The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks (44 page)

The day before the draft, the Vikings had watched the tape of Bridgewater’s so-called disappointing Pro Day and came away thinking the criticism was overblown. “He throws such a catchable ball, and he makes such good decisions on film, and that was such a big thing for us,” said Scott Turner, Minnesota’s QB coach, who noted that Bridgewater’s issues surfaced whenever he slowed down his drop from center and whenever he didn’t follow through on his throws, which caused balls to either sail on him or dip.

Whitfield’s other QB, Logan Thomas, ended up being chosen by the Arizona Cardinals in the fourth round, ahead of AJ McCarron, Georgia’s Aaron Murray, LSU’s Zach Mettenberger, and Clemson’s Tajh Boyd. Whitfield was elated.

“Perfect spot for Logan,” Whitfield said.

The Cardinals’ coach, Bruce Arians, loves big QBs and had helped develop Ben Roethlisberger in Pittsburgh and Peyton Manning and Andrew Luck in Indianapolis. Arians, himself a onetime Virginia Tech quarterback, said Thomas has “probably the best arm I’ve worked out in ten years.” Arians also admitted to putting up a “smoke screen” the day before picking Thomas, when he said Arizona had no interest in taking a quarterback.

“I lie pretty good,” Arians said. “I didn’t want anybody jumping in front of us.”

AROUND
C
LEVELAND
,
THE BROWNS
were dealing with being the talk of the NFL. Season-ticket sales were flooding in. The morning after
Johnny Manziel was drafted, a billboard went up in midtown Manhattan of a close-up shot of the former Texas A&M quarterback in a Browns jersey. The caption:
FOR ONCE
,
DEFENSES KNOW WHERE HE
’
S GOING
.

But a bigger question still remained: How well would Johnny Manziel’s magic work in the NFL?

 
Epilogue

JULY 11, 2014
.

Much changed in the few months after Trent Dilfer, George Whitfield, and Johnny Manziel were together on the same turf: the
Elite 11
TV show landed an Emmy nomination in the Edited Special category. TDFB became a part of Dilfer and Steve Stenstrom’s latest vision, a “forward-facing platform” called QB Centric that touted itself as “The Forum for All Things Quarterback.” There was also a new darling of the Elite 11 staff: Baylor’s hulking QB Bryce Petty, who wowed everyone—including the Army Rangers and Navy SEALs who Dilfer brought in to administer his first big challenge to his young QBs—with his grit and resolve up in Oregon. In fact, Petty so impressed Command Sgt. Maj. Todd Burnett, the leader of a grueling six-and-a-half-hour training session, that Burnett approached the 6′3″, 235-pound Texan and said, “I don’t get easily impressed, but I’d go to war with you,” before handing the quarterback his own hat as a sign of respect.

Dilfer’s staff had hoped former Elite 11 MVP Jameis Winston would return as a counselor, in part so they could counsel him after the FSU star’s latest off-field incident—being cited for shoplifting $32 worth of crab legs from a Publix supermarket. Winston, however,
was busy back home in Alabama, where two cities were honoring him with “Jameis Winston Day.”

Perhaps the biggest sign of just how big this QB “cult,” as Dilfer called it, had become came on the third day of the 2014 Elite 11.
ESPN.com
ran a two-thousand-word story about little Chase Griffin, its thirteen-year-old ball boy.
NFL.com
had its own feature on Griffin one day later. “
That
proves my point about how big this thing is,” Dilfer said.

On the same day ESPN ran its feature on Griffin, the Internet buzzed about a picture of Manziel tightly rolling up a dollar bill in a bathroom. The photo—and the accompanying speculation about Manziel’s party lifestyle—was picked up by bloggers and mainstream media in the Charlie Sheen–like coverage of the Cleveland Browns rookie QB. The picture even jolted many Manziel defenders who had shrugged their shoulders at shots of him partying poolside in Vegas with Rob Gronkowski and chugging booze from the bottle while sprawled out on an inflatable swan weeks after the draft.

