'Quarterbacks run the team:' OC David Yost on the most spellbinding position in all sports
Insight into Jordan Love, Shedeur Sanders, Justin Herbert and how one longtime expert of the position identifies and accentuates greatness out of the quarterback position. It's complicated...
He coached Jordan Love at Utah State… in addition to several NFL-bound passers.
Without question, David Yost is one of the sharpest quarterback minds we’ve encountered at Go Long. Today, he’s the OC and QBs coach at New Mexico State.
Full video and audio of our conversation is accessible here.
Prefer words? Our full transcript is below for you to surf around.
We get into the chaotic college football landscape today, Love’s rise, Love’s future, the curious case of Shedeur Sanders and — all hour — what it takes to excel at the quarterback position. If you don’t have a quarterback, Yost believes you better as hell do everything you can to find one.
And what should teams look for exactly? That’s in the eye of the beholder. Yost offers much insight.
Dunne: When in doubt, you’ve got to call David Yost. I think a lot of the folks here at Go Long are familiar with you. You’re one of the few people who knew what was coming with Jordan Love. You’ve worked with so many NFL quarterbacks. It only made sense here on the eve of the NFL draft to shoot the bull. How’s life?
Yost: It’s good. We just finished our spring ball here at New Mexico State. I got here in January and we’re just putting in the offense and fine-tuning it and trying to take steps forward with the offense with the program for Coach Sanchez. So now we’re getting it ready for recruiting, which opens up tomorrow: spring recruiting. And then the portal opens on the 16th and it’s open for 10 days. And we’ll see how that affects everything. That’s how college football has evolved into the world of free agency,
Dunne: Offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach right there in New Mexico State after Florida International. So what’s life like with the portal? Is it just 24/7/365 needing to stay on your toes with the movement of 18- to 22-year-olds today?
Yost: Yeah, and you try to talk to your guys. You try to figure out where they’re at. I’ve got a room right now with three scholarship quarterbacks. One was a transfer that came in from Montana. They signed before I got here, Logan Fife. Going through spring, we had an incoming freshman, so really a high school senior. He graduated early, came in January, went through everything. And then one guy returning from last year’s group, which he was new last year, just that's how the transition happens at a lot of schools. Especially the group of five. So those three guys went through the spring and now you try to talk to ‘em and find out what their thoughts are. There’s no contract that locks anybody in really in college. If all of a sudden somebody wants to go in on the 16th, they can go in. So that’s part of what you deal with and everything. So you try just to know what's going on with them — try to be truthful, try to tell ‘em exactly where they stand, what’s going on, what your plans are. But it’s a nonstop deal.
And then constantly checking all the different sites to see who’s going in, who’s announced they’re going in, who might be going in, how the situations are going at other places. I track the quarterbacks, but also you’re tracking all offense. There’s some positions we’re looking to still add to this spring positionally. So I’m trying to help our O-Line guy and help our tight end guy and those types of things to see if anything pops. And then we’re going to see what happens with us. Are we going to have some unforeseen or surprised positions that have need all of a sudden because someone’s decided they’ve got an opportunity or want to go see how it is?
It’s a different world than it was 20, 25 years ago when I got into this. It’s way different even 10 years ago. The quarterbacks I’ve had, I don’t know how many of those guys would’ve stuck around if they had to wait. That’s kind of the quarterback world. Do you wait your turn for your chance and opportunity? That doesn’t happen as much as it used to. Everybody saw what was going on with Tennessee over the weekend. That guy wasn’t waiting his turn. He was trying to get taken care of in the way he felt he deserved to be taken care of. With the rules now, you can. So it’s a different world in that way.
Dunne: I thought that was a win for loyalty though, that Tennessee as a program basically said, “We’ve got to build a team.” I don’t envy the position you coaches are in where you have to attract talent and appeal to talent and keep them around. There’s a certain layer of coddling everybody has to accept. But it’s football. It’s 22 moving parts smashing into each other and you still need to build a team. How do you balance that all, David? You want the best players and they want a lot of money, but at the same time, chemistry matters and you’ve got to sell these principles that have always worked in football since the sport was invented.
Yost: Oh yeah. You have that. But I remember we talked about it when Jordan was young because they had a situation there with Aaron Rodgers, which was not your typical quarterback situation and how things were going that way. And they finally got to a point where they had to make a decision just like Tennessee had to make their decision. And everybody’s talking, “Oh, that’s great what Tennessee did.” I’m like, “Yeah, it is. And they better win games.” That’s what it all comes down to.
Yeah, they won the spring game. That’s great. But now they were in the playoffs last year, so what’s their fan base expect? The old adage: “You’re at a job as long as the expectations of the fans allow it.” Everybody’s excited about that. But the bottom line is Coach Heupel and those guys have to win football games and that’s what the expectation is. No one will remember why or why not it didn’t happen. They recruit good quarterbacks every year. Their freshman kid coming in, he’s the nephew of the head coach I was working for at Florida International: Coach MacIntyre. He’ll do a good job, but I mean he’s a high school senior going through spring ball and threw a touchdown the other day in their spring game, which was great.
