This guy is really interesting.
https://theathletic.com/1046003/201...-verduzco-quarterbacks-coach-adrian-martinez/
The scientific method of Mario Verduzco, Nebraska quarterbacks coach
By Bruce Feldman Jul 2, 2019
120
LINCOLN, Neb. — On one side of the glass is the weight room where Nebraska football players grunt and clang their way through their workouts.
On the other, opera music plays from desktop computer speakers, the majestic voices of Andrea Bocelli and Luciano Pavarotti — Pava-row-tee, as the office’s occupant says — a constant soundtrack.
Beside the glass overlooking the weight room, a dresser showcases three dozen books, neatly positioned around a jar of Tootsie Pops. This is no typical football library, aside from the half-dozen books by or about Bill Walsh. The rest of the collection seemingly has nothing to do with the sport. There are multiple works by Friedrich Nietzsche, books on religion, on biomechanics and on focus. One book is titled, “Motor Control and Learning”, written by Richard A. Schmidt, a former nationally ranked college gymnast-turned UCLA scientist.
This is the office of Mario Verduzco, the second-year quarterbacks coach at Nebraska. He is 63, has thick, gray, feathered hair and wears round-framed glasses much like the ones favored by John Lennon. Verduzco is prone to slipping off his shoes while discussing the throwing motion and rattling off philosophical quotes and physics formulas. He cites Schmidt’s name and his work while talking about the intricacies of the quarterback position to the point where one wonders if the late UCLA professor should be considered one of the godfathers of quarterback coaching.
Verduzco brings up the aspect of Schmidt’s theory on the specificity of skill, which gets into why he thinks there has been a lot of confusion in the quarterback coaching space. “Even if two skills are quite similar — for example, throwing a baseball and throwing a football correlate damn nearly to zero,” Verduzco says. “That’s not me speaking. That’s the research. You want to screw up a guy’s tennis stroke, have him go play racquetball. And vice versa.”
The playing environment for a quarterback is unlike anything else in sports, he explains.
“Pitchers are on a mound,” he says. “We’re not on a mound. They operate in an absolutely closed environment. The position that I coach is the most open environment skill in all sport. Golf and bowling are closed environment sports. Basketball is a semi-open, closed environment sport, meaning they can do all sorts of stuff but they can’t jack you in the jaw, and the basket is not gonna move. In hockey, they can check you, but the goal’s not gonna move. We’ve got to drop back, eyeballs downfield, throw the ball to a moving target, and those targets are being guarded. All while four or five maniacs are trying to rip your balls off your body.”
While all of that all makes sense, how, exactly, does that factor into coaching the position? Questions beget questions, which only seem to get Verduzco more invested.
“This is really, really, really fascinating stuff,” he says gleefully. “I mean, it’s ****in’ wild now.
“How long do we have to talk about this stuff?”
Verduzco helped groom his nephew Jason Verduzco, a 5-9, 175-pounder who went on to earn All-Big Ten honors twice at Illinois. In 14 seasons at Northern Iowa, Verduzco produced one standout quarterback after the next. His protégé Eric Sanders still holds the FCS record for highest completion percentage in a season and in a college career.
Scott Frost worked as an assistant coach at Northern Iowa in 2007 and 2008, saw Verduzco’s work with QBs up close and became a believer. So much so that when Frost — a former QB himself who once led the Cornhuskers to a national title — got promoted to become Oregon’s quarterback coach and offensive coordinator in 2013, he flew Verduzco out to Eugene.
“I took over after Marcus (Mariota)’s sophomore year and I didn’t want to mess him up,” Frost says, sitting in his own office three doors down the hall from Verduzco. “Mario was the best (quarterback coach) I’ve ever been around. I figured the best way I could learn was to have him put me through all his stuff. So he and I went out there and I was the quarterback.
“For two days I did everything, and to be honest with you, I was pissed because at the end of those two days I threw better than I’d ever thrown in my entire life. It was night and day after two days. I had better balance, better accuracy, and better velocity. And I was 38 years old at the time.”
Verduzco had Frost throwing with a softball to help remedy his mechanics. He had Frost doing the same drills as all of his quarterbacks at Northern Iowa.
“I figured I had to find a way to dumb down all the information so that I can communicate it,” Frost says. “But the great thing about the way he teaches is they hear this stuff over and over and over and over to the point that it makes sense and it does relate.”
In 2016 when Frost was named the new head coach at UCF, he hired Verduzco as quarterbacks coach. Verduzco’s first protégé with the Knights was a 5-11, 160-pounder from Hawaii with only three FBS scholarship offers named McKenzie Milton. He finished eighth in Heisman Trophy voting after just two seasons in the system. Milton also helped turn around a program that had gone 0-12 the year before Frost and Co. arrived. They went 13-0 in their second season together with Milton compiling a 37-9 TD-INT ratio and completing 67 percent of his passes.
Verduzco’s latest gem is Nebraska sophomore Adrian Martinez, a freshman All-American last season. The Fresno, Calif., native completed 65 percent of his passes — the second-highest single-season total in Nebraska history — and rushed for 629 yards in 2018.
Verduzco made some subtle tweaks with Martinez, who had missed his senior season of high school with a shoulder injury. When Martinez arrived in Lincoln as an early enrollee in 2018, Frost asked Verduzco if the young QB would be able to get more juice on the ball.
“Don’t worry about it,” Verduzco told him. “We’ll get it taken care of.”
Verduzco earned the trust of Frost (foreground) one evidence-based step at a time.
Verduzco turned to the Butt Drill, which asks the quarterback to throw a football from the seat of his pants, forcing the passer to focus from his shoulder to his hand. “We’re isolating the musculature that throws the football, therefore strengthening it, and we’re gonna increase the flexibility of the shoulder joint — he doesn’t have to worry about hip rotation,” Verduzco says of the merits of the drill. “All he’s worried about it that piece of the puzzle, and we’re rippin’ it.”
The issue Verduzco identified was one of rhythm, as Martinez was bringing the ball back at a slower tempo than when it was going forward. The drill can help solve that. “They’ll bring the ball back slowly — BOOM — then let it rip,” he says. “It’s to get them to understand it’s like a rubber band. Expand and contract. Expand and contract. Cha-Ching! Cha-Ching! Cha-Ching! Once the new program took over, he never looked back.”
Sure enough, during last year’s preseason camp, Frost was wowed by the velocity on Martinez’s throws.
Frost looked at Verduzco and told him, “I’ll never question you again.”
One of the first sentences in Verduzco’s QB manual that he gives to his players reads, “Below is a list of the consequences of a life without science; statements that were once held as truths and in some cases they still are!!!” Among them are a dozen myths, ranging from eating carrots can improve your eyesight to you should starve a fever and feed a cold to the last one, muscle memory exists. Each item has the word FALSE in all caps written next to it.
The manual is crammed with theories, mantras and explanations. On the topic of “ground reaction force” and its importance to the throwing motion, stance and initiation of motion, Verduzco writes, “We want our whole back foot flat on the ground, the phrase is a flat platform. We do NOT want to initiate our motion pushing off our back right toe. We can’t launch a missile from a rowboat. A flat right foot platform increases the ground reaction force.”
Verduzco also goes into great detail about what he believes is one of the bigger misnomers in quarterback coaching: “Blocked trials will improve the performance for an isolated skill but will have a detrimental impact on learning the array of requisite skills. Random Variable Practice will have a positive impact on both learning and performance. This fact must be tempered with the stage of learning.”
Verduzco’s adherence to Schmidt’s theory about random variable practice shows when he is on the practice field. When he has his QBs doing 12 reps, it can be a mix of frontside curl, a backside hitch, a backside post, but all are in variable random order to be more in line with how a quarterback has to operate within the game.
He suspects few other quarterback coaches in college football, if any, are incorporating random variable practice to train their QBs unless they’ve heard him speak in a lecture or they understand the notion of Schmidt’s Scheme theory. “It’s really simple,” he says, adding that the first time quarterbacks get into this practice mode, it “shocks their brain”, and the results, initially, are pretty ugly.
Verduzco’s methods incorporate a lot of throwing at practice, his quarterbacks say. He has all kinds of throws and drills for them — rapid-fire, progressives and regressives; T-drills; zero-, 45- and 90-degree, 3 o’clock and 9 o’clock throws.
Another piece of the puzzle for a quarterback, from the psychological perspective, is kinesthetic awareness. “Then, once he’s aware of it, we’re golden,” Verduzco says, employing a method he’s taken from Schmidt of exaggerating the error in both directions.
“The learner doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing,” Verduzco says. “He has no concept, as Schmidt would say. He has no schema for rightness and wrongness until you tell him.
“So the idea is to make him aware and create a schema in his brain for rightness, and wrongness.”
How quickly each quarterback may process the information will vary but eventually, Verduzco believes, they’ll all get it. In Martinez’s case, the change happened fast. His coach’s grade on his stroke went from “good” to “excellent” before he ever suited up for a game.
Sanders, Verduzco’s record-setting QB at Northern Iowa, came to school as a walk-on with, by his own admission, a weak arm. One of the things that really helped, Sanders says, was Verduzco’s drills using a heavy football, one that is about two or three times the weight of a game ball.
“He was awesome,” says Sanders, now a high school coach in Bradenton, Fla., producing Division I QBs thanks in large part to the Verduzco way. “You’re learning something new every day.”
Verduzco drills and tests his quarterbacks to extensive lengths in order for them to maximize every snap and situation in a game.
Verduzco’s library is one of his best resources, which means the quarterback room sometimes sounds like a college lecture hall.
“I’ve always enjoyed Friedrich Nietzsche because of his emphasis on self-reliance and responsibility and that sort of stuff. So I’ve used him,” he says. “I’ve used Machiavelli and all kinds of other cats to try to get our guys to understand what the hell they need to do.”
When he says he’s used other cats to try and get his point across, he’s not kidding. Mention Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule from his bestseller “Outliers”, and that prompts another trek down the rabbit hole.
“Yeah, there’s something to that and leads into another discussion,” he says. “To get to the autonomous stage of learning — you don’t tell your heart to beat — we get to a point where we’ve done X, Y, Z skill enough where we can do it without thinking about it. It’s a beautiful thing.
“Let’s say there’s a saber-toothed cat chasing some frickin’ caveman — even though they didn’t exist at the same time — and the caveman’s on a bike. And he’s got to get away from the saber-toothed cat. Well, he’s not thinking about riding the bike. He’s thinking about the strategy by which he can escape from this saber-toothed cat. Well, it’s the same thing for us as quarterbacks. If we’re thinking about our skill, we’re done. We can’t see anything.”
Verduzco’s optimum mindset of a quarterback on Saturdays?
“It’s like Picasso; Picasso knew all the rules of painting, but he broke ’em,” he says. In other words, they need to know what they’re doing but also must have the ability to improvise on any snap.
Then he begins paraphrasing from Nietzsche’s book “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”. “The camel is a beast of a burden. Put all the weight on him, right? How much weight can that camel bear is going to determine the strength of the lion that’s bound to kill the dragon with a thousand scale of thou-shalts on him. All we’re trying to do is get him to go play sandlot football with specialized language. Let’s just go play.”
The camel in the metaphor is the quarterback, and at some point, he must transcend those rules.
The roots of Verduzco’s system are in psychologist Benjamin Bloom’s three domains of learning — the cognitive (knowledge-based), the affective (emotion-based) and the psychomotor (action-based). Once Verduzco finished his Master’s thesis, he added a fourth domain — the physical.
“After I wrote the thesis, I was still kind of digesting all this stuff, because the thesis was just getting this stuff out of me — it was like a benign tumor that I just had to get out of my body,” he says. “Once it’s written, I’m still thinking about these sorts of things where you separate the psychomotor domain — the psycho aspect, there’s the motor learning control behavior, and the motor part is the biomechanics. So that becomes two different chapters. But then along the way, I was always thinking about, ‘Where in the hell do our drills go?’ ”
Through discussions with one of his professors at San Jose State, Verduzco pegged the physical domain as the realm where the quarterbacks do all of their work with the strength coach as well as the drill work designed to improve translational rotational power, and their reads and keys.
Verduzco tests the quarterbacks twice a year, once in fall camp, the other time around the end of May. There are eight sections to the 722-question test, drawn from his own instruction and the evaluations of Huskers strength coach Zach Duval. Verduzco says it takes about three hours to complete. He gives his quarterbacks four individual grades tallied in each of the four domains. He’s never had a starter who scored below average (a grade under 81 percent), he says.
“It’s hard to play the position when you’re kind of guessing and don’t know what you’re doing.”
Verduzco is asked, if his quarterbacks just did all of the drills, could they learn and be able to do what he’s asking of them without understanding the theories behind them or knowing what the words cognitive or affective mean?
“God that’s a fascinating question,” he says. “I don’t know. My gut would be saying yes, but the drills that we’ve used have been developed because of that combination of the biomechanics, research in motor learning.
“I don’t go into the weeds that deep particularly when we’re out there going through the drill work. But I want them to understand where this crazy shit came from. I want them to understand why they were developed in the way that they were and that they come from the science of motor learning and biomechanics together.”
Martinez, who has the maturity of a 30-year-old, concedes there is an adjustment period to Verduzco’s style. This isn’t like the quirks of Mike Leach, who knows a little about virtually everything and may drift into any one of a thousand different directions. This is more like the deepest dive about a subject in ways a young quarterback would never fathom.
“When I first got here, it’s a lot to take in — the verbiage, the way he goes about things — but the longer you spend time with him, the more you see there’s a process,” Martinez says. “There’s a reason for everything we do. Everything is applicable. Everything he does and teaches, I can use in games, so I trust it 100 percent even if sometimes may not make sense at first, I have faith in him.
“It’s a lot, no question. But I love it, and you get that sense when you first meet him that he hasn’t changed. He’s genuine to the core. He’s not putting on a show, and that’s something I appreciate about him the most. When he recruited me to right now, the way he treats me, it’s always been the same.”
To Martinez, the most interesting aspects of Verduzco are that he is a terrific guitar player and an amazing cook.
Milton says Verduzco is like another father to him. “His knowledge of the game is unlike anybody I’ve been around. He told me when football’s done that I could be a grad assistant for him, which was a big part of me coming to UCF and wanting to get into coaching. He’s as smart a QB coach as I’ve ever had.”
Verduzco grew up in Pittsburg, California, a rugged old fishing and steel town about 30 miles northeast of Oakland. “We didn’t have a pot to piss in,” he says. “We weren’t poor, my mom would say we were financially distressed.”
He was born the second to last of 10 children. One of his older brothers was diagnosed with schizophrenia at 18 right before his oldest brother, Chuck — a former quarterback at the University of Pacific-turned college coach — was killed in a car crash. Chuck was 25. Mario was eight at the time.
“He passed away in May, right before Mother’s Day,” Verduzco says. “I was born in May. And I could never figure out why I never had a birthday party or why she never came to my football games.”
Verduzco said it didn’t dawn on him until he got older that it would be too painful for his mom, who taught him how to throw a football back when he was six or seven years old. Verduzco’s parents divorced when he was in the eighth grade. He said his father, who passed away in the 1970s, was physically abusive to the family.
“I never learned anything from my dad, aside from how not to treat your family,” he says. “My mom was a frickin’ saint. She was by herself a lot of the time. How she didn’t go bonkers I don’t know, but she never flinched.”
Sports and music were Verduzco’s passions. He began playing the trumpet in the second grade and learned other instruments as he got older. He loved music for much the same reason he was drawn to football.
“There’s nothing like being on stage and you’re playing a Beethoven symphony, and there’s no electronics or anything and you can feel the vibrations and violins and it’s just right though your frickin’ bones,” he says. “Man, that’s awesome, but I really enjoyed being on the field. The interesting thing about football is it’s a lot like music. All the parts come together and they have to at the precise time (to make a play work).”
The former junior college quarterback had been studying music at UC Santa Cruz while working as a football coach at a local high school when Bill Walsh was hired as Stanford’s head coach in 1977. Verduzco and some of his coaching buddies became regulars at Walsh’s practices in Palo Alto.
“It was hard not to feel his presence,” Verduzco says. “We’d go out to practice just to listen to him talk.”
A comment Walsh made really resonated with him. It was that the key to coaching was to become a master technician at the position you coach. “Well,” he says. “I took it to friggin’ heart.”
It was the inspiration of Walsh that led Verduzco to decide he was going to get his undergraduate degree in human performance and then go for a Master’s in biomechanics at San Jose State while he worked as a graduate assistant under Terry Shea, a Walsh protégé. One of the courses Verduzco took for his Master’s was in motor learning. Verduzco talks about how fortunate he was that the professor used the book by Schmidt that sits on his shelf now.
“It’s about (Schmidt’s) theory with regards to the acquisition of open environment skills,” he says. “This was the cat who said there has got to be a best practice for how to teach it. I had to extrapolate information and apply it specifically to the quarterback position.”
Verduzco was intrigued by incorporating biomechanics into his quarterback coaching because, he says, there was no model for it. “And, even to this day. There really isn’t anything.”
Verduzco’s Master’s thesis at San Jose State was titled, “The biomechanics of the quarterback position: a kinematic analysis and integrative approach”. It’s now part of a book project that he’s been fine-tuning for three decades running and hopes to publish in the next year or so. In it, he writes, “Without an understanding of motor learning, any biomechanical technique that you wish to teach will remain doomed to the written page.”
He was coaching at DeAnza College, a junior college 13 miles from Stanford, after Walsh retired from coaching the Cardinal in 1994. Walsh hosted a quarterback camp there for a month. Verduzco got to be a fly on the wall as he watched the Hall of Fame coach teach drills and talk about stance, follow through and other minute details of playing quarterback.
“What an education that was,” Verduzco says. He also noticed that much of what Walsh taught overlapped with Schmidt’s theories. “It was just amazing.”
Frost’s and Verduzco’s relationship is one of respect, admiration and trust.
A quarter-century later, Verduzco’s name — and methods — are starting to generating buzz in football circles. Verduzco has spent most of his career coaching at smaller football programs far from the national spotlight. He was 59 when Frost hired him at UCF and in his early 60s when he made it into Power 5 football. He says he lamented that he might not get his chance to work on a bigger stage, evoking the Sanskrit term “satchitananda,” or understanding your true bliss. “As Nietzsche once said, ‘The worst possible feeling you could have in your life is the spirit of resentment.’ You know, ‘Why aren’t I there?’
“I do know my bliss, that which melts my butter — my life’s work. I latched on to that, and in so doing, it’s as if the world has opened itself to me, blessing me with (wife) Cate and (son) Charles, our QBs, and most certainly with Coach Frost. He was awesome to be around at Northern Iowa. He was the same guy that he is now. He’d come over to the house. I’d play guitar and make a bunch of Italian food, drink wine and we’d have a blast. He’s not a micromanager. He lets you do your work. I feel very fortunate to be here.”
Verduzco cringes at the word guru and the connotations that come with it in the quarterback space, particularly the idea that they can get a quarterback to attain certain levels of skill but that the quarterback must go back to them to get to another level and go back again for another level. “They really don’t necessarily give you the whole ball of wax. So you continually have to rely on them,” he says.
How quarterbacks learn and improve does not need to be a mystery. It’s much more a science, and that is the Verduzco method.
“The way I coach our guys that play for us, is that I want to give you the principles by which you can go ahead and coach yourself. I want to get to the point where that guy doesn’t need me. I want to give them the principles now, as I see it.
“The science is readily available and has been so for quite a long time. All that was required was to research the appropriate academic disciplines related to each of the four domains of learning, extrapolate said research and apply it to the position.”
Martinez, Milton and many before them have seen the benefits of that applied science. And Frost has too, briefly as a subject and for years as a colleague.
“He’s really good at taking what I want and making it even better,” Frost says. “Some of our reads, some of our decisions, some of the way that he phrases things and categorizes things for the quarterbacks is beyond what I even tell him. He gets the guys to do the things that we need ’em to do within the offense, and to be honest, he does it in a better way than I would do it.”
(Photos: Nati Harnik / Associated Press)
https://theathletic.com/1046003/201...-verduzco-quarterbacks-coach-adrian-martinez/
The scientific method of Mario Verduzco, Nebraska quarterbacks coach
By Bruce Feldman Jul 2, 2019
LINCOLN, Neb. — On one side of the glass is the weight room where Nebraska football players grunt and clang their way through their workouts.
On the other, opera music plays from desktop computer speakers, the majestic voices of Andrea Bocelli and Luciano Pavarotti — Pava-row-tee, as the office’s occupant says — a constant soundtrack.
Beside the glass overlooking the weight room, a dresser showcases three dozen books, neatly positioned around a jar of Tootsie Pops. This is no typical football library, aside from the half-dozen books by or about Bill Walsh. The rest of the collection seemingly has nothing to do with the sport. There are multiple works by Friedrich Nietzsche, books on religion, on biomechanics and on focus. One book is titled, “Motor Control and Learning”, written by Richard A. Schmidt, a former nationally ranked college gymnast-turned UCLA scientist.
This is the office of Mario Verduzco, the second-year quarterbacks coach at Nebraska. He is 63, has thick, gray, feathered hair and wears round-framed glasses much like the ones favored by John Lennon. Verduzco is prone to slipping off his shoes while discussing the throwing motion and rattling off philosophical quotes and physics formulas. He cites Schmidt’s name and his work while talking about the intricacies of the quarterback position to the point where one wonders if the late UCLA professor should be considered one of the godfathers of quarterback coaching.
Verduzco brings up the aspect of Schmidt’s theory on the specificity of skill, which gets into why he thinks there has been a lot of confusion in the quarterback coaching space. “Even if two skills are quite similar — for example, throwing a baseball and throwing a football correlate damn nearly to zero,” Verduzco says. “That’s not me speaking. That’s the research. You want to screw up a guy’s tennis stroke, have him go play racquetball. And vice versa.”
The playing environment for a quarterback is unlike anything else in sports, he explains.
“Pitchers are on a mound,” he says. “We’re not on a mound. They operate in an absolutely closed environment. The position that I coach is the most open environment skill in all sport. Golf and bowling are closed environment sports. Basketball is a semi-open, closed environment sport, meaning they can do all sorts of stuff but they can’t jack you in the jaw, and the basket is not gonna move. In hockey, they can check you, but the goal’s not gonna move. We’ve got to drop back, eyeballs downfield, throw the ball to a moving target, and those targets are being guarded. All while four or five maniacs are trying to rip your balls off your body.”
While all of that all makes sense, how, exactly, does that factor into coaching the position? Questions beget questions, which only seem to get Verduzco more invested.
“This is really, really, really fascinating stuff,” he says gleefully. “I mean, it’s ****in’ wild now.
“How long do we have to talk about this stuff?”
Verduzco helped groom his nephew Jason Verduzco, a 5-9, 175-pounder who went on to earn All-Big Ten honors twice at Illinois. In 14 seasons at Northern Iowa, Verduzco produced one standout quarterback after the next. His protégé Eric Sanders still holds the FCS record for highest completion percentage in a season and in a college career.
Scott Frost worked as an assistant coach at Northern Iowa in 2007 and 2008, saw Verduzco’s work with QBs up close and became a believer. So much so that when Frost — a former QB himself who once led the Cornhuskers to a national title — got promoted to become Oregon’s quarterback coach and offensive coordinator in 2013, he flew Verduzco out to Eugene.
“I took over after Marcus (Mariota)’s sophomore year and I didn’t want to mess him up,” Frost says, sitting in his own office three doors down the hall from Verduzco. “Mario was the best (quarterback coach) I’ve ever been around. I figured the best way I could learn was to have him put me through all his stuff. So he and I went out there and I was the quarterback.
“For two days I did everything, and to be honest with you, I was pissed because at the end of those two days I threw better than I’d ever thrown in my entire life. It was night and day after two days. I had better balance, better accuracy, and better velocity. And I was 38 years old at the time.”
Verduzco had Frost throwing with a softball to help remedy his mechanics. He had Frost doing the same drills as all of his quarterbacks at Northern Iowa.
“I figured I had to find a way to dumb down all the information so that I can communicate it,” Frost says. “But the great thing about the way he teaches is they hear this stuff over and over and over and over to the point that it makes sense and it does relate.”
In 2016 when Frost was named the new head coach at UCF, he hired Verduzco as quarterbacks coach. Verduzco’s first protégé with the Knights was a 5-11, 160-pounder from Hawaii with only three FBS scholarship offers named McKenzie Milton. He finished eighth in Heisman Trophy voting after just two seasons in the system. Milton also helped turn around a program that had gone 0-12 the year before Frost and Co. arrived. They went 13-0 in their second season together with Milton compiling a 37-9 TD-INT ratio and completing 67 percent of his passes.
Verduzco’s latest gem is Nebraska sophomore Adrian Martinez, a freshman All-American last season. The Fresno, Calif., native completed 65 percent of his passes — the second-highest single-season total in Nebraska history — and rushed for 629 yards in 2018.
Verduzco made some subtle tweaks with Martinez, who had missed his senior season of high school with a shoulder injury. When Martinez arrived in Lincoln as an early enrollee in 2018, Frost asked Verduzco if the young QB would be able to get more juice on the ball.
“Don’t worry about it,” Verduzco told him. “We’ll get it taken care of.”
Verduzco earned the trust of Frost (foreground) one evidence-based step at a time.
Verduzco turned to the Butt Drill, which asks the quarterback to throw a football from the seat of his pants, forcing the passer to focus from his shoulder to his hand. “We’re isolating the musculature that throws the football, therefore strengthening it, and we’re gonna increase the flexibility of the shoulder joint — he doesn’t have to worry about hip rotation,” Verduzco says of the merits of the drill. “All he’s worried about it that piece of the puzzle, and we’re rippin’ it.”
The issue Verduzco identified was one of rhythm, as Martinez was bringing the ball back at a slower tempo than when it was going forward. The drill can help solve that. “They’ll bring the ball back slowly — BOOM — then let it rip,” he says. “It’s to get them to understand it’s like a rubber band. Expand and contract. Expand and contract. Cha-Ching! Cha-Ching! Cha-Ching! Once the new program took over, he never looked back.”
Sure enough, during last year’s preseason camp, Frost was wowed by the velocity on Martinez’s throws.
Frost looked at Verduzco and told him, “I’ll never question you again.”
One of the first sentences in Verduzco’s QB manual that he gives to his players reads, “Below is a list of the consequences of a life without science; statements that were once held as truths and in some cases they still are!!!” Among them are a dozen myths, ranging from eating carrots can improve your eyesight to you should starve a fever and feed a cold to the last one, muscle memory exists. Each item has the word FALSE in all caps written next to it.
The manual is crammed with theories, mantras and explanations. On the topic of “ground reaction force” and its importance to the throwing motion, stance and initiation of motion, Verduzco writes, “We want our whole back foot flat on the ground, the phrase is a flat platform. We do NOT want to initiate our motion pushing off our back right toe. We can’t launch a missile from a rowboat. A flat right foot platform increases the ground reaction force.”
Verduzco also goes into great detail about what he believes is one of the bigger misnomers in quarterback coaching: “Blocked trials will improve the performance for an isolated skill but will have a detrimental impact on learning the array of requisite skills. Random Variable Practice will have a positive impact on both learning and performance. This fact must be tempered with the stage of learning.”
Verduzco’s adherence to Schmidt’s theory about random variable practice shows when he is on the practice field. When he has his QBs doing 12 reps, it can be a mix of frontside curl, a backside hitch, a backside post, but all are in variable random order to be more in line with how a quarterback has to operate within the game.
He suspects few other quarterback coaches in college football, if any, are incorporating random variable practice to train their QBs unless they’ve heard him speak in a lecture or they understand the notion of Schmidt’s Scheme theory. “It’s really simple,” he says, adding that the first time quarterbacks get into this practice mode, it “shocks their brain”, and the results, initially, are pretty ugly.
Verduzco’s methods incorporate a lot of throwing at practice, his quarterbacks say. He has all kinds of throws and drills for them — rapid-fire, progressives and regressives; T-drills; zero-, 45- and 90-degree, 3 o’clock and 9 o’clock throws.
Another piece of the puzzle for a quarterback, from the psychological perspective, is kinesthetic awareness. “Then, once he’s aware of it, we’re golden,” Verduzco says, employing a method he’s taken from Schmidt of exaggerating the error in both directions.
“The learner doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing,” Verduzco says. “He has no concept, as Schmidt would say. He has no schema for rightness and wrongness until you tell him.
“So the idea is to make him aware and create a schema in his brain for rightness, and wrongness.”
How quickly each quarterback may process the information will vary but eventually, Verduzco believes, they’ll all get it. In Martinez’s case, the change happened fast. His coach’s grade on his stroke went from “good” to “excellent” before he ever suited up for a game.
Sanders, Verduzco’s record-setting QB at Northern Iowa, came to school as a walk-on with, by his own admission, a weak arm. One of the things that really helped, Sanders says, was Verduzco’s drills using a heavy football, one that is about two or three times the weight of a game ball.
“He was awesome,” says Sanders, now a high school coach in Bradenton, Fla., producing Division I QBs thanks in large part to the Verduzco way. “You’re learning something new every day.”
Verduzco drills and tests his quarterbacks to extensive lengths in order for them to maximize every snap and situation in a game.
Verduzco’s library is one of his best resources, which means the quarterback room sometimes sounds like a college lecture hall.
“I’ve always enjoyed Friedrich Nietzsche because of his emphasis on self-reliance and responsibility and that sort of stuff. So I’ve used him,” he says. “I’ve used Machiavelli and all kinds of other cats to try to get our guys to understand what the hell they need to do.”
When he says he’s used other cats to try and get his point across, he’s not kidding. Mention Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule from his bestseller “Outliers”, and that prompts another trek down the rabbit hole.
“Yeah, there’s something to that and leads into another discussion,” he says. “To get to the autonomous stage of learning — you don’t tell your heart to beat — we get to a point where we’ve done X, Y, Z skill enough where we can do it without thinking about it. It’s a beautiful thing.
“Let’s say there’s a saber-toothed cat chasing some frickin’ caveman — even though they didn’t exist at the same time — and the caveman’s on a bike. And he’s got to get away from the saber-toothed cat. Well, he’s not thinking about riding the bike. He’s thinking about the strategy by which he can escape from this saber-toothed cat. Well, it’s the same thing for us as quarterbacks. If we’re thinking about our skill, we’re done. We can’t see anything.”
Verduzco’s optimum mindset of a quarterback on Saturdays?
“It’s like Picasso; Picasso knew all the rules of painting, but he broke ’em,” he says. In other words, they need to know what they’re doing but also must have the ability to improvise on any snap.
Then he begins paraphrasing from Nietzsche’s book “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”. “The camel is a beast of a burden. Put all the weight on him, right? How much weight can that camel bear is going to determine the strength of the lion that’s bound to kill the dragon with a thousand scale of thou-shalts on him. All we’re trying to do is get him to go play sandlot football with specialized language. Let’s just go play.”
The camel in the metaphor is the quarterback, and at some point, he must transcend those rules.
The roots of Verduzco’s system are in psychologist Benjamin Bloom’s three domains of learning — the cognitive (knowledge-based), the affective (emotion-based) and the psychomotor (action-based). Once Verduzco finished his Master’s thesis, he added a fourth domain — the physical.
“After I wrote the thesis, I was still kind of digesting all this stuff, because the thesis was just getting this stuff out of me — it was like a benign tumor that I just had to get out of my body,” he says. “Once it’s written, I’m still thinking about these sorts of things where you separate the psychomotor domain — the psycho aspect, there’s the motor learning control behavior, and the motor part is the biomechanics. So that becomes two different chapters. But then along the way, I was always thinking about, ‘Where in the hell do our drills go?’ ”
Through discussions with one of his professors at San Jose State, Verduzco pegged the physical domain as the realm where the quarterbacks do all of their work with the strength coach as well as the drill work designed to improve translational rotational power, and their reads and keys.
Verduzco tests the quarterbacks twice a year, once in fall camp, the other time around the end of May. There are eight sections to the 722-question test, drawn from his own instruction and the evaluations of Huskers strength coach Zach Duval. Verduzco says it takes about three hours to complete. He gives his quarterbacks four individual grades tallied in each of the four domains. He’s never had a starter who scored below average (a grade under 81 percent), he says.
“It’s hard to play the position when you’re kind of guessing and don’t know what you’re doing.”
Verduzco is asked, if his quarterbacks just did all of the drills, could they learn and be able to do what he’s asking of them without understanding the theories behind them or knowing what the words cognitive or affective mean?
“God that’s a fascinating question,” he says. “I don’t know. My gut would be saying yes, but the drills that we’ve used have been developed because of that combination of the biomechanics, research in motor learning.
“I don’t go into the weeds that deep particularly when we’re out there going through the drill work. But I want them to understand where this crazy shit came from. I want them to understand why they were developed in the way that they were and that they come from the science of motor learning and biomechanics together.”
Martinez, who has the maturity of a 30-year-old, concedes there is an adjustment period to Verduzco’s style. This isn’t like the quirks of Mike Leach, who knows a little about virtually everything and may drift into any one of a thousand different directions. This is more like the deepest dive about a subject in ways a young quarterback would never fathom.
“When I first got here, it’s a lot to take in — the verbiage, the way he goes about things — but the longer you spend time with him, the more you see there’s a process,” Martinez says. “There’s a reason for everything we do. Everything is applicable. Everything he does and teaches, I can use in games, so I trust it 100 percent even if sometimes may not make sense at first, I have faith in him.
“It’s a lot, no question. But I love it, and you get that sense when you first meet him that he hasn’t changed. He’s genuine to the core. He’s not putting on a show, and that’s something I appreciate about him the most. When he recruited me to right now, the way he treats me, it’s always been the same.”
To Martinez, the most interesting aspects of Verduzco are that he is a terrific guitar player and an amazing cook.
Milton says Verduzco is like another father to him. “His knowledge of the game is unlike anybody I’ve been around. He told me when football’s done that I could be a grad assistant for him, which was a big part of me coming to UCF and wanting to get into coaching. He’s as smart a QB coach as I’ve ever had.”
Verduzco grew up in Pittsburg, California, a rugged old fishing and steel town about 30 miles northeast of Oakland. “We didn’t have a pot to piss in,” he says. “We weren’t poor, my mom would say we were financially distressed.”
He was born the second to last of 10 children. One of his older brothers was diagnosed with schizophrenia at 18 right before his oldest brother, Chuck — a former quarterback at the University of Pacific-turned college coach — was killed in a car crash. Chuck was 25. Mario was eight at the time.
“He passed away in May, right before Mother’s Day,” Verduzco says. “I was born in May. And I could never figure out why I never had a birthday party or why she never came to my football games.”
Verduzco said it didn’t dawn on him until he got older that it would be too painful for his mom, who taught him how to throw a football back when he was six or seven years old. Verduzco’s parents divorced when he was in the eighth grade. He said his father, who passed away in the 1970s, was physically abusive to the family.
“I never learned anything from my dad, aside from how not to treat your family,” he says. “My mom was a frickin’ saint. She was by herself a lot of the time. How she didn’t go bonkers I don’t know, but she never flinched.”
Sports and music were Verduzco’s passions. He began playing the trumpet in the second grade and learned other instruments as he got older. He loved music for much the same reason he was drawn to football.
“There’s nothing like being on stage and you’re playing a Beethoven symphony, and there’s no electronics or anything and you can feel the vibrations and violins and it’s just right though your frickin’ bones,” he says. “Man, that’s awesome, but I really enjoyed being on the field. The interesting thing about football is it’s a lot like music. All the parts come together and they have to at the precise time (to make a play work).”
The former junior college quarterback had been studying music at UC Santa Cruz while working as a football coach at a local high school when Bill Walsh was hired as Stanford’s head coach in 1977. Verduzco and some of his coaching buddies became regulars at Walsh’s practices in Palo Alto.
“It was hard not to feel his presence,” Verduzco says. “We’d go out to practice just to listen to him talk.”
A comment Walsh made really resonated with him. It was that the key to coaching was to become a master technician at the position you coach. “Well,” he says. “I took it to friggin’ heart.”
It was the inspiration of Walsh that led Verduzco to decide he was going to get his undergraduate degree in human performance and then go for a Master’s in biomechanics at San Jose State while he worked as a graduate assistant under Terry Shea, a Walsh protégé. One of the courses Verduzco took for his Master’s was in motor learning. Verduzco talks about how fortunate he was that the professor used the book by Schmidt that sits on his shelf now.
“It’s about (Schmidt’s) theory with regards to the acquisition of open environment skills,” he says. “This was the cat who said there has got to be a best practice for how to teach it. I had to extrapolate information and apply it specifically to the quarterback position.”
Verduzco was intrigued by incorporating biomechanics into his quarterback coaching because, he says, there was no model for it. “And, even to this day. There really isn’t anything.”
Verduzco’s Master’s thesis at San Jose State was titled, “The biomechanics of the quarterback position: a kinematic analysis and integrative approach”. It’s now part of a book project that he’s been fine-tuning for three decades running and hopes to publish in the next year or so. In it, he writes, “Without an understanding of motor learning, any biomechanical technique that you wish to teach will remain doomed to the written page.”
He was coaching at DeAnza College, a junior college 13 miles from Stanford, after Walsh retired from coaching the Cardinal in 1994. Walsh hosted a quarterback camp there for a month. Verduzco got to be a fly on the wall as he watched the Hall of Fame coach teach drills and talk about stance, follow through and other minute details of playing quarterback.
“What an education that was,” Verduzco says. He also noticed that much of what Walsh taught overlapped with Schmidt’s theories. “It was just amazing.”
Frost’s and Verduzco’s relationship is one of respect, admiration and trust.
A quarter-century later, Verduzco’s name — and methods — are starting to generating buzz in football circles. Verduzco has spent most of his career coaching at smaller football programs far from the national spotlight. He was 59 when Frost hired him at UCF and in his early 60s when he made it into Power 5 football. He says he lamented that he might not get his chance to work on a bigger stage, evoking the Sanskrit term “satchitananda,” or understanding your true bliss. “As Nietzsche once said, ‘The worst possible feeling you could have in your life is the spirit of resentment.’ You know, ‘Why aren’t I there?’
“I do know my bliss, that which melts my butter — my life’s work. I latched on to that, and in so doing, it’s as if the world has opened itself to me, blessing me with (wife) Cate and (son) Charles, our QBs, and most certainly with Coach Frost. He was awesome to be around at Northern Iowa. He was the same guy that he is now. He’d come over to the house. I’d play guitar and make a bunch of Italian food, drink wine and we’d have a blast. He’s not a micromanager. He lets you do your work. I feel very fortunate to be here.”
Verduzco cringes at the word guru and the connotations that come with it in the quarterback space, particularly the idea that they can get a quarterback to attain certain levels of skill but that the quarterback must go back to them to get to another level and go back again for another level. “They really don’t necessarily give you the whole ball of wax. So you continually have to rely on them,” he says.
How quarterbacks learn and improve does not need to be a mystery. It’s much more a science, and that is the Verduzco method.
“The way I coach our guys that play for us, is that I want to give you the principles by which you can go ahead and coach yourself. I want to get to the point where that guy doesn’t need me. I want to give them the principles now, as I see it.
“The science is readily available and has been so for quite a long time. All that was required was to research the appropriate academic disciplines related to each of the four domains of learning, extrapolate said research and apply it to the position.”
Martinez, Milton and many before them have seen the benefits of that applied science. And Frost has too, briefly as a subject and for years as a colleague.
“He’s really good at taking what I want and making it even better,” Frost says. “Some of our reads, some of our decisions, some of the way that he phrases things and categorizes things for the quarterbacks is beyond what I even tell him. He gets the guys to do the things that we need ’em to do within the offense, and to be honest, he does it in a better way than I would do it.”
(Photos: Nati Harnik / Associated Press)