A few hours after the bathroom photo surfaced, Manziel showed up back in Oregon, wearing a Chicago Bulls hat turned backward, to check out the Elite 11 QBs and to take part in a Q&A in front of the 160 blue-chip football prospects at the opening ceremony of “The Opening.” He was the new face of Nike Football. The subject of the bathroom picture never came up, but it was discussed plenty around the Nike campus.

Dilfer faced his own challenge at the 2014 Elite 11. A college coach told him that one of the eighteen invited high school QBs, Josh Rosen, might be the most talented quarterback he’d seen in the last ten years but predicted that within three days the kid would drive Dilfer crazy.

Rosen’s display of skills on the Nike campus was as advertised. The recruiting reporters along the sidelines gushed about his arm. Dilfer, though, wasn’t as effusive. “He’s big, strong, and supersmart,” Dilfer said of the former tennis prodigy who listed his off-the-field hobbies on his Elite 11 profile as guitar, beach volleyball, cars, and astrophysics. “Josh makes the very difficult look so easy, but he also makes the easy stuff very hard.”

Rosen barely made it into Dilfer’s final Elite 11, ranking eleventh, which raised the ire of UCLA fans—Rosen had verbally committed to the Bruins in March 2014—and a few of the online recruiting analysts as well. Before the camp wrapped up, Dilfer told reporters that, “what Josh has to learn before he takes the keys over to a major college program is that it’s not about knowing more than the coach; it’s about doing it the coach’s way.”

“His issue is that he’s so freaking smart, and he’s been told that the right way to play quarterback is defense-centric, and you react off defenses. That’s just not true,” Dilfer told me after the Elite 11. “He just didn’t buy into the Axon or the playbook, but in the end, he played so bad doing it his way that he finally just admitted he wished he would’ve done it differently. He probably got as much long-term out of it as anybody.”

Yogi Roth, who was part of Rosen’s five-man group the first night of the Elite 11’s military challenge, was Rosen’s biggest advocate in the war room. Roth asked the five-star quarterback the question he posed to all the young QBs at the end of the week: “What’s the biggest thing you learned?” Rosen answered, “I need to listen better.”

“This dude was the man in our group,” said Roth. “He led when he was asked to lead. He followed when he was asked to follow, and when our leader wasn’t leading, that’s when he stepped in. I think he’s got DQs for days.”

Roth’s prognosis of the biggest thing that Rosen must overcome as a QB? “I think it’s called being seventeen,” Roth said. “I don’t think he even understands what self-awareness is. I think [most of these young quarterbacks] are just trying their best to be ‘awesome.’ It’s our job to grow their strengths and identify areas that need to be developed. In Josh’s eyes, he’s been through a lot in terms of competitive settings and being the lone wolf. That’s what he’s going to naturally gravitate to, ‘I gotta figure it out because I’m by myself.’ His team was him, his parents, his (tennis) coach, and his trainer, and that’s it.”

Blake Barnett, the former Notre Dame–committed QB who had switched to Alabama, won the Elite 11’s MVP honors, leading his team to the 7-on-7 title at The Opening. He and Rosen were two of
the five Southern California products to make the top 11, along with Travis Waller (third), Brady White (fifth), and Ricky Town (eighth).

Town, the kid who Steve Clarkson got to move, with his family, from Northern California down to the Los Angeles area in seventh grade so he wouldn’t have to fly down a few times a month for his training sessions, struggled mightily early in the week. Nearly every pass he threw looked like it was being thrown into a stiff wind. Town’s 7-on-7 team in The Opening’s tournament lost all four of its games in pool play, but the next day something changed. His team went 4–0. Both Dilfer and Roth were stunned to see such a turnaround, not just in the way Town threw the ball, but in how the dour guy who had arrived in Oregon had become so upbeat. “I’m finally having fun,” Town told Roth.

Dilfer broke down into tears when he looked Town in the eye and told him he had made the final Elite 11.

“You are the reason we do this. In my years of doing this, I’ve never been more proud of one guy,” Dilfer said.

