The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks (9 page)

“John Schneider is this optimistic, bright, fun, cool guy but also this guy who doesn’t give a flying fuck what anybody else thinks about what his decisions are,” said King. “Luckily, he didn’t have a sedate, traditional NFL head coach who didn’t believe in 5′11″ quarterbacks.” Schneider’s mentor from his days in the Green Bay Packers organization was Ron Wolf, another freethinker. It was Wolf who, in his first season, traded a first-round draft pick to Atlanta for Favre, then the Falcons’ 248-pound, heavy-drinking, hard-living, third-string QB.

“Ron Wolf could give a shit about what anybody else thought about his decision, and he taught John Schneider, ‘Have a conviction, and if anybody disagrees with you, fuck them. You’re the one hired to build this team. You build this team.’ ”

Wilson’s size would have been a turnoff to Carroll back in his USC days. The shortest Trojan quarterback Carroll signed was John David Booty at 6′3″. However, Carroll, a guy who loves to talk about “doing it better than it’s ever been done before,” trusted Schneider’s instincts, and Seahawks brass exhaled when their third-round pick—seventy-fifth
overall—was up, and Wilson was still available. Most outside of the Seahawks’ football complex didn’t think too much of the pick. The selection of Wilson, along with the rest of the Seattle draft choices, was ridiculed, being handed C-minuses, D’s, and F grades by the major media sites.

“Pete Carroll is proving why he didn’t make it in the NFL the first time … Seattle selecting Russell Wilson, a QB who doesn’t fit their offense at all, was by far the worst move of the draft,” wrote a
Bleacher Report
columnist.

Part of the skepticism stemmed from the fact that the Seahawks had just signed free agent Matt Flynn to a $26-million deal with $10 million guaranteed to challenge the 2011 starter Tavaris Jackson. As most expected, Carroll named Flynn the starting quarterback for the first two games of the pre-season—although he still maintained that there was competition for the job.

“I asked him in the pre-season how he thought [Flynn] would react when he’s told he’s not being named the starter,” recalled Yogi Roth, one of Carroll’s former assistants at USC and the co-writer of the coach’s
Win Forever
book. “Pete goes, ‘It’ll be hard for him to deal with it.’ I said, how will it be for Russell when he’s told he’s not The Guy right now?’ He goes, ‘He won’t even flinch.’ It was ‘OK, cool. I’m going to show you.’ And he was right, and the rest was history.”

Carroll started Wilson in the Seahawks’ third pre-season game, and he led the team on scoring drives on the first 6 possessions and wasted little time winning the starter spot. As a rookie, playing in a system run by offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell (Favre’s old QB coach at Green Bay under Rossley), Wilson tied an NFL rookie record with 26 touchdown passes and led Seattle to an 11–5 record. In Wilson’s first two NFL seasons, he completed 64 percent of his passes and threw 52 touchdowns against only 19 interceptions while rushing for over 1,000 yards and making the Pro Bowl each year. Three days after the 2014 Super Bowl, Wilson tweeted out a picture from the Seahawks’ locker room of him and thirteen teammates: “The 2012 @Seahawks draft class. They graded us as an F. Now we are World Champs!”

Carroll said, thanks to Schneider, Wilson’s performance “expanded” his thinking, as he suspects it has for many others around the NFL now.

“We just wanted great football players and unique football players, and Russell fit that to a T,” he said. “I was excited when John was so fired up about him. This was a chance to see what would happen and realize that the magnitude of this style of play could really be a factor for us, which it turned out to be. As I’m growing and moving forward, I would think more that way, too. I was closed to the idea to some extent. We never had a six-foot QB. I think it’s proven to all of us, we gotta be more open-minded and expand our thinking if we want to do great things.”

Johnny Manziel was one of many quarterbacks who didn’t fit the old prototype, which was now being looked at in a new light.

 
3.

