The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks (33 page)

JANUARY 13, 2014
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Draft camp season hadn’t even started yet, and George Whitfield had already taken his first loss. Whitfield had been excited that he’d get to appear on Comedy Central’s
The Colbert Report
after the producers from one of his favorite shows had contacted him months earlier for a segment during which the private quarterback coach would teach the show’s star how to throw a football. Problem was, the producers wanted to tape the segment on January 10, which turned out to be the day Whitfield’s most famous client, Johnny Manziel, was scheduled to arrive in San Diego. Manziel had come to Southern California for three months of intensive training with Whitfield and his staff to get ready for the NFL Combine and a Pro Day—just like two other quarterbacks, Logan Thomas of Virginia Tech and Brock Jensen of North Dakota State, were doing. Whitfield had to tell Stephen Colbert’s people, thanks but no thanks.

“How could I look at these [quarterbacks] and tell them I want everybody dialed in, and then I fly out of town to appear in some comedy skit?” said Whitfield. Instead, Comedy Central brought in Steve Clarkson to help Colbert in the segment.

The first day of training started three days later, on the second
Monday in January, although Whitfield had already done some coaching over the weekend with his star protégé. A few minutes after 8:00 a.m., Whitfield gathered his staff, which included two assistants, a half dozen interns, a strength and conditioning coach, and former NFL backup quarterback Kevin O’Connell, to run through the day’s schedule. He also mentioned to O’Connell that he had changed Manziel’s grip over the weekend.

“I wanted to do it the last year, but, honestly, I was too nervous about messing with him, because we did so much other stuff with him,” Whitfield said, noting that previously Manziel’s fingers weren’t on the strings, so when he finished throws, his hand wrapped up so he could get the spin. Whitfield changed the spacing between Manziel’s fingers to give them something to come off of upon release, which he said the Texas A&M star quickly took to when they got some throwing in over the weekend.

“Halfway through the first drill, he goes, ‘Man, this is some good stuff right here,’ ” Whitfield said proudly.

Much of the training for the next three months would take place in Carlsbad, a half hour north of San Diego at Prolific Athletics, a modest, 15,000-square-foot training center owned by thirty-two-year-old former-Utah State-receiver-turned-speed-coach Ryan Flaherty.

By 10:00 a.m., Whitfield had his entire crew on the field at Aviara Park, a mile down the road. Two of Whitfield’s interns maneuvered flip cams and tripods to get into position while another was filming on an iPad. Whitfield tried to script every segment of the day for his quarterbacks to save their arms and legs. Best known as the “Broom Guy,” Whitfield wasn’t shy about using anything in his drills. One of his favorites was having his interns wave a tennis racket above their head as a receiver ran a corner route just past them to better hone his quarterback’s touch on “bucket” throws. It was the same reason he’d sometimes use soccer goals and have his receiver stand just on the edge with the net to his back, forcing a pass to be lofted over it. Manziel’s touch, as NFL scouts could attest, had already proven to be feathery soft. For the rocket-armed Logan Thomas, though, it was a much bigger point of emphasis.

At 1:35 p.m., back at Prolific on the opposite side of the weight room, Whitfield had four air mattresses brought in and spaced five yards apart for nap time. He’d gotten the idea, from a Stanford professor two years earlier while training Andrew Luck there, that athletes were noticeably sharper and more energized if you could mix in an hour of sleep for their bodies and minds to recuperate. The players: Manziel, Thomas, Jensen, and Texas A&M star Mike Evans—the first wide receiver Whitfield had ever included in a draft camp—rooked skeptical when Whitfield had an intern pass around sleep masks. Whitfield also walked around with a tray to collect their cell phones, just in case they were tempted to text friends or take to Twitter rather than sleep. Jokes aside, within ten minutes, all four players were zonked out on their mattresses.

One of the offices in the Prolific building had been turned into a makeshift quarterback room or, more specifically, Kevin O’Connell’s classroom for the QBs to get a crash course in NFL schemes and terminology. There was a wooden table with enough room for two chairs on each of the four sides. Whiteboards had been fastened to two of the walls, with a projector in the middle of the table aimed at a third wall. The room felt cramped once the 6′6″, 250-pound Thomas settled into a chair fifteen minutes after being awoken from the hour-long nap. A pair of his size-seventeen shoes sat beside his chair, looking as if they weighed twenty pounds apiece. Thomas dwarfed Jensen, the quarterback seated to his left, a guy who was listed at 6′3″, 225 pounds by North Dakota State. They were up first with O’Connell, while Flaherty had Manziel lifting weights. In a week the Virginia Tech quarterback would be down in Mobile, Alabama, for the Senior Bowl, where NFL personnel men studied his every move.

“Best thing I can tell you is, for the next three months I’m somebody who’s been through this,” said O’Connell, standing in front of a whiteboard. The twenty-eight-year-old O’Connell’s main job with the camp was to help get the QBs prepared mentally from a scheme and film review standpoint, so they could handle the team interviews with NFL coaches and GMs and aid in prep for the Wonderlic, a twelve-minute, fifty-question cognitive test used by some corporations and the NFL.

“I know the important parts, and I know the not-so-important parts. We don’t need to teach you to play a game on March 1. Just so you can explain next-level thinking to a GM or quarterbacks coach.”

O’Connell, a former star QB at San Diego State and the son of a former FBI agent, spent five seasons in the NFL with five teams. For the 2013 season, O’Connell worked with ESPN as a commentator. In his pro career, he backed up Tom Brady in New England after being selected by the Patriots in the third round of the 2008 draft. At about that same time six years earlier, O’Connell was being viewed as a seventh-round guy, but through strong performances at the Combine and in his individual workouts and meetings, his draft stock soared. The affable former QB was hoping his new protégés could make a similar rise.

“You can take a perceived weakness and turn it into a strength in reality in a ten-minute conversation with a GM,” O’Connell said, sounding a little like a self-help guru. “I walked into the Combine, and I’m meeting with the head coach of a team, and I see San Diego State film up on the screen. Great. ‘What are we gonna watch?’ Film starts playing. I see it’s the New Mexico game. I think back to that game: ‘I think I threw three picks in the first quarter.’ Every single INT was shown on that film. No touchdowns. No third-down conversions. No NFL throws. Two of them I threw right to the defender, and I had to talk through what [had] happened without throwing anybody under the bus; not about the play call or the O-line or a receiver running a wrong route. And they just sit there and watch you.

“I’m gonna be constantly watching you. Your body language while I get you up on the board answering questions really matters. The thing about the Combine and this whole process is, it’s pretty uniform. Tom Brady went through it. Andrew Luck went through it. They try to put everybody through it the same way. Shorts. T-shirt. Mentally, it’s all the same. How you handle the stress of everything they put you through—it all matters.”

While Manziel was Whitfield’s headliner, Logan Thomas spurred plenty of debate in NFL circles, too.

“He’s intriguing because he’s got great size, is athletic, and has a very big arm, but he was just so inconsistent,” one NFL scout said.
“You wonder if he can ever put it all together. But in his defense, he really didn’t have much talent to work with the past two seasons.”

Thomas’s career at Virginia Tech—including three seasons as the Hokies’ starter—seemed to have almost as many downs as ups. He wowed his coaches in his first action, which came in a tight spot the year before he took over the starting job. In 2010, forced into action on a crucial third-and-16 at Miami after Tyrod Taylor went down, the young QB displayed an advanced understanding of the position—and his powerful arm—when he connected on a 24-yard pass for a first down.

Thomas’s first season as the starter was strong. He threw for over 3,000 yards and ran for 469 more while totaling 30 TDs and completing 60 percent of his passes, leading the Hokies to the Sugar Bowl. Some NFL Draft analysts talked about his potentially becoming the first overall pick. Not bad for a guy who came to Blacksburg as the top-ranked tight end prospect in the 2009 recruiting class or, as Tech’s old QB coach Mike O’Cain put it, wasn’t one of those guys “who has been to thirty-seven QB camps” since the time he could barely walk.

Logan Thomas was a rising star when he spent spring break in 2012 in San Diego training with Whitfield. That happened to be the same week Whitfield took on another new client, an unknown fourth-stringer from Texas—Johnny Manziel—who came to California looking for a confidence boost. Since the time the two QBs met, their careers went in nearly opposite directions—one from undersized unknown to football phenomenon, the other from supersized prototype to enigmatic underachiever. As odd as the juxtaposition of the two quarterbacks may have been, they cheered each other on, which fit in well with the camaraderie of the QB room O’Connell was hoping to foster.