Town, despite his lofty recruiting status, had actually been one of the last quarterbacks awarded a golden ticket to Oregon. “His regional workout sucked,” Dilfer said. “But his high school game film was really good.”

Set to play at USC, Town had initially committed to Alabama, which didn’t hurt his stock with online recruiting analysts. One site, 247Sports, touted him as the nation’s number one overall prospect, a fact that only opened Town to more criticism when he struggled—a dynamic that made him press even more.

“Ricky had the greatest week an Elite 11 kid has ever had,” Dilfer said. “He told me, ‘Thanks, coach. This week has changed my life. The breathing [exercises he learned from high performance psychologist Dr. Michael Gervais]. The perspective. This is the best thing that has ever happened to me.’

“Ricky is everything we stand for. It’s helping kids reach their potential, and unlocking something in them. At the beginning of the week in Oregon, there was just no juice in his soul. No juice in his arm. It seemed like the ball weighed thirty pounds. Like he had a thousand pounds on his shoulders. Burdened. This was a kid who
was suffocated by the blue-chip recruiting attention, and it wasn’t his fault. The day after the Elite 11 was over, I ran into some old USC alum, and he’s telling me about Josh Rosen and Ricky Town as if he knows anything. He just regurgitated a bunch of bullshit that he had heard from the recruiting sites. I just looked at him and said, ‘You know,
this
is what’s wrong. What you’re saying right now is exactly what’s killing these kids.’ A bunch of pencil-jockey ex-lawyers who know nothing about quarterbacks are defining who these kids are to the general public, and these poor kids, their parents, and their coaches don’t have any choice but to listen to it. And some of the colleges recruit off of it. I’m as sick as I’ve ever been after seeing what it’s actually done to some of these kids. I just think it’s really toxic that they’re being labeled at such an early age and their identity is wrapped up in it. It’s really sad.”

Rick Town Sr., admitted he’d been concerned about the emotional pounding his boy was taking leading up to Oregon.

The kid had come back too soon from getting his knee scoped. “Ricky was about 60 percent,” his dad said. “He couldn’t use his lower half to push off. He said, ‘I feel like I’m not living up to expectations,’ and that worried me.

“He came back from the Elite 11 and told me, ‘this has changed my life,’ and it has. All of his coaches at St. Bonaventure said, ‘this kid has drastically changed.’ His leadership has gone to a whole new level. Before, he really didn’t talk much except when he was on the field. The Elite 11 unlocked something in him for sure. They gave him new tools to separate himself as a person from what he does.”

Town wasn’t the only one whose life has been turned upside-down by what had been happening with the Elite 11. Dilfer, in his forties with a net worth well into eight figures from his long NFL career, had actually experienced quite a metamorphosis, too.

“Having watched how Trent has changed with the Elite 11, in terms of how these athletes are growing up emotionally and intellectually, I truly believe that he is evolving the same way,” said Roth. “Our job is to find out how each young man learns, through auditory, visual, or kinesthetic elements, and then tailor our teaching that way. Where we have all evolved at Elite 11 is in also tapping in
to their emotional intelligence. To do that, we have to learn about our own. The Elite 11 has allowed Trent to process a lot in his own life, whether it’s his son Trevin’s death, being a father to a Division I athlete, or being a father figure to a thousand seventeen-year-old quarterbacks each year.”

Dilfer, though, left Oregon with as many questions as answers, he admitted. Was he bringing in the right kids? Did the perspective need a little more tilting? Each year brought another downpour of reminders that the times the QBs—his QBs—were living in were changing as fast as the game they were trying to master. He believed, now more than ever, that success in the position he loved so deeply was more about nurture than nature. Still, the latter kept finding ways to torment him as he trudged through his own journey, surrounded by escalating amounts of positive and negative reinforcement and driven by his passion for finding the ideal balance of talent and training—one, he hopes, that will mold the QBs who shape football’s future, and their world beyond the game.

 
Acknowledgments