I
sure as heck hope AM doesn't under-perform...but if he does, and he is allowed to keep playing with the same results as last year, there will be a hot-seat for someone...and HCSF isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Do the math.False. AM came in with some mechanics issues that were cleared up, and Verduzco worked with him to build up some zing on the ball following shoulder surgery. Some of the main things that Verduzco stresses is the footwork of the position, especially throwing while moving, and he doesn't allow QBs to stand and throw the same pass repeatedly as he believes that it's necessary to throw to different spots accurately the first time without "dialing it in" via repeated throws. All of these things are relatively novel, but he absolutely is considered a guru on teaching QBs how to throw while moving. I've never seen better, and I know of nobody else who even focuses on it, let alone teaches it/drills it as much as he does.
The freshman Adrian Martinez was exactly what Coach Verduzco produces. It's the sophomore AM that was baffling ... until you take into account that he was playing with multiple injuries, at least one of which required surgery.
It's also not true that Coach V won't allow players to train with other QBs. Anyone remember that Adrian was at the Mannings' QB camp last summer? What Verduzco and Frost do NOT want is another voice in the QB's head. They won't allow a personal QB coach. Before I ever met Verduzco I had already come to the same conclusion as a head coach/OC/QBs coach, and I believed it so fervently that we have always had a team policy where only one coach is allowed to coach QB technique and read progressions. Sometimes that person was me, but I took a step back once when a better QB coach was available, even though I was still the HC/OC. This is becoming standard practice at the collegiate level and the upper high school levels. It's too difficult to sort through conflicting messages when two people are telling a QB different things. When I had a separate QB coach, I still had input, but I made sure that it went through the QB coach so that he was still the one teaching, coaching, and correcting.
@Huskerthom has a point that different players learn different ways, but that's already baked into this cake: Frost and Verduzco don't recruit players that won't adapt well to Verduzco's coaching. Verduzco is amazingly laid back about a lot of issues that other QB gurus get hyperventilated over, such as release point for passes, arm level for passes, etc., so he's very willing and able to accommodate a wildly wide variety of throwing styles, but he won't accept compromises on the footwork, eye placement, and a handful of other details. It's not a secret either. He's very blunt about it. No recruit will come to Nebraska and say that he wasn't aware of how it would work. If he arrives and doesn't like it, that's what the transfer portal is for.
If you want to see how Verduzco is doing at Nebraska, consider a few facts regarding the QB position that are kind of mind-boggling considering how things have been elsewhere:
For those of you who have never played QB or coached QBs, I don't know how to explain it to you except that I did, and I do, and I've never met anybody else even remotely like him. Yes, he is an odd duck, but not in any sort of off-putting way. He's an Italian surfer dude who reads and teaches highly technical biomechanic and cognitive concepts in a way that nobody else ever has before. A lot of coaches don't understand the vocabulary that he's using, so, naturally, they assume that the problem is with him and not them. He does have a rote spiel that he goes through in how he teaches QB biomechanics, and it is loaded with jargon and academicese,... but he's clearly not full of b.s. and blowing smoke to try and hide it. How do I know? Whenever I didn't understand what he was saying, I'd ask him to explain it to me in a more simple way, and he did, repeatedly. He's a mad scientist on the one hand, but I'm also pretty sure that he could teach my 9-year-old son how to better throw a football in a matter of minutes, and my son would walk away with a lifetime's worth of coachable points and memorable phrases that I still remember after one very long day 2 years ago.
- Andrew Bunch returned for his redshirt junior year, even knowing that he wouldn't see any playing time, and that he was moving down the depth chart. Yes, he entered the portal after the '19 season, but why stay? He liked the coaching he was getting, and he was able to make throws that he'd never made before.
- Noah Vedral followed Frost and Verduzco back to Nebraska, and I highly doubt that he will ever transfer out, even though, again, he knew that he would not be starting, and he would likely move down in the backup order over time. Why? He knew before he ever stepped foot on a college football field that he wanted to coach football after college, and he came to the realization that Verduzco is the best QB coach for him to learn the business.
- Matt Masker is still at Nebraska. I don't know the specifics of his situation, but I have a hunch that it's similar to Bunch and Vedral.
- Luke McCaffrey came to Nebraska, and a big part of why was that he liked what he was already learning from Verduzco while he was being recruited in high school. He was very aware that his QB mechanics were horrible in high school, but it was Verduzco who convinced him that he had all of the tools to be a good college QB. Verduzco worked with him on his mechanics all of last spring, and Luke says that it helped, and now it's more a matter of keeping the teaching instead of falling back on old/bad habits.
- Logan Smothers is coming to Nebraska, and Verduzco was his chief recruiter, and it's clear that working with Verduzco was/is as much of the draw as anything else. He also said that he asked Mario about a mechanics issue that he was having a year ago, and Coach V showed him some drills to work it out, and it helped. He said that he was throwing better last year because of that.
So why would people criticize him? Other QB gurus don't like somebody notable going against their orthodoxy. Verduzco flat out challenges some of the age-old "wisdom" that has been handed down literally for generations when it comes to QB throwing mechanics, and the guys who teach that for a living have a heavy stake in squashing those who question their methods. It's about as surprising as a late 1800s horse buggy manufacturer talking about the drawbacks of those new-fangled motor carriage thingamabobs.
Yes, he did. He was a mediocre QB at San Jose State, which happened to produce another mediocre QB a couple decades earlier named "Bill Walsh." Walsh also coached at San Jose State where he wrote his dissertation on the history of the passing offense. (You can read it here.) Growing up in the San Francisco area and going to San Jose State at about the same time that Bill Walsh was coming onto the scene, it's not a coincidence that Verduzco was/is also a huge Bill Walsh fan. Verduzco also did his graduate work/coaching at San Jose State, and he wrote his dissertation on the biomechanics of being a QB, which you can read here. (Head's up: It's not an easy read.) If you watch Joe Montana's scrambling, footwork, and throwing technique on "The Catch" that Dwight Clark made to beat Dallas in the NFC Championship Game, you're literally seeing the product of Walsh's teaching on QB footwork, etc., and it was the foundation for what Verduzco teaches. Don't forget that Frost went to Stanford specifically to be coached by Walsh as a QB, or that Walsh even as late as Frost's rookie year in the NFL as a Safety was saying that Frost could still play NFL QB with some proper coaching.
Fwiw, Verduzco is NOT alone in insisting that his QBs avoid other QB gurus. It's relatively common.
Yeah, that's not going to happen ... on either end of what you're saying.
I completely agree with this. The best athletes are often able to do things without having to work on their technique to the same degree of breaking it down and analyzing it to get the most out of whatever talent is there. It has been my experience in both basketball and football that almost all of the best coaches have been guys who were NOT great at what they teach, and often they were average or below and had to work incredibly hard at the details just to get playing time. It's especially interesting in the case of Frost as QB because Verduzco says that he can see on film that he received some bad coaching when he was at Stanford that affected Frost's delivery as he never threw the football like a shotput when he was in high school, but he came back to Nebraska with that throwing motion, and he was never able to fix it. Fwiw, with 2 days of drills at Oregon ten years ago, Verduzco helped him fix it. I asked Frost about it, and he still remembered the exact drill. He says that he still has to do that drill occasionally when he's throwing balls for WRs in practice when his old tick comes back. THAT'S why Frost believes in Verduzco.
You clearly haven't read much of Verduzco's bio. Everywhere he's been, he's left a trail of QBs who suddenly are better both mechanically and at making decisions. Also, do you include Verduzco's disciples in your calculus? Frost will tell you plainly that he only taught Marcus Mariota whatever he could remember from what Verduzco had been teaching him. I don't know how direct the connection is with Ryan Day, but I can't help but notice that since Justin Fields went to Ohio State, he suddenly started showing some of the same footwork mechanics when scrambling that Verduzco teaches. Maybe it's a coincidence, but Day also coached QBs under Chip Kelly, who was also a QBs coach, and there is so much overlap there in every direction that it's difficult to sort it out. If you want a coincidence, I also thought it was interesting that suddenly this year--but not so much last year--Joe Burrow was flashing a lot of the same exact footwork and feet placement when scrambling. If you're not a QB or QB coach, you might think it's just a natural place to end up, but that's not the world of football coaching as I've ever known it. One of the cardinal rules of QB decision-making since the middle of the 20th century was "Never throw late over the middle when you're scrambling." Joe Montana did that all of the time, and so did Steve Young, but that's because they were trained how to do it, and so their footwork added power to their passes that other QBs simply didn't have. If you watched UCF beat Auburn, you should have noticed that Milton threw late over the middle for a TD in a very tight window late in the game--the announcers noticed because they made comments to the effect that QBs are taught NOT to do that. Verduzco taught him that. Verduzco has close-up video footage of both Montana's feet when throwing "The Catch" and Milton's feet when throwing that pass, and he'll painstakingly break it down, point by point, to show you how both were coached to do exactly what they did in exactly the way that they did it.
But hey, if YOU say that he's a "very average coach," I'm sure that you know more about it than I do.