The 1983 NFL Draft is
known for producing the greatest crop of quarterbacks in League history. Three of the six first-round QBs—John Elway, Jim Kelly, and Dan Marino—are Pro Football Hall of Famers. In all, there were sixteen quarterbacks taken in the twelve-round draft. But it was a quarterback who got bypassed in that draft and signed on two days later who may have made an even bigger impact on young QBs than any of the NFL stars.

Undrafted free agent Steve Clarkson, a three-year starter and Academic All-American at San José State, lasted one season on the Denver Broncos roster, then two more years in the CFL before he walked away from football.

In college, Clarkson was an unconventional (for his era) dual-threat QB. As a junior, he was a shockingly nimble 6′0″, 254-pounder whom Mike Singletary literally bounced off of when Clarkson led the Spartans to rally from a 15–0 hole to a 30–22 victory over number ten Baylor. Clarkson said he hung out with his Samoan teammates and ate like them, too, but then, at the request of head coach Jack Elway, he shed forty-five pounds before his senior season and sparked State to road wins over Oregon, Oregon State, and Stanford, featuring
Elway’s son, John. It was the second season in a row Clarkson’s team had beaten John Elway’s squad.

“If I came along today, I’d definitely be at the top of the charts,” Clarkson said. “The things that we held back on are my biggest strengths. I was very fast, but I didn’t do a lot of that for fear that they’d make me a wide receiver or a running back. I did everything I could to look like Joe Namath. Wearing his number 12 in high school. Had I come out now, I’d have been in vogue. I wasn’t as fast as Michael Vick, but I think I would’ve been a bigger version of Russell Wilson.”

Clarkson’s pro career, statistically, consisted of his completing one pass for the CFL’s Saskatchewan Roughriders. He was about to head off to training camp for a USFL team in Arizona, when he realized he couldn’t take any more rejection. His playing career was over at twenty-four, but it ended up triggering the now-thriving QB tutoring business that helped him generate tens of millions of dollars, as wealthy parents hope some “guru” can turn their kid into a star.

The whole industry actually started with a backflip.

In 1987, Clarkson was divorced with two children and back in his native Los Angeles. His playing career was over at age twenty-four. He was working as a manager for Black Angus Restaurants, when his aunt noticed a newspaper ad seeking a Pop Warner league football coach. She answered the ad, giving a wealthy businessman from Malibu her nephew’s number. When the man called, Clarkson told him he had no interest in being a youth football coach.

The businessman, Danny Klein, remembered Clarkson from his days as a star quarterback at Wilson High in LA and told him his own son was a fifteen-year-old aspiring high school QB. Coaching at the high school level sounded better to Clarkson, who offered to watch Klein’s son play a flag football game at Westchester High the next day.

The kid, Perry Klein, was really more of a volleyball player at the time. He had a spindly frame and threw the ball OK, but Clarkson wasn’t particularly impressed by his potential. Clarkson told the younger Klein to stay in touch, wished him luck, and then headed
back to his car. He got to the door, unlocked it, and was about to get in, but then, for some reason, he turned around and glanced back to the field and noticed Klein doing a backflip. Clarkson paused and watched him do another flip, this one with his body twisting in the air, and, once again, the kid perfectly stuck the landing. Clarkson’s mind raced. He wandered back over to Klein.

“You mind doing that again?” he asked.

Klein flipped. The gears inside Clarkson’s head spun.

“What other kinds of flips can you do?”

Klein, who had grown up in a family of gymnasts and had been doing flips since about the time he got out of diapers, proceeded to go through an array of vaults and corkscrews and cartwheel flips.

“I thought, ‘If I can teach this kid to play quarterback, and he does one of these flips after every touchdown, we’ll be famous,’ ” said Clarkson. “That was my logic. I came from a marketing background.”

IN THE MID-1980S ANDY
Bark, a former San Diego Chargers wide receiver, bought
Cal-Hi Sports
magazine, a glossy publication that maintained the state high school record book for California. One day Bark got a call from Steve Clarkson, whom he knew from their high school days in Los Angeles. Clarkson predicted that his quarterback was going to rewrite the record book. Bark was skeptical. He was plugged into the local high school football scene and had never heard of Perry Klein.

