1-on-1 with DP – 93.7 The Ticket KNTK - January 5th: 10am - Barry Thompson (Fairfax Football Academy Coach)

Episode Date: January 5, 2022

Feelings about Logan SmothersMark WhippleKeeping it simple for QB'sAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It's time to go one-on-one with D.P. Coming at you live from the Coppull Chevrolet GMC Studios. Here is your host, Derek Pearson, presented by Beatrice Bakery, on 937 The Ticket and the Ticketfm.com. The autumn wind is a pirate, blustering in from sea with a rollicking song he sweeps along, Swaggering boisterously. His face is weather-beaten.

He wears a hooded sash with a silver hat about his head and a bristling black mustache. He growls as he storms the country, a villain big and bold. And the trees all shake and quiver and quake as he robs them of their gold. The autumn wind is a raider

pillaging just for fun. He'll knock you round and upside down and laugh when he's conquered and won. Give it to me. Give it to me. Let's bring him in. Let's bring him in. Let's bring him in. You know that means one thing.

We have the QB Cup, John. Let's bring in Barry Thompson, Fairfax Football Academy. B.T., what's happening, man? Oh, man, it's all good. I'm thinking. quarterback, a guy getting ready for the draft, and a sophomore American, it couldn't be a better day. Yeah, there's a lot of QB development happening out there, and you have your hands on.

You get to watch it up close. Jay Foreman and I were talking in the previous show about the importance of coaches to players because the coach has to identify what type player he has. We have the guy who will do anything and everything, the guy who, the get-by guy, right? We have the guy who doesn't believe you and the vision you have for him. And the guy who has a vision for himself that doesn't match the work. So you're working this week with that first group, with guys who no matter what is required will put in the work. Right. Full in.

Right. So I'll ask this of you as a coach. When you're working with individuals, the most important thing has to be, A, their energy, B, their IQ, right? C, their approach. And then, D, their final mission, like what they're trying to accomplish from all of it.

How do you rank those? Which one's the most important of those? Well, speaking from a strictly from a training standpoint, right? You know, that's how I make my living. For me, it's really basic. I just need to see that whoever I'm working with is getting better between the time that we work together. That little thing there tells me all those ABCDs and these, right? I don't need to know, you know, what the talent level was when they start.

I just, and I explain it to him. I said, your responsibility when you come to me is to get better by the next time I see you, that is by working on things that we work on. A lot of times I'll have them, you know, after take out their phone, take little notes and ask them to recall what things that we talk about a lot. And I said, okay, those are the things you need to work on. And it's only happened to me, fortunately, I think about three times in about eight years, where someone was coming back to me, and I wasn't quite,

sure that they had gotten better, you know, and one of them is really memorable. You'll appreciate this. This kid, he would come and he would remember everything that we just did. Sometimes the guys had, you know, didn't get a little cue him, but he would remember everything. But I couldn't quite tell had he been working on things, and normally I could. So I stopped and I asked him. I said, did you do anything between last time I saw you? said no. And I remember

I was right at the nearby high school. We were walking to begin to go work out in the summer day. And I stopped him when he said that. And I said, what did you do in this last week? And he started to tell me of all things he went fishing. And I took

the conversation right there. And I said, you know, how much you like fishing? And he explained to me it was a great passion of his. And one day he hoped to be a pro-fisherman. And we stopped right there. And we turned that whole conversation around, and we started talking about how there's schools that give scholarships for fishing. And then it became like a football recruiting talk, except we were talking about fishing.

So I think, and what I do, it's real important to understand are they serious about what they're doing. And from a coaching standpoint, you know, that's what you want. You want people who care about what it is they're doing. or they care about the team or they care about football. As long as you have that, you can do a lot with individuals. But when you don't have that, whether it's ABCD or A, right, it's some iteration of I don't care that much, right? And that's a warning sign.

And it's tough to get around. Here in Nebraska, and there's several different things going on in the quarterback talk tank, right, of being able, one, you lose a record-breaking. record-setting quarterback and Adrian Martinez. You have Logan Smothers here who flashed in the last game, which was his only opportunity to really flash. You've got young Torres that's coming in as a true freshman. And then you've got the transfer portal,

which is just a turnstile door with folks coming in, looking in the window and walking back out again. you, if it's your program or you're running the Nebraska program, one, how comfortable are you with Logan's mothers? Well, I like Logan. You know, I saw his hospital tape. Again, with quarterback, I think it's extremely important that you're asking them to do things that they're really good at.

It sounds really simple, but I think that's really important. So the big question is, isn't who's the quarterback or who's in the portal. The big question is, is Coach Whipple, you know, what is he, what is he looking for and what is he going to ask those quarterback to do? Then once he asks them to do it, then the alpha has to emerge. There's got to be somebody who devours that information and devours the work. Kenny Pickett didn't happen by accident. Kenny was an elite 11 kid. Kenny, you know, through social media, I know the guy that he works with,

and you could see Kenny constantly working on the small parts of his game. And so the question is, is once Coach Whipple says, hey, this is what we're doing, this is running, who steps up and devours that information? And who begins to, like I said in the training thing, who makes it their mission to get better each time that they're taking the feeler when they wake up. That's the quarterback that you want. And oftentimes, if people really think about it, it isn't the 6'4-2-20-pound guy. Right?

It can be, but it's not. You know, you look across the league, and there are a lot of quarterbacks that are under 6'2, right? So what's the difference? It's not physical ability. it is it is that person's willingness and desire to wake up every day and to be better than when they you know when they lay down to be better at the end of the day than they work and you know there just aren't that many human beings out there like that especially at that level so names and ability and this and that I'm just looking for the guy that's going to going to bite on what coach whiffles putting down. Do we know what Whipple is going to want to do, like based on all the places he's been, he's been in different places, run different systems? What's core?

What's the most important thing for him coming into Scott Frost program? Well, when a guy's had that much success all over, you know, and it's at different levels. So from the outside, never having met him, there's a couple of things that you can assess. about him is, one, whatever he's teaching, it's relatively simple. And it's clear and it's purposeful because you look at from the FCS level to the pro level, it's all been effective. So he has a way of simplifying things and making it clear and repeatable for quarterbacks. That's something that I think you can take from the outside.

Two, he's got to be a pretty good teacher or he's a real good eliminator of guys that won't help him. Right? He's one of the other. He's a great teacher or he just eliminates guys that aren't going to help them. You know what I mean? And at the college level, you know, coaches won't say that very much, but that's one of their big missions when they come in. Get rid of guys who can't help them win. Right?

So it's one of the other. But I do know that what he's teaching at its core, it's got to be simple and it's clear. It's not a thousand-page playbook. It's not. The other thing about him having success is that he's able to adapt what he has or what he wants to do to the abilities of the quarterback he's working with. Because although he's had all the success, it's not like he's had 12 draft things. Right? So those are guys with different abilities, and he found a way to kind of help them be effective.

So those are the two things I know from the outside. But even though that sounds great, the facts still remain. Somebody's got to get clear and somebody's got to get it really consistent at doing it and execute. We're talking to Barry Thompson, QB Coach Fairfax Football Academy. And Barry, you've been in spaces where you had to go in and get high-level players to learn new verbiage, learn new combinations, et cetera, on a short plank. Like it had to be done. You'd get them on Thursday.

And by Saturday, they had to be functioning as a group under new language and new route combinations. So I get frustrated when I hear, well, we haven't had time to develop receivers or we haven't had time to develop quarterbacks. No, we can get the base level fully functional offenses put together in a matter. matter of hours. Why is it that a program would have the problem in developing or getting quarterbacks or skill position players on the field and under the same language and with full understanding after 18 months, two years? It's some combination of the opposite of what I