The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks (23 page)

“I want you to watch this in context. This is one of the greatest players who ever played college football, and he didn’t know how to pass. I believe that now he knows how to pass. Every GM, every scout, every personnel person out there should go at least watch Tim Tebow now, because he’s a different guy.”

Weeks later, in Indianapolis at the NFL Combine, the reaction from coaches and personnel people to claims of a Tebow transformation was a collective shrug. “The problem isn’t really his arm,” said one veteran NFL defensive coach about Tebow. “It’s that he’s not wired to process what he’s seeing once the ball is snapped, and if you don’t have that, you simply can’t be a quarterback in this league.”

Told of the skepticism, Dilfer nodded. “I think that’s fair, based on his track record in the NFL,” he said. “I will always err to a fault on ‘nurture’ over ‘nature.’ My argument to that is, now that he has a better passing acumen, doesn’t he deserve a chance to see if that passing acumen allows his mind to free up a little bit to process?

“Tim is very transparent. He said there were times when he knew he couldn’t complete the ball and was just looking for a chance to move the chains with his legs. That’s a pretty honest answer, explaining a lot of stuff that’s seen on tape.”

Neither the latest layer of skepticism nor his budding broadcasting career would keep Tebow from House’s workouts. If the NFL had given up on Tim Tebow as a quarterback, that was its decision. It wouldn’t be his or House’s.

As Tebow exited the baseball field to head to a throwing workout with Dedeaux at a park in El Segundo, he pulled the import/export guy in for a hug and then moved toward House, who put up his hands. “My family doesn’t hug,” he said half-jokingly.

Tebow, smiling ear to ear, ignored it and engulfed House in a bear hug, as he let out a big “YEAAAAAAH!”

 
7.

JUNE 28, 2013
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Elite 11, once again, had tweaked its format. Trent Dilfer picked eighteen top high school QB prospects for his “campetition,” rather than the twenty-five it had in 2012 or the eleven it had for its first decade in existence. The organizers overhauled the process, so that now, by week’s end, a “top eleven” was determined based on quarterbacks’ performance in a very, very wide variety of opportunities and situations. It was Dilfer’s personal lab, a way to beta test his research and theories.

Most of the week’s activities were held at the exquisitely manicured Nike campus in Beaverton, Oregon. A dozen-plus QB coaches from eight different states helped run the event. Many of them were former NFL QBs who had gone into the private-quarterback-coaching business and had come together as part of the season-long Elite 11 process that bounced all over the country trying to ID elite high school prospects. They all were working for Dilfer, who continued to build his TDFB brand, the venture he called a “holistic coaching ecosystem uniting coaches & expanding their influence.” None of them was paid other than for travel expenses.

By 9:59 a.m., the room was packed with coaches, and an eight-person camera crew was documenting the week.

“I’m a big thirty-thousand-feet guy,” Dilfer began by telling his staff. “We’re not doing a camp anymore, guys. This is truly a culture.”

Dilfer and the folks from Student Sports, Inc., who have run the Elite 11 since its inception, have been consumed by trying to find ways to give the young QBs every edge and opportunity imaginable to grow. Since Dilfer’s arrival at the Elite 11, the camp’s competitive nature had amped up. In 2012, he even brought in the Navy SEALs to run the high schoolers through a rigorous challenge in the ocean. He and his staff kept tallies on it all. He reminded the college-age counselors that their words were even more meaningful to the kids.

“You’re their idols,” he said, looking at Michigan quarterback Devin Gardner [Elite 11 Class of 2009] and Clemson QB Tajh Boyd [Elite 11 Class of 2008]. “Teach them how to learn.”

Dilfer’s also added to his staff a “high-performance psychology” coach, Dr. Michael Gervais, who helped coach the Seattle Seahawks and in 2012 trained six Olympic gold medalists.

“We’re not looking for the top eleven quarterbacks; we’re looking for the top eleven competitors,” said former-USC-assistant-QB-coach-turned-Pac-12 commentator Yogi Roth, who was called up to the front along with Dr. Gervais for a quick presentation. Roth helped run the camp and was one of the voices of the ESPN TV show.

Most of the curriculum covered in Dilfer’s meeting probably sounded familiar to a coaching staff that had spent its life around football, with many of the Elite 11 assistants having played the game at a high level. Two of the staffers in the room, Neil Lomax and Ken O’Brien, each spent a decade in the NFL. Dr. Gervais’s messages, though, often took the football guys into uncharted waters. There were diagrams with triangles and overlapping circles of mental flow charts.

“We’re going to teach confidence,” said the forty-year-old surfer before asking where confidence came from. The old QBs threw out a bunch of guesses—preparation? past success?—before Dilfer, a protégé of Gervais, provided the right answer.

“It only comes from one place—self-talk,” Gervais agreed. “We need to teach, as coaches, how to speak well, how to think well. This is why language matters.”

Of course, here in Dilferland, it all mattered.

The players also were put on a high-tech, brain-training system, AXON, to help them, among other things, process coverages faster—and “to show how pliable their brains are,” Dilfer said. Another group Dilfer had brought in was debuting a cutting-edge camera (smaller than a fingernail) built into a helmet that would give the QBs—and the coaches—a full perspective of what the quarterback was seeing, or “Ground Truth,” as Dilfer put it.

“We’re the product. The kid is the consumer,” he said. “Everything we do. High energy. High respect for others. Let’s be aware of our language. Everything we say matters.”

The Super Bowl–winning QB told his staff exactly what he was looking for from them and for the kids. Dilfer was passionate, moving around, punching key points. Each of the morning’s speakers he called on hit on elements to illuminate an environment that Dilfer said had the kids who won invitations there feeling like, “I get to go to QB Heaven.”

Dilfer also was mindful of the perceptions of his group from the outside. “We’re bringing an army up here, guys, and it just takes one weak link to ruin the whole thing,” he said. “How we carry ourselves and how we interact with the hotel and the people with Nike matters. We pick up any garbage, and we leave a room better than when we found it. I want people to say, ‘That is the coolest bunch of cats.’ ”

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].”