Thomas’s stock plummeted in 2012, when, not so coincidentally, the level of talent around him on Tech’s offense diminished. Gone were game-breaking RB David Wilson, as well as go-to receivers Jarrett Boykin and Danny Coale, all off to the NFL. Thomas went from being a 60 percent passer to a 51 percent completion mark. His 19-10 TD-INT ratio fell to 18-16. Worse still, all the hype about draft gurus
pumping him up left many ripping the Hokies QB. It was almost a given that any time Tech played on a national TV stage, Logan Thomas would end up trending on Twitter, and not because he was carving up a rival defense or his team was piling up points.

“You definitely have to have a thick skin to play quarterback,” Thomas told me later. “You have to have a thick, old, leathery skin about it, and I do. I know it’s the most scrutinized position in sports. That [mental toughness and focus] has gotta be a part of you. You have to be calm, cool, and collected.”

In 2013, Thomas—playing in a new system with a new offensive coordinator—put up slightly better numbers. His completion percentage went up 57 percent, and it didn’t help that Hokie receivers dropped 36 passes—most by a team from one of the six major college conferences. But questions about his accuracy and his decision making still remained. Some had speculated about whether Thomas had lost confidence—something that can be devastating for a QB, perhaps more than any other position in sports.

“I’ve never lost confidence,” Thomas said. “While we struggled, it was a whole team effort, and as a quarterback you have to take the blame.”

Asked how he’d respond when NFL teams questioned him about why, for all his physical tools, his performance was so inconsistent, Thomas said, “I’m still a little bit raw. I’ve worked hard every single day. I’m still developing, and I know that.”

Whitfield was excited by what he saw in the first week with Thomas in Southern California.

“He was throwing balls that everybody on the field stopped and watched and were wowed by,” said Whitfield. “James Lofton [the Hall of Fame receiver who was training Evans as part of the same group] and Johnny [Manziel] and [speed coach] Ryan [Flaherty] on the opposite corner doing agilities all were staring. He was throwing ropes.”

The private QB coach also made some mechanical tweaks with Thomas, who had a tendency to keep the ball by his ribs. “We’re working on bringing his hands up higher—‘thumbs to collarbone.’ So he has leverage on the ball, and we’re just trying to make sure
he’s fluid. This is a huge guy with size-seventeen feet. There’s a lot of moving parts.

“We’ve told him, ‘You have to have more awareness of your mechanics, more so than smaller QBs. Your machine’s too big to be nonchalant.’ ”

In Mobile, Thomas would be coached by the Atlanta Falcons’ staff, so O’Connell had a friend get him the foundation of the team’s playbook so they could focus on some of the nuances of that system. O’Connell tutored Thomas not only on the Falcons’ scheme, but also on the verbiage the young QB should be versed in when he spoke with NFL personnel folks. When he had Thomas go up to the board to draw up his favorite plays on third downs or red zone situations, it wasn’t just what the quarterback was saying, but how he said it.

“Don’t picture us sitting here. Picture Andy Reid,” O’Connell told Thomas. “You live it. You love it. You’re a ‘grinder’! You’re Russell Wilson! They said that he was the most prepared, charismatic leader they’ve been around. Talk big. Stand big. Sound big.”

Another O’Connell classroom tip for Senior Bowl week: “Think players, not plays.

“On day one, play catch with the guys. See which guy runs good stop-routes. Who’s got the jets? Who is the big physical guy? Who is your X [receiver]? Can he win on a three-step slant?

“Rule number one for Quick Game [three-step drops]: ‘Pick-and-Stick.’ As simplified as you can make this. Check down every time. Do not wheel back around. These defensive ends are trying to get paid, too. Also, a shot called does not equal a shot taken if it’s all locked up. [Translation: Just because there’s a deep pass called, that doesn’t mean the quarterback should try to show off his arm and force the ball if the coverage is tight.] Check it down!”

O’Connell wrapped up his first session with Thomas and Jensen with a few words about his own knowledge. It was similar to what he began telling Manziel when he walked in ten minutes later to start his class, only with Manziel it was more tailored.

Manziel looked as if he had just finished running a marathon as he plopped down in a chair next to O’Connell. It was probably the first extended weight workout he’d done in about a year. He’d
managed to steer clear of weight lifting sessions since winning the Heisman at A&M, but with so much concern about his physical size, Whitfield wanted Manziel looking as if he could take a pounding, and the hope was that he could pack on about ten pounds and be a solid 210 pounds within six weeks, in time for his trip to Indianapolis for the Combine.