“What makes you so sure?” Bark asked.

“I’ve changed the offense,” Clarkson replied. “It’s going to be so wide open. We’re throwing it every play.”

Clarkson’s overhaul of Palisades football had been in the works for months. It had grown from the first time he got Perry Klein out of school at lunchtime and rode with him to the family’s home in Malibu. Soon, it felt as if Clarkson and the younger Klein had formed a big brother–little brother relationship, Perry Klein said.

“I think Steve was pretty enamored that we lived on the beach,” Klein recalled. “Steve never asked to get paid, but Steve doesn’t do
anything for free. I think he thought it’d turn into something, but I’m not sure if he knew what. He’s a flashy guy. He liked the idea that he could bring girls up to the house.”

Klein actually spent a lot more time at Clarkson’s place than the twenty-six-year-old did at his. In the spring of Klein’s sophomore year, he started bringing his receivers to Clarkson’s house in the valley. Klein usually slept on the floor. Clarkson taught Klein how to read defenses and tightened his mechanics. The former standout QB also explained to Klein and his buddies the concepts of a Shotgun-Spread attack that Clarkson had devised as an offshoot of his godfather, Dennis Erickson’s, offensive scheme. As payback, the sixteen-year-old washed Clarkson’s tricked-out Datsun 280-Z and bought him lunches.

“It was sort of like Mr. Miyagi,” Klein said. “And then we’d run this offense that he was installing.”

With Clarkson’s help working as the high school’s new volunteer offensive coordinator, Klein did put up staggering numbers. And, just as Clarkson requested, Klein punctuated every touchdown with a backflip.

“He promoted the showboating,” Klein said. “To this day, he’s all about flash, and he understands the entertainment value. That’s his biggest strength. He understands it’s a business, knowing that there’s a lot of guys who can throw a football. How do you build a guy’s name? That’s Steve’s genius, too.”

In Palisades’ first three games, the junior quarterback averaged over 435 yards passing and 4 touchdowns, generating plenty of buzz around Southern California. It also didn’t hurt that Klein had quite the hype man in Steve Clarkson:

“If he stays healthy and keeps his head, I think he will develop into the best quarterback in the history of high school football,” Clarkson told the
Los Angeles Times
, adding that Klein reminded him a lot of John Elway.

Clarkson transformed previously unknown Perry Klein into one of the hottest quarterback prospects in the country, with big-name schools suddenly in pursuit. Relying heavily on shovel passes and short throws, Klein put up jaw-dropping stat lines. In one game, he
smashed the national single-game record for most completions and the state record for most passing yards by going 46 of 49 for 562 yards and 6 touchdowns. Klein went on to set a state record with 3,899 passing yards while leading the Dolphins to the city title game.

The following year, Clarkson—and Klein—switched high schools, going from Palisades, which didn’t have many starters returning, to California prep powerhouse Carson, the team that was pre-season ranked number two in the nation by
USA Today.
The longtime coach at Carson had just witnessed his high school team get beaten by a less-talented school with a more advanced passing game. Carson High coach Gene Vollnogle wanted Clarkson to come in and incorporate his offense. Clarkson liked the bigger stage and the better group of receivers and running backs but wanted to bring his QB—Klein—with him to pilot the offense. Klein’s father was against the move, but his mom was in favor of it, because she thought it would better him.

The switch caused quite a dustup in the LA sports scene. The longtime Palisades high school coach told the
Times
he felt used. “I would quit coaching before I would ever let a Klein on my field again. They stabbed me in the back twice,” Jack Epstein said.

The Kleins navigated the clunky local high school transfer rules by establishing an apartment for Perry to set up residence. The quarterback and his parents lived in a nearby two-bedroom apartment during the week and spent the weekends at their beach house in Malibu. “We came up with a story that it was closer to work for my dad, and that my parents were getting a divorce—even though they weren’t,” said Klein. “Turns out, we didn’t even need to have the story.”