The Quarterback Whisperer by Bruce Arians (November 2017)
Arians, a longtime coach who currently leads the Arizona Cardinals, wrote this book in collaboration with Lars Anderson. The Quarterback Whisperer details a career notable for the many top quarterbacks Arians has worked with – including Andrew Luck, Ben Roethlisberger, and Carson Palmer – and this book is filled with his knowledge about helmet football’s most important position.
The crucial ingredient for a successful quarterback is character. A great quarterback is a special person. He leads teammates to achieve in ways no one else believes possible. Quarterbacks inspire on the field by playing with heart, grit, and determination. They also do the same off the field by setting a high standard for training and always being perfectly prepared for the next game.
A story about Andrew Luck, one of the sport’s top players, illustrates the idea. Luck, writes Arians, showed up on the first day of practice during his rookie season and confused his entire offense by calling out plays and audibles no one else knew. It didn’t take Arians long to realize that Luck had memorized the entire playbook and was calling out signals no one else had even considered reviewing at the earliest stage of the season.
The NFL quarterback position, though physically demanding, is a test of a player’s mental ability more so than his athletic skill (1). Preparing to quarterback a team for a football game is like studying before an important debate – it is easier to perform well if all the questions are anticipated. The difference between a debate and helmet football, of course, is that there is no separation between asking the question and giving the answer – in a helmet football game, it all pretty much happens at the same time (2). It is up to the quarterback to draw on all the knowledge he has to look at the defense, understand the possibilities, and anticipate the correct play for his team to run.
The challenge for coaches like Arians is to help players transition from the less mentally demanding college game to the professional level. The rise of the no-huddle spread system in the college game is making this a more challenging task, especially if the players in question are young quarterbacks. In the spread system, quarterbacks are not asked to interact in a huddle, change the play, or read the defense. In short, these quarterbacks do not cultivate the leadership skills needed to succeed as professionals and must learn the position's intangible skills on the job before becoming successful NFL players.
One up: Arians makes a couple of comments about standard practice procedure in the NFL that I think would benefit many if applied to their own careers, organizations, or professions.
First, he notes how every NFL team reviews what went well, what went wrong, and what the areas for improvement are after every game. I do not hear about this happening too regularly for the average nine-to-five worker. I’m sure a standardized routine of self-evaluation would lead to a big boost in productivity for most workers, though, and even a brief end-of-week review with a manager or informally comparing notes with colleagues every once in a while would probably have significant rewards for all types of workers.
He also notes how sometimes it is the most gifted players who fail to work on fundamentals. He explains by noting how sports at lower levels of competition sometimes come too easily for gifted young players. This, too, could be a problem for workers in general. People who do not find ways to expand their skill sets risk stagnating in their career development. If they fail to reinforce the basic fundamentals of their jobs, there is the possibility of performance decline. Those who do not work at their craft will get stuck at the career level they once dismissed as being too 'low-level' for their God-given talents.
One down: Arians suggests at one point that because just one discontented coach can infect an entire coaching staff, an incoming head coach will usually prefer to bring in an entirely new group of his or her own hand-picked assistants. Though this was presented as an explanation, I thought it described what more than it explained why.
What does it mean to describe what rather than explain why? It means to settle for observation when understanding is required. To borrow an analogy from Gary Taubes, it’s like saying a space is becoming crowded because more people are entering it than leaving it. This might provide a narrative for the action by telling us how the room is becoming crowded. But it fails to explore why people are choosing to enter the room (or why the people already present are choosing to stay).
A big job for the coach is to hire the best people available and figure out the way to get the most out of them for the sake of the team. A new coach who thinks the way Arians describes is systematically ruling out a group of people for an assistant job. This makes it less likely that the new coach will assemble the best possible coaching staff. It also hints that the coach is perhaps unable or uninterested in working out the sorts of disputes or disagreements sure to arise over helmet football’s intense five month long season.
Just saying: Arians mentions how play callers should believe their job is to win the game with the offense. Broadly speaking, this is a good point. Most helmet football games require the offense to score at least twenty points for the team to have a reasonable chance at winning.
But longtime TOA readers will recognize the following position: great rules are defined by their exceptions. In helmet football, the offense must tailor its play-calling to balance the needs of the team. Sometimes, the goal is not to win the game with the right call but to simply see a situation through. If the defensive unit is exhausted, for example, the offense should try to retain the ball and give the defense a chance to rest instead of scoring right away and forcing their tired teammates back onto the field.
Another good example is when a team is up big late in the game. At some point, the offense must call plays in response to the time and score situation of the game. Otherwise, teams are going to end up replicating Atlanta’s collapse in the most recent Super Bowl.
Footnotes / next time on TOA... / bad puns
1. More on this topic in a future post…
Evaluators often fail to predict which college quarterbacks will become the best professionals. Part of the reason, I suspect, is the ease of measuring a player’s physical skills relative to a player’s mental ability. All a scout needs to figure out speed or strength is the right stopwatch or weight lifting exercise – understanding if a player is smart enough to learn a playbook and apply the knowledge in a game situation is not measurable by any test, drill, or exercise. This is supported by the observation that most top draft picks who fail at quarterback possess superior athletic skills compared to those who beat them out for the job.
The analogy here is to the empty suit. Anyone with no knowledge or understanding can still look good and deliver a message just like anyone with a strong arm can throw the ball fifty yards.
2. What? What? I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist…
The similarity between a debate and helmet football is the possibility of being chased around by a crazed six-foot-four guy.
