the throws now.

“It’s a numbers game. You saw Malcolm Gladwell’s book that it takes ten thousand hours for mastery? He’s getting close.

“You can be the tough guy here,” House said, turning to Dedeaux. “How much better is his accuracy than when he first showed up?”

When told that they were not the first people to work with Tim Tebow and pronounce the big QB “fixed,” Dedeaux nodded. “That’s why I’m a little bit more conservative.”

“What we don’t wanna do is send him off, telling everybody he’s fixed, and have him poop the bed. But he’s not gonna poop the bed. He knows why he’s screwing up, and he can tell you why. I think he’s ready to go play right now. If we could get him into a system he’s comfortable with, he could go play now.”

That, of course,
was
a big piece. The knock from NFL coaches and personnel people on Tebow, beyond doubts about his accuracy, was that he struggled to read defenses and process what was in front of him at warp speed the way top NFL QBs need to.

House dismissed that skepticism. “He’s already proved it,” he told me. “He couldn’t throw accurately, and he still won in the NFL.

“It’s going to take someone who understands that kids can get better and understands that the entourage that comes with Tim Tebow, if managed properly by the front office, is not an issue at all. Belichick proved that already. There’ll be a perfect spot for Tim. I just hope it happens sooner rather than later.

“I’d like to call some of my contacts in football to say he’s ready.”

These were uncharted waters for House. His other famous football protégés were more established in their NFL careers. Tebow, to many people, had become a punch line, and that made House play the advocate’s role.

“He’s a pretty special kid,” House said. “I’m not gonna lie. I was looking for holes in the program, but he’s everything he appears to be.”

One month later—and about a week after ESPN announced that Tebow was joining the company for its SEC Network as a college-football analyst—Trent Dilfer flew to Los Angeles to work Tebow out for a five-minute TV segment on ESPN’s
Sunday NFL Countdown.

Dilfer introduced the piece by saying he had received a call from
Tebow asking for a “brutally honest evaluation of where he’s at.” Dilfer, wearing his Elite 11 baseball hat and pullover, ran Tebow through a workout similar to that of any other quarterback he trained. In the segment, Dilfer made it clear that it was House—identified as the “3DQB Performance Analyst”—who had been overhauling Tebow for the past four months. The video showed Tebow, in a red, sweat-soaked T-shirt with the words
I AM SET FREE
on the front, going through many of the exercises that are staples of House’s regimen. There was the quarterback with his hands extended above his head, dribbling in unison two grapefruit-sized balls against a cinder-block wall, as well as Tebow snapping a towel against a football held up to mirror the top of his release point in a variation of a drill House picked up in Japan. House at one point compared Tebow to Nolan Ryan for having the “same motivational muscle.”

“I don’t have all the answers,” Dilfer said on camera, coming out of the segment. “I do know this. If you put Tim Tebow on a football field right now with four other NFL quarterbacks, [and] you didn’t know who they were, and [you] just watched the ball, you wouldn’t know which one was Tim Tebow and which ones were the NFL quarterbacks.