But bottom line is you’ve got to have good players and you’ve got to put it together. And now we have GM positions, which we didn’t have GM positions before. So everything’s changed in college, but it’s for the best and they never asked my opinion. So guess what? I don’t really need to have an opinion on all that. It’s just, how do we get our best 11 guys on the field? How do we have our best 22? How do you put all that together? How do you keep it moving? How do you train guys when you have so many new guys that come in now in January for a fall to go play? It used to be that you looked ahead. I remember at Missouri we were always sitting there and you’re looking two and three years out because if a guy left, it was kind of a surprise. It didn’t happen a lot because there was a penalty. If you left, you were going to lose a year or you had to transfer down. So it didn’t happen as much. So you were constantly looking at the one-year, two-year, three-year, four-year plan. Now it’s more of an eight- to nine-month plan and then it all happens again. If you plan too far out, you’re just wasting your time because you don’t know what you’re going to have.
Dunne: You were at Tiffin, then Toledo for five seasons. The quarterbacks coach. And then Missouri from 2001 to 2012. So I’m thinking of Chase Daniel, Blaine Gabbert, you were around some prolific offenses, prolific quarterbacks. Justin Herbert at Oregon. Obviously, Jordan Love with Utah State. But the origins of how you view the quarterback position, what do you believe makes a great quarterback?
Yost: All my training, it’s evolved over time. But the basis of mine was Gary Pinkel. He was the head coach at Toledo when I got hired. He was the head coach at Missouri. We were together for 17 years, but before he was the head coach at Toledo, he was the quarterback coach and offensive coordinator at Washington. And he had Mark Brunell, Chris Chandler, Billy Joe Hobert, he had Hugh Millen. They had a string of quarterbacks very similar to what we were able to have while we were at Missouri where you have NFL guys. So he was a really good quarterback coach and he’ll tell you that those guys were good when he got ‘em and he just tried to help. And that’s what I kind of learned from him was — how you train them in a certain way to get the most out of ‘em and figuring out what they can do. Because each one’s different.
When I was at Missouri, we started off with Brad Smith. I feel bad because Brad Smith was kind of the Lamar Jackson-type player before you were allowed to be that as a quarterback.
When they came to work out Brad for his pro day, they asked him do wide receiver drills, and he said, “Sure, I’ll do whatever.” He just wanted an opportunity in the NFL. And he made it 10 years as a Swiss Army knife doing everything from special teams to running back to receiver. And we got lucky to have Chase, but they were so different. They still had skills that you could win with, so you just kind of move to their direction. And then we ended up with Blaine Gabbert, who has some similarities to Chase, but totally different because Chase is this 5-11, 6-foot guy, and Blaine’s this 6-foot-4, 6-foot-5 guy who can throw the ball through a wall. So it was like, “OK, where’s his strength?” So we tried to move to his direction and then when he was finishing up and leaving for the NFL, we got lucky to have a kid named James Franklin who was very different. He ran the ball and he was different than Brad in running the ball because he ran power read. He could run through people, whereas Brad ran around people. So you evolved with him.
And then I got to go with Coach Leach at Washington State for those years, which a lot of the things I’d believed in and I’d done with the quarterbacks at Missouri was kind of the way I’d done it. And I saw how Coach Leach did it, and I’ve evolved a little bit off that because he really kept things at a very simple rate for the guys so they could go play and play early and play well. I’ve tried to steal some of those things from him as we’ve moved on. And a lot of the things we did with Jordan at Utah State were kind of those Washington State principles with my background of how you train quarterbacks. And I’m not all the way to Coach Leach, but a lot of the things I stole are evolved in that direction there.
Working with quarterbacks is the best thing about my job. Being the offensive coordinator is great. Calling plays. Designing plays, all that stuff’s fun. But my favorite thing is coaching the quarterbacks. This spring was tremendous here. Spring football is great because we get a practice and you get a day in-between most of the time, then you get another practice. So you’re not racing toward a game. In fall camp, you’re racing through fall camp to get to the game week. During the game week, you’re racing to get to that game every week.
In spring ball, we can sit in there and have our meetings: “Hey, how’s our drop here? Hey, here’s our footwork on this run play. Hey, we want to be perpendicular to the line of scrimmage.” Which I can be a jerk about it and demand it at this time because I’ve got time to do it. Now, once you get into the fall camp and into the season, I’ve got to try to remember to look for that stuff, but you’re looking at the big picture a lot more. So it was a lot of fun this spring focusing on the quarterback and you could see guys growing in the position and getting better at it. I’m dealing with three guys who had never dealt with me before all coming from different backgrounds, different situations, and kind of like, “Hey, this is where we’re all moving toward.” We had some real good success and definitely things we need to work on as we hit the summer and hit fall.
Dunne: And I forget about Brad Smith. He was dynamite. He averaged over 100 yards rushing a game for two full seasons, and he could throw it, too. He was ahead of his time.
Yost: That was back when you weren’t allowed to do that. That wasn’t what the NFL used and the NFL has evolved similarly. We were talking the other day. We were just watching the UFL games, and I remember when the World League started, and a big part of the why the World League of American Football was going on was so they could train quarterbacks because the colleges weren’t providing them with NFL-ready quarterbacks because the offenses were different. Not a lot of guys were playing in that style of offense that the NFL was using. So it was more of a training ground for those guys. And I remember Jake Delhomme was a guy there. I had a kid who played for me at Missouri, Kirk Farmer who made it a year or two there with the Chiefs as a guy in the World League.
But now the NFL uses a lot more things that we use and there’s a lot more similarities where guys can walk in and play quicker and have success and they lean in that direction. Kyler Murray would’ve never have had an opportunity to play quarterback 15 years ago. They would’ve said, “No, he can’t. He’s too small. He’s not a pocket passer.” Which he isn’t, but they figured out how to use him. He’s a great player. Every guy’s a little different. But that’s the evolution the NFL has done. And the same thing we do — trying to take advantage of what we have because you can’t just design a guy from the ground up.
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Dunne: When it comes to Jordan at Utah State, you guys get together and he’s a raw quarterback. He needs some time. But his willingness to wait and learn and be patient and get better, that was something you saw early on. What kind of popped with Jordan the player and Jordan the person when you got with him at Utah State?
Yost: Well, the thing that probably stuck out to me at first, and we’ve talked about this a bunch and why I thought the Green Bay situation was going to be something he would actually use to his advantage was, I showed up at Utah State. I got there in January. He had just had come in the year before. Went through spring football, and then they decided to redshirt him and send him to scout team. But when I showed up in January and we started talking football and we started putting the offense in there, and I would draw it up and say, “Hey, we’re going to call this ‘eight,’ or we’re going to call this ‘red.’ He was the guy, it was funny, because we had a returning starter in the room. We had some other guys that had been there a while, and he was like, “Oh, we called that popcorn last year.” I mean, he was the one that knew it, and I was impressed. So he went through spring and that’s a big adjustment for any high school quarterback to jump in and learn an offense. And they said “No, he did a great job learning it.” And then he really competed in the spring and then they got into fall camp and they were kind of going along and then they made a determination that, “Hey, yeah, he’s probably not going to play a whole bunch this year. We’re better off redshirting him to have another year on the other end.” And this was still when that’s what you did with quarterbacks. And so they decided to redshirt him. So he was on the scout team, but he was still sitting in the quarterback meetings, but he learned it. He didn’t just take that year off, which I’ve been around a lot of good quarterbacks that have a hard time not being the guy.
They have a hard time being in that meeting and not being the starting quarterback. Because primarily — when you’re in that quarterback meeting — you talk to the starter. That’s who you’re coaching and everything. And when the two gets reps, you coach him on that stuff. But primarily everything you do in that meeting is focused toward that starter. And the other guys have to learn it off of that. And Jordan knew the previous offense, and he’d only been there through a spring of it in a fall camp. And then as soon as we started putting stuff in, he got it. He picked it up. It was like, “OK, he can pick things up quickly. He’s naturally got football sense, IQ.” And then to see him kind of grow within it.
But then as we talked when he goes to Green Bay, it was like, “Well, he’s not going to be the guy initially.” He’s the one guy I knew would be OK doing that. I’ve had other quarterbacks, and it’s happened before during this portal stuff, you get a call about a guy that you had that’s going into the portal and they ask, “Hey, we’re looking for a backup quarterback. What do you think about this guy you’ve had?” And I’m like, “No, he’d be a terrible backup because he’s never been a backup before. He couldn’t. He’ll be lost. He’ll sit in that meeting and be so bored to death and lose track and lose focus that he’s not going to gain anything out of this. If you put him in, he’s going to be shocked by it because you’re not coaching him to be the guy. So his lack of focus is going to show up.”
Whereas Jordan might not get any reps as the No. 2 because that’s what happens a lot of NFL style during the week, you don’t have as many reps, but if he’s called upon, he’s going to go in there and know what he’s supposed to be doing.
And then he had the “it” quality. I’ve always called it the “it.” Different people call it different things. All the quarterbacks I’ve had that are the best ones I’ve had, they all had ‘it’ where they’re going to run the football team. They’re a great player no matter what, and it’s all different. It’s not the same. I’ve had guys that talk a lot and that’s great, and that’s their style. Had other ones — Brad Smith was super quiet. All he did was work hard and he showed everybody he had that and all the guys could rally behind him and follow him. Jordan would talk some. He didn’t talk very often, but when he did, everybody listened. I mean, everybody listened to it. All these guys were in the huddle or on the sideline, talking whatever. And then all of a sudden if Jordan started talking, it got quiet and they all listened to him. Boom. And then they went and did it.
But everybody’s got that differently. I mean, Herbert didn’t talk very much. He was super, super quiet. To the point that it almost worried you a little bit. But you could just see his ability and how good he was. From the first day he showed up, he showed up in the summer. He wasn’t an early enroll, and we had a receiver one day. We were sitting there in the summer and he goes, “Hey, you’re freshman quarterback.” And we had a couple that year and I said, “Terry?” He goes, “No, no, the tall guy.” And I was like, “Oh, Justin.” And he points to the guy who was our starting quarterback at the time at Oregon, and he goes, “He’s going to take his job. It’s just a matter of time.” And he was buddies with the starter. And I was like, “OK.” And all he’d done at that point was work out in the weight room and thrown a little bit of 7 on 7, and he had no idea what we were doing offensively or any of that stuff. But he was a guy when you put him in with put him in fall camp, we put him with the fours the first day. And the ones looked pretty good and the fours looked pretty good. So after a few days, we move him up to the threes and then all of a sudden the ones and the threes look pretty good. And before that, the twos and the threes were not very good. And then next thing you know, you put him with the twos and you’re like, “Oh, the twos are better.” It’s like, “Well, the constant here is Herbert.” He just made it work. And I don’t know if he always knew exactly what he was doing or what we were trying to do on a play, but he found a way to make it work.
When Chase Daniel showed up as a freshman, he passed guys up because whatever group you put him with, they were good. They were able to make plays. He found a way to make it work. You’ll get a quarterback (who says), “Well, coach, I was with the twos. I didn’t have as much time.” I said, “Well, all the good ones I’ve ever had, when they go with the twos, they make the twos good. It’s not about them being good around you. You have to make them good.” The really good ones make the guys around them better.
And I think Jordan always had that from the get-go, and it wasn’t easy and perfect for him. I remember that first fall camp, he had a great spring and moved himself into the No. 2 spot. He had a really good summer. Then we start fall camp and our starter hits his thumb on a helmet. So next thing you know, “Jordan, you’re going to get a lot of one reps.” And he was off a little bit. He was trying to make super throws. I just remember he threw in the interception one day and he hit the linebacker right in his face. And I said, “What are you doing?” He goes, “I was trying to throw it around him.” I was like, “Around him? How do you get the ball around him?”
Dunne: A Rory McElroy shot?
Yost: I joked at the time, there was a movie “Wanted” where they shot the bullets and they made ‘em go around the corner. I was like, “You’re not going to bend it around the guy.” And he had to settle himself down. One of the things quarterbacks have to do is know when a guy is covered. It used to be — and everybody would always laugh at it — you’d say the “three don’ts” for a quarterbacks are don’t have a quarterback-center exchange problem, don’t have a quarterback running back exchange problem, and then don’t throw to covered receivers. And everybody would laugh at the covered receivers. And I’d be like, “You’d be surprised how many guys can’t do that.” And I’ve seen that. I’ve seen guys who make great throws. And then every now and then they hit the ‘backer in the face. Jordan was able to make decisions to make sure those weren’t.
But Jordan was fun to work with and he wanted more and more and more. We gave him a lot of freedom to check things. And that’s really when the offense took off the second year — because he was running the offense. I was recommending plays and he was calling it. He was making sure. And I remember when Coach LaFleur called me and we talked about it. I said, “If you watch the video, you see when he looks at his wristband, he’s looking at that and, most plays, there’s two or three things listed there. He gets to pick which one he wants. But on top of that, he can go to whatever he wants. I’m recommending these plays to him, and then he’s going to get in the right thing.” Most of the vertical throws that he makes in a game are he saw the look he liked, he liked the matchup, he liked all those things. The situation: Hey, it’s not third and one, you’re throwing the ball 40 yards downfield. It’s hey, we’ve got a chance to attack ‘em here and he took advantage of it. So he was good that way. He was able to kind of be an aggressive playcaller at the quarterback position. Which I have a lot more fun and I have a lot more success when my quarterback’s kind of the aggressive playcaller of the group because then I don’t have to be. When I’m having to always push them to try to get the ball down the field, that’s when it gets hard. Because that’s not their nature. But he was an aggressive, get the ball down the field kind of guy. And we had some weapons to do it with, but he did a great job with it.
Dunne: Which is fascinating because I feel like Year 3 as the starter in Green Bay — and LeRoy Butler got into this a couple weeks ago. He said, “Matt LaFleur should give him the keys.” Let him run the offense. I understand early on — you’re replacing Aaron Rodgers, and this is Matt LaFleur’s chance to really put his fingerprints all over this offense. I can’t imagine how liberating that was for LaFleur as an offensive guy his whole life, as the playcaller. But what is the value in giving Jordan a little more leash here? Giving him a little bit more freedom? You laid it out beautifully there where he’s got a menu place and he can pick and choose. When he has the ownership to call some plays himself and take his own shots, how much better of a quarterback is Jordan Love?
Yost: Most quarterbacks when they’re able to do that — and this was a Leach deal — they’ve got the best view of the defense and they’ve got the last view of the defense because they can do it right up to that snap. I try to watch Jordan whenever I can. And Green Bay does a great job offensively taking advantage of the guys. And you can see Jordan evolving with that receiving corps and the tight ends and it seems like they’re all growing together in a strong way. But I would not be surprised that Jordan’s able to kind of, “Hey, this is what we’re going to do. But if they give you this, take that.” And those opportunities. I’m sure that’s already going on to a point on certain things. But that’s when you can really see an offense take off because they spent so much time studying it, they know it, and then they’re able to control everything and get everything in the right framework.
We had a couple opportunities this spring, and it hasn’t happened as much yet because we’re still new in it. But our one quarterback goes up. We had a play called, boom, he looks at it. They happened to go press on one of our guys that they should not be pressing — he’s going to run right by him. And all he did was look out there. He didn’t change anything. We had a protection he could work with, and he just gave him our wind route signal and went back, looked the other way, and threw him a go route. And he’s about six yards behind our guy. It was just a matchup deal that they got caught in with a motion that he took full advantage of and, boom, all of a sudden you’ve got a 60-yard play happening. That makes football a lot easier when your quarterback can do those things. So you’re not in that constant mode of “I’ve got to call the perfect play for every down because if I don’t, we’re going to be behind the sticks.” So you can see that in certain situations. Last year when I was watching Green Bay, they could really get a flow going with that run game and then the passing and everything. And then you play some really good NFL teams, and that’s much harder to do.
Dunne: You made a really good point with his quality of just working his ass off when he is a backup, when he isn’t the guy and trying to absorb the entire playbook and absorb the offense. It’s the opposite of what we were saying earlier with a lot of quarterbacks today where if they’re not the starter, they’re going to try to go to a school where they can be the starter with the way college football is set up. There’s a coach for the Packers. We talked before last season, and he said, “Man, people don’t understand year to year to year the kind of work and diligence that Jordan needed to have as a quarterback.” Aaron Rodgers is an MVP. And then Aaron Rodgers is holding the team hostage for a few months and then he returns and you’re just kind of waiting and you don’t know what in the hell’s going to happen? That takes mental toughness, doesn’t it, as a quarterback to just wait your turn and never know when that chance is going to come?
Yost: Oh, yeah. And I would text with Jordan every now and then because you’d see different things, but I think he was always in that mode of, “Well, I can’t control anything but what I’m doing.”
Dunne: Everybody says “I can’t control what I can’t control.” But he lives it. There’s substance to it.
Yost: He went and got better. If he’d have wasted those times sitting back there — which I’m telling you — I’ve been around guys that do. They sit there and they’re like, “When it’s my turn, I’ll do it.” Well, it’s never going to become your turn if you don’t do it beforehand in that way. I remember when Chase Daniel signed, he left us at Missouri. He ended up in Washington and they had a quarterback room and he said one of the guys in the room had been on the team the year before, but had been injured all year. And the guy had been a rookie the year before. And he goes, “Yeah, he doesn’t know any of the offense. I don’t know what he did last year in the meetings.” And I was like, “OK, you’ve got to beat him out.” He was like, “Yeah, I’ve got that. I’m taking care of that right now.” So you’ve got to take advantage of what you get.
The whole thing with Jordan, he was the one guy I knew that would take advantage of being a backup as opposed to just being mad all the time or being disappointed or, “Woe with me” or “Hey, when do I get my chance?” Well, you better be ready when you get your chance. And I think he showed that early on to the coaches. Otherwise, he wouldn’t still be there. And I know one of his first games against the Chiefs was not his best game when he got to play for Aaron. They tried to put him in a good position and it was a tough day and he didn’t have his best day there. But I think they must have seen enough in practice — because that’s what we see as coaches — you see ‘em in practice, you get an idea of what you’ve got. You know, this is our quarterback room, this is our guy, and we have a No. 2. Or, in that case, we have a guy we can win with if Aaron is ever gone. Or the starter’s ever gone. They had that belief. Otherwise, they would’ve moved on and went a new direction because you can’t even have an off year in the NFL at that position. Everybody in the NFL, either you have a quarterback or you’re looking for a quarterback. It’s one of those two things — all the time. And if you’re in that other area, you’re in that purgatory, you have no chance. All you’re doing is waiting to go get one.
Dunne: So they did their homework. They knew that Jordan was wired to handle a two- or three-year wait. I don’t know why more teams just don’t do what Green Bay does. We talk about it all the time — draft a quarterback when you don’t need a quarterback. It’s going to piss off people, including your starter. But it’s too valuable. You also need to know Jordan Love is going to work day-in and day-out and be patient and improve. It was ugly. That Kansas City game was not a sight to behold. But he got better and better. You talked to Matt LaFleur. So what were those conversations like before the draft? Were they trying to get to know the person in addition to the player?
Yost: Yeah, and what Coach LaFleur said, it was different because that was the Covid time. I was at Texas Tech at the time. So I was gone from Jordan for that whole season. But there was a connection. One of the guys on the staff there I’d worked with at Missouri, Daryl Franklin, and I knew Coach LaFleur. We watched Jacob Eason throw one day together up in Seattle one day. And so I’d known him from recruiting for a while. So he called and said, “Hey, normally I go out and I sit down with the quarterback. I get to know him and everything. We just don’t get to because of Covid. What’s he like?” So I think there were three times he called me and we talked for 45 minutes to an hour just about how he thinks, how he reacts to things, how he handles things in that way. That’s when I was like, “OK, they have serious interest in him.” I know they have Aaron Rodgers, but they have serious interest because the head coach is making a lot of effort to know what this could be if this is a guy we want to go on.
It was “How does he think? How does he handle things?” I said, “He checks a lot of his own plays. I’m just recommending plays. And he’s calling them.” Coach LaFleur’s joke was “Do you think I do anything different with Aaron Rodgers?” And I said, “Well, no.” Which I always find that interesting. I coach a guy for at the most basically four years. If we redshirt him, I spend five years with a guy. I can’t imagine having a guy who’s 35 years old that’s played 15, 18 years of high, high level football and you’re talking to him. The difference in coaching that guy. I’m always dealing with kids. Coaching Jordan Love now, I mean, I still see him as a kid because I coached him then. But he’s not, he’s an adult. He’s a man. This is his livelihood, this is his business. It’s way different than when I first got him at Utah State and he’s just having fun and all that. It’s a totally different aspect of that. But it’s an interesting dynamic you have with the quarterback.
Dunne: In 2018, that was his best year by far in college, obviously — 3,567 yards, 32 touchdowns, only six picks. Led the conference in yards per attempt: 8.6. And then you had left in 2019, right? That's when you went to Texas Tech. And so then we see the interception number go up 17.
Yost: Well, I should have taken him with me. Nowadays, you’d take him with you. It would have been a package deal. And we knew. We joked at the time because I think the next year they played LSU. They had Wake Forest. Their schedule got tougher than what we had. We had Michigan State, which was good. And we were driving actually to have a chance to tie the game or try to win in regulation in that first game. But then we kind of got rolling after that and won 10 in a row.
And also, my first year with him — as a redshirt freshman — we go out and we start a whole new offensive line. He takes over the job after the Wyoming game, which was against Josh Allen. So we played Josh Allen. He beat us on a power read play that went for a touchdown. But Jordan, that was his real first (game) where he played a lot and started to lead the team. And then we went to him as a starter. The next year when we came back, I think we returned 10 of 11 starters. So he was comfortable with the guys around him. And then most of that offense line all graduated the following year. The running backs graduated that next year. The tight end graduated that next year, the best receiver graduated. So all of a sudden he was dealing with new stuff, so it got harder for him. And he’s the kind of guy that he wouldn’t accept that as an excuse. He was going to have to go make more plays. So he probably tried to do a little bit more than what he needed to or what he could do.
Dunne: I think Green Bay saw that and appreciated that, too. He’s down linemen, down skill-position players. It’s a different world. You go back and watch that LSU game, the ball is snapped and there’s people in his face. But he didn’t flinch. At the same time though, this is a balance that Green Bay is trying to figure out because he had a little stretch early last season where there were some interceptions and risk-taking. And you don’t want to neuter all of that from his game. You want Jordan Love pushing the ball down the field, taking those shots. You don’t want to turn him into some kind of game manager at 55 million a year. That’s just bad finances, too. So what is that perfect balance to strike then you think with a Jordan Love?
Yost: When I had him, he’s an aggressive thrower. He wants to get the ball down the field. It’s easier to say “whoa” than “to go” is how I always talk about the quarterbacks. It drives me crazy when I’m calling stuff or I’m giving him plays and they’re finding the checkdowns. I’m like, “OK, I like completions. But you got guys running down the field. You have opportunities. We need to take these opportunities.” And he’s an aggressive thrower that way. I know early in the year last year, he had some, and you see how mad he is after the fact. And I think that’s a fine line of figuring out, “OK, I can or can’t make that throw. Is this too much? When can I?” If you try to do too much, you’re going to get a hole. But if you’re not doing enough, you give yourself no chance. So that’s a balance, I think. And with him, I mean he’s got a lot of years ahead of him. A lot of football ahead of him. So he’s still early in his pro career. He had that time where he wasn’t playing. And then once he started playing, he kind of popped pretty quick and everybody kind, “Oh, here you go!” You follow Favre. You follow Aaron Rodgers. Green Bay’s been spoiled for a while with having good quarterbacks. I remember when I was a kid, when Green Bay was terrible at football.
Dunne: One “Majik Man” in there briefly, right? I know you’re a big Don Majkowski guy.
Yost: I had him on my fantasy team. He had an unbelievable year and he had Sterling Sharpe and all that. So, no, there was some tough times. It’s that fine line of, “OK, am I reckless or am I being aggressive?” And you want him to be right beyond that line in that way. You want him to be pushing that all the time. And then it’s easier to say, “Hey, let’s pull it back. Hey, let’s be smart with the football, make good decisions.” Not, “Hey, I’ve got to push you more toward the edge so we can get some of those explosive plays.” Because football is about explosive plays. That’s how you score points. You win by scoring points. Protecting the football and getting explosive plays is the key to everything we do.
Dunne: Well, I hope Ben Johnson knocked some sense into everybody at the owners meetings. It was my buddy Dan Wiederer at the Chicago Tribune. I think he asked him the question. Ben Johnson, in so many words, I’m paraphrasing, said the biggest indicator between winning and losing to him is now EPA. Not necessarily the turnover battle. The turnover battle, it matters. But I feel like you can drill that into everybody’s head and, all of a sudden, not just your quarterback but everybody is playing a little scared. A little tense. You’ve got to play loose. You’ve got to play to win. Think to win. Take chances. Think of anybody in any line of work. I’m just thinking back to when I first got into sports writing. I’m a 10th grader, 11th grader, writing at the Olean Times Herald. My boss, Chuck Pollock, would let me write columns in a professional newspaper about the NBA. I look back and think, “Why did he let me do that?” He was just letting me go. Let somebody succeed or fail and take chances in anything. That’s just so good for the brain chemistry of anybody in any industry. And you saw it up close with Jordan. I imagine every quarterback loves playing for you if you’re going to let him kind of slam that gas pedal. Within reason, right? You can’t go 120 down the highway. But it’s OK to be creative and innovative at this position.
Yost: Oh yeah. And in practice, you want ‘em to stretch themselves. And what we do, we talk about turnover margin and the ones we feel we can control a lot more are fumbles. So we’re on everybody’s tail about how you carry the football, how you protect football and those types of things. There’s times when, hey, a guy drops the ball and you do something after practice with him. If they fumble a football, we’re going to talk about it. They’re going to get up in front of the whole offense and explain to us the five points of pressure of how we carry a football because that’s how important it is. But interceptions, we don’t really make a big deal about it because I don’t want the guys ever scared of throwing an interception. Because if you throw the football, they’re going to happen. A ball’s going to get tipped. You’re going to think the window’s there and it’s not. A receiver is going to tip a football. Things happen throwing the football. It’s not the old Woody Hayes theory of when you throw the ball, three things happen and two are bad.
I’ve never punished a guy for interceptions. What I always talk about and I’ve had this discussion a lot with quarterback people and how you evaluate quarterbacks. The No. 1 thing you can evaluate in a quarterback off of video is accuracy. You can watch their stuff. You can watch their game stuff. You can see are they inaccurate throwing the football. And that’s the No. 1 thing in being a successful quarterback. You have to be accurate. Now, the No. 1 reason why guys play — and I’ve had arguments with people and they’re like, “Well, they’ve got to be accurate.” And I’m like, “Yep, they’ve got to be accurate. We evaluate that in recruiting or in drafting. But the guys who play can make decisions after the snap. It sounds simple, but not every guy can. Not every guy who plays quarterback can after the snap of the ball make a decision on, ‘Hey, it’s covered. It’s not covered. I can make the throw. I can’t make the throw in this situation.’” And that’s where guys separate, the guys that can make decisions after the snap are the guys who play and they can play at a higher level.
Brad Smith could make decisions. Now, he was probably a little bit more of a conservative guy — and I’ve run into this — when you have a guy that’s really athletic who can run, they always have that Get Out of Jail free card they’ve used their whole life. They don’t have to make the super throw because ‘Well, I can scramble. I can run and make a play.’ Whereas opposed to when you get to a Chase Daniel, where he’s got to make it with his arm. Blaine Gabbert, he’s got to make it with his arm. So those guys were both able to really make decisions on one guy who were open or not open.
When a receiver runs the wrong route, it’s amazing how many times we throw them the football. It is. The guy runs the wrong route and the first thing the quarterback will tell you — I’ll say, “What are you doing?” — and he’s like, “He ran the wrong route.” I’m like, “You threw it to him.” Because when the guy runs the wrong route, it blows their mind and they just throw the ball to the guy. … I’m like, “He was covered and you threw it to him. You have 51 percent of the vote. Don’t throw him the ball.” The decision-making after the snap is what differentiates quarterbacks that can really play the game at a high, high level. And then you have to have the physical traits and the physical traits are what we can evaluate in recruiting. But then can you make the decisions after the snap?
Quarterbacks run the team. That’s what they do. There’s no difference. That is standard across everything. That guy has to be so good at what he does that the whole team can rally behind him. He runs the team and they do it in their own way, but they have to be the alpha of the group. Even if they’re not the guy that stands up and says all the stuff. Everybody knows it’s his team and where he goes, we can go. And if he can’t get us there, guess what? We won’t get there. That’s what it comes down to.
We as coaches, we don’t have too much time on our hands, but we sit in there and every now and then start talking about this year’s draft of quarterbacks. I watched Shedeur when he was in high school. I very much underestimated him. He’s a way better college football player than I ever thought he was going to be when I was at Texas Tech. I watched his video and I did not see what he became. So I was wrong on that one. I actually saw Cam Ward in high school football and thought he was a good player. Not good enough that we recruited him at Texas Tech, but he made my initial list of guys that I thought were scholarship-type players in the state of Texas and everything. And then he went to Incarnate World and has done a great job. But we were talking the other day, and one of our coaches played in the NFL and he goes, “Well, I don’t know if that guy’s worth a Top 5 pick or a Top 10 pick or whatever. And I said, “If I don’t have a quarterback, I’m drafting a quarterback until I find one.” Because if you draft one, it’s not the same punishment you used to get when you took a quarterback and you’re stuck with him because you’re paying him so much money earlier on.
What the Cardinals did a few years ago, they drafted the guy out of UCLA, Rosen, and decided after a year that he wasn’t the answer. So they went and got Kyler Murray because he was good enough. Which to me, until you have a quarterback, you should draft every quarterback you can to try to find one. The thing I heard the other day, they were talking about you talking about Josh Allen and Pat Mahomes and Lamar Jackson being the top three in the NFL right now. It’s very easy to argue that. And they’re like, “None of those guys were Top 5 picks.” And I was like, “No, but Jared Goff was, he’s really good. Joe Burrow was, he’s really good.” So I don't know where you get him at, but you better get one. Until you have one, you should be taking all the guys you can in that way.
Dunne: Amen. If you’re a general manager, if you’re anybody in charge, I totally agree. You don’t want to get fired and look back and say, “Oh, I never even drafted a quarterback, somebody that I had conviction on.” Is there somebody? Cam Ward’s going to go No. 1, but whether it’s Shedeur Sanders, Jaxson Dart, Tyler Shough, Kyle McCord, Dillon Gabriel, is there somebody that pops to you?
Yost: I haven’t studied Shedeur as much, but his games have been on TV and they happen to be a lot of those early games. So you get to watch them. I’ve been amazed at how accurate he is with how much duress he was under. Which I think that’s an undervalued thing. When you see a lot of the guys that come from some of the top programs, it’s never easy. Playing quarterback is never easy. But a lot of those guys have had better circumstances or better things around ‘em. So it’s easier to manage the position and play the position. I think watching what he’s had to do as far as getting himself out of trouble and still making plays over and over and over again, I think a lot of that will carry over into the NFL because that’s what you are. And he makes plays. I don’t think he breaks things down just to break ‘em down. I always watch that. Is this guy looking to make a super play every time? Everybody talks about that with Pat Mahomes, how many great plays he makes. Well, when you watch him, there’s a whole bunch of throws in that game he catches, sets and throws the ball on time to a guy at a high, high rate. Then every now and then, he has to go and make this spectacular play in that way. Josh Allen has become a tremendous player, but a lot of Josh Allen isn’t the super play anymore. It’s just making all the normal plays. And then I think he’s grown into that.
And when you watch Shedeur Sanders, I think he fixes a lot of things you have to do as a quarterback. I tell the quarterbacks all the time, “Your job is to fix the mistakes of the guys around you.” Because guess what? The right guard is going to get beat sometimes. It’s not a hot situation, it’s not a blitz situation. But heck, the right guard gets edged and all of a sudden you got to slide to your left to make a throw. We try to do drills for those things, but you’ve got to be able to do that. And just watching what Shedeur was able to do at Colorado at a really high level — over and over and over again, when everybody knew they were throwing the ball almost every snap. I mean, you’d watch that game and he found ways to make play after play after play to keep ‘em in games and the win games. So I’ve been way impressed by him, and I think a lot of what he does will show up in the NFL.
So he’s the one guy that's stood out to me because he’s had to deal with the tougher things, which if you watch Pat Mahomes, I mean, he was playing at Texas Tech and they were not a great football team at the time. Coach Kingsbury was there. They did some unbelievable things on offense, but he was a lot of times was behind or having to make plays. He wasn’t playing with a lead too often, and he was able to make them a successful team as best they could. And then a lot of that stuff carried over when he got there. Josh Allen had to be the best player on the field every game for Wyoming. And guess what, that’s what he’s used to doing. Where some of those other guys are playing, you’re playing at some of those blue-chip programs and they’ve got offensive linemen getting drafted too, or a bunch of ‘em getting drafted, and you’re like, “OK, their lives were a little easier, a little cleaner than some of those other guys.”
Dunne: Now we’re at that point in the pre-draft discourse where Shedeur Sanders is that biology frog experiment. Everybody’s just poking and prodding, and now we’re hearing, “Well, is he even a first-round pick?” You just made a compelling case. If I’m like the New York Giants and I’m picking three and I’ve got Jameis Winston and Russell Wilson and I still need a quarterback and I’m in my fourth year of the regime, you better think long and hard about taking Shedeur Sanders there probably.
Yost: If I didn’t have a quarterback, I would draft Shedeur Sanders. And if you’re wrong, guess what, you’re probably picking really high again next year. But no, you’ve got to have one of those. Either you’ve got one or you don’t have one or you think you have somebody who might be one. That’s what everybody in the NFL is constantly doing. And if you don’t have one, you better find a way to go get one. Otherwise, you might be able to make the playoffs. You might. But you’re not going to win the Super Bowl without having a guy in that position anymore. That’s what it’s gotten to and that’s what the game’s become. College football is the same way, Georgia last year, a guy got hurt and guess what? They weren’t the same team. And that goes on all the time. And a couple of years ago, Florida State went from Travis, who was a great player for them. He gets hurt and they don’t even get to go into the four-team playoff because everybody said, “Well, they’re not the same team.” Which they weren’t. Jordan Travis was such a player for them that they weren’t the same team. Their whole team got punished for it. But bottom line is they probably wouldn’t have been as competitive with that group. No question they wouldn’t have been as competitive without him. So I don’t know if I agreed that they didn’t make the playoffs. But again, they didn’t ask me. So it didn’t matter in that way. But no, you’ve got to have a guy.
Same thing in recruiting. I tell every head coach I talk to when you’re talking about jobs and that, they ask about the quarterback position. I said, “We should recruit as many as it takes to find one. And give him as many reps as we can early, and when they start to show signs they can be the guy, then we got to lean on those guys that way.” And we can make quick decisions on guys. Because what I found in the past is — the really good ones I’ve been around? — they were really good the first day. The first day Brad Smith showed up and started doing stuff, everybody on our team was like, “Oh, he’s really good. He’s going to be a really good player for us.” When Chase Daniel showed up, everybody’s like, “Wow.” When Gabbert showed up, other guys left the program because they saw him throwing the ball and what he could do. The good ones are good from Day 1. They’re not the unknown guy. I’m sure Josh Allen, the first day he showed up at Wyoming, they went “Oh!”
Dunne: And if you start rationalizing with an average guy, you’re just going to end up being shit out of luck. If you find yourself having to talk yourself into somebody, it’s probably not a good thing.
Yost: I’ve always said this about quarterbacks. If I’m sitting here every day saying, “Well, he’s getting better.” Any coach does this. If I’m sitting in the meeting and they say, “Such and such is getting better,” I’m like, “Is he ever getting good enough?” Most of the time, it’s no. “OK, then let’s stop talking about him.” And that’s the same thing with a quarterback. If all we’re doing is sitting there saying, “Oh, he’s getting better, he’s getting better.” Well, is he ever going to be good enough? No. OK, let’s move on. Let’s get going. Let’s invest those snaps into a guy who can be if we have that.
Dunne: David Yost, man, this was awesome. We’ll be keeping an eye on New Mexico State Football this year. Running the show offensively, working with those quarterbacks. Hopefully you can nail down this position and get into that playoff. Who the hell knows? We’ll have to check back in with you when you’re undefeated in November.
Yost: I just want to win the first game against Bryant.
ICYMI:
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The phone lines must stay open at McGinn HQ through February and March because the calls from scouts are constant. Whenever I check in with our longtime scribe, it’s important to keep the conversation pithy.
Great insight on the natural vs learned traits of a great QB. Would have been interesting to get his take on the current flow of younger OC's from college to the NFL and whether that's likely to continue.