The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks (6 page)

After five hours of deliberation, there were still four golden tickets remaining. Dilfer tweeted: “4 golden tickets left and we only know one way to figure this out. #MidnightMadness”

Actually, Dilfer had already figured out one of the spots he was filling. It was going to Luke Rubenzer, the 5′11″-ish QB from Arizona whom Dilfer had compared to Johnny Manziel and Russell Wilson. Even though Rubenzer was barely a blip on the online recruiting radar and had just one scholarship offer from a BCS program (Cal), his game tape and spunky personality had made Dilfer a believer. Rubenzer’s private quarterback coach Dennis Gile, who also worked with fellow Elite 11 QB Kyle Allen, was a Dilfer TDFB protégé sitting nervously in the back of the room. Rather than just call Rubenzer with the good news, Dilfer wanted to pull a little prank he hoped would go viral for Elite 11 and TDFB.

Dilfer had Gile call Rubenzer at 12:30 a.m. at his hotel down the street in Columbus. Get out of bed. Get your cleats and your ball. We need to see more. Time for a midnight workout at a field across the street from the hotel.

After a long night of deliberations on other QBs, Dilfer and his coaches called Rubenzer under the guise of needing to see him make
some more throws … at 12:30 in the morning. The headlights from five SUVs parked in front of a small muddy lot provided the light. “In the pressure chamber, you showed a little puckering,” Dilfer told Rubenzer.

Dilfer had Rubenzer stretch his legs and told his colleagues holding flip cams to focus on Luke’s feet as he fired a few warm-up passes to one of the TDFB coaches standing twenty yards out into the darkness. Just when the kid figured his workout would officially begin, Dilfer let the kid in on the joke as the rest of the TDFB crew howled. The little quarterback sighed in relief before getting a bear hug. Rubenzer got his invite to the Elite 11—or QB Heaven, as Dilfer calls it.

 
2.

In recruiting circles, there is
a caveat that veteran scouts cling to when dealing with high school football coaches who rave about one of their own kids: How do they know what a “great” one actually is if they’ve never had one before?

Tom Rossley knew something about greatness. In fact, after what Rossley had been through in his football career, he was as qualified to sift through the murk of the quarterback world, with its booms and busts, as anyone. Rossley spent five decades in big-time football. He’d coached greatness. He’d recruited greatness. Once, back in the mid-’60s, as a wispy 6′4″ nineteen-year-old, he even had to give up his dream of playing quarterback due to the presence of greatness. Rossley was a redshirt freshman at the University of Cincinnati battling for the starting QB job with a true freshman. The coaches opted for the other kid, who was bigger and had a more powerful arm. They asked Rossley to move to wide receiver. As a senior, Rossley caught 80 passes for 1,072 yards in 1968. The guy who got the quarterback job, Greg Cook, went on to be selected by the Cincinnati Bengals with the fifth overall pick in the 1969 NFL Draft.

“I still think I was better than him, but that’s beside the point,”
Rossley said with a chuckle two years after retiring from a career in coaching. “In my heart, I was always a quarterback.”

Rossley went to camp with the Philadelphia Eagles as a free-agent receiver before being released.

“I was about to go to the Bengals, and we were in Vietnam, but they couldn’t guarantee me that I’d get into a reserve unit, so I took a teaching job and started coaching in my high school,” Rossley said. Two years later, he was a graduate assistant at the University of Arkansas for head coach Frank Broyles on a staff where Joe Gibbs was the offensive line coach and Raymond Berry was the wide receivers coach.

“I just fell in love with coaching,” Rossley said.

Cook was the Bengals’ opening-day starter as a rookie. The 6′4″, 220-pounder even sparked Cincinnati—3–11 the previous year—to wins in its first two games in 1969. Then, in Week Three against the Kansas City Chiefs, Cook was sacked by Jim Lynch, who landed on the quarterback’s throwing shoulder. Cook was shaken up but continued playing. He attempted another pass before leaving the game. Doctors didn’t diagnose it at the time, but Cook had shredded his rotator cuff. In spite of that, Cook returned to action at mid-season after sitting out three games. He took cortisone shots and played though the pain, he later told
Sports Illustrated.
He still managed to lead the AFL and NFL in yards per attempt (9.4) and yards per completion (17.5), as well as in passer rating (88.3). He was voted Rookie of the Year by UPI.

Cook’s torn rotator cuff, though, only got worse. He re-tore it playing basketball when he got hung up on the rim one day before he actually was ready to start throwing again, Rossley said. Cook’s biceps also had become partially detached—another injury that had yet to be diagnosed and wouldn’t be until Cook’s rotator-cuff surgery. He would undergo three operations and would not play again till attempting a comeback four years later. He completed one pass in 1973 for the Chiefs, and that was the end of his NFL career.

Cook’s name has wafted into football lore in a Bunyanesque manner, the way some star-crossed playground legends are discussed by NBA greats. Bill Walsh, the iconic NFL mastermind who was an assistant
with the Bengals during Cook’s rookie season, once told NFL Films that Cook could’ve become “the greatest NFL quarterback of all time.” Cook’s impact on the game is a poignant one. Without the use of Cook’s prodigious arm strength and downfield passing acumen, Walsh rethought the Bengals offense to cater to his new QB, Virgil Carter’s, talents. Walsh’s new scheme employed rollouts and an underneath passing attack, becoming the framework of what would later be known as the West Coast Offense that won the San Francisco 49ers a fistful of Super Bowl rings.

“Greg Cook was a big strong guy who had good feet and could really zip the ball—a real rope-thrower,” Rossley said. “The ball came out so quick. He was more of a drive-the-ball-down-the-field guy. I likened him to Terry Bradshaw, although I didn’t think Bradshaw was as good as Greg Cook.”

Meanwhile, Rossley’s coaching career meandered from small colleges (Holy Cross) to small Division I programs (he had two different stints at Rice) and his alma mater. Rossley also coached in four different professional leagues—the NFL, the CFL, the AFL (the Arena Football League), and the now-defunct USFL. At age fifty-four, he landed a job with the Green Bay Packers, where he inherited the most remarkable quarterback he’d ever been around—Brett Lorenzo Favre.

Rossley had spent one season as the Atlanta Falcons quarterbacks coach in 1990. The organization was scouting QBs for the draft. Favre was tempting. He played at Southern Miss, which was the only program that had offered Favre a scholarship—and USM was basically living on the margins of big-time college football. Southern Miss had recruited Favre as a defensive back, but he pushed them to give him a chance to play QB. It didn’t take him long to generate some buzz in the scouting community. The guy who began his freshman season as the Golden Eagles’ seventh-string quarterback won the starting job by the third game of the year, when he led them on a come-from-behind victory over Tulane despite having spent the pre-game hungover and vomiting during warm-ups. In his junior year, Favre carried USM to an upset of number six Florida State.

The summer before his senior season, Favre lost control of his car, flipping it three times before he crashed into a tree. The wreck
left him with a broken vertebra and a concussion, and thirty inches of his intestine had to be removed during emergency surgery. In spite of that, six weeks later, Favre still sparked Southern Miss to a 27–24 victory on the road against number thirteen Alabama.

The Falcons needed a young quarterback. Jerry Glanville, Atlanta’s colorful head coach, drafted Favre in the second round with the thirty-third pick overall. Rossley, though, wouldn’t be around to coach him. A few months before the 1991 NFL Draft, he left the organization to become the head coach at SMU. The Mustangs were emerging from the wreckage of the NCAA’s “Death Penalty.” Rossley lasted five seasons trying to rebuild the SMU program before being fired. His record: 15–48–3.

Rossley returned to the NFL as a position coach with the Chiefs and then the Chicago Bears before Packers head coach Mike Sherman hired him to be the team’s offensive coordinator, where he’d finally get to work with Favre.

Favre had just turned thirty. He’d already been a three-time NFL MVP and led the Packers to a Super Bowl. He and Rossley bonded instantly. Favre always had stories.

“He told me the first time he worked out for an NFL team,” said Rossley, “he got there late. They had him run a forty. He got to the end and went down on his hands and knees and started throwing up, because he’d been out drinking the night before. The coach said, ‘Jeez, what did you drink last night?’ ”

Favre also had plenty of stories about his curious relationship with Jerry Glanville.

“He could really do a good Jerry imitation,” said Rossley. “Jerry didn’t call him by his name. He called him ‘M’ssippi.’ And every stadium they walked into, he’d say, ‘M’ssippi, come over here. M’ssippi, let’s see if you can throw this ball out of the stadium …’ ‘M’ssippi, let’s see if you can throw this ball into the upper deck.’ Every stadium it was a challenge. Brett has the strongest arm I’ve ever seen, and the strongest arm that’s probably ever been in the NFL. He’s amazing. It’s God-given, and he’s a little bit wild.

“When I first got there, I was doing footwork drills with Favre.
I’d say, ‘Brett, your footwork is horseshit. We’ve gotta do some footwork drills.’ And he’d laugh at me. He would go through every drill, but he’d still play his way when it came to the games. He’d jump up and kick his feet or hop step after a throw. Matt Hasselbeck was our backup. He’d give them names, such as, ‘that was the Mississippi Sidekick.’ But I really think, when you watch it, that’s one of the reasons he never had a knee injury or a hip injury, because his cleats were almost never in the ground. I remember watching Byron Leftwich when he came out of college, and he had such a long stride, and his feet were constantly in the ground, and thinking that he was gonna get hurt before long. One of the big reasons Brett was so great is because he’s so competitive, and he has that field sense. He never had a knee injury in all that time because nobody ever got a clean shot at him. He could spin out of a sack or evade a guy coming from the blind side, and I’d say, ‘Brett, how’d you see that guy?’ He’d say, ‘I didn’t. I don’t know how I knew he was there. I just knew.’ It’s a sense of where the players are on the field, and when he scrambles, he knows where guys are, and he can throw on the run and put it on him with accuracy.”

Favre’s freewheeling style, which some football people categorize as a “gunslinger,” was akin to Magic Johnson’s on a fast break, complete with everything from off-balance flings to cross-body chucks to sidearm and even slung-from-the-hip flick passes. In general, it was a mishmash of stuff coaches had spent a lifetime preaching against. Favre was fearless. It was as if doubt or caution or any element of self-preservation never crept into his mind, because his rampant gusts of self-confidence always overrode it. “More than anything, he played free,” said Gil Haskell, another former Packers assistant.

Working with Favre proved to be an education for the coach in his mid-fifties. Favre did things Rossley had never seen pulled off. Things that you wouldn’t, couldn’t, ever coach a quarterback to do. In the presence of this, Rossley became convinced that truly great quarterbacks were born more than made. But surely they could also be screwed up if you messed with them too much—as Favre playfully reminded him often.

“Brett used to say, ‘Well, I’m gonna play well this week
if
I can overcome my coaching.’ And it kinda makes sense. He was being light with me, but he was telling me, ‘Don’t overcoach me.’ ”

Rossley’s experience with Favre—and that’s what it often felt like as a coach: you
experienced
Brett Favre—was the complete opposite of his time working in Chicago with another NFL quarterback he’d had a few years earlier. That guy, unlike Favre, was a first-rounder—the second overall pick of the 1993 NFL draft—and came from a big-time college program.

“Beautiful” is how Rossley described Notre Dame product Rick Mirer. “Pro-perfect-looking quarterback and could throw it great, but when you’d get him on the field, he was in a cloud. He didn’t compete. He just couldn’t see the field.”

Mirer lasted one season with the Bears, throwing 0 touchdown passes and 6 interceptions before being released. After Rossley started working in Green Bay with Favre, the coach knew exactly what Mirer was missing.

Magic.

To get ready for the draft, Rossley and his coaching protégé in Green Bay, Darrell Bevell, a former standout quarterback at Wisconsin (and a coach who would later rise up the NFL ranks to become a top offensive coordinator with the Seattle Seahawks), compiled a list of characteristics they wanted in a Packers QB.

They debated what should be the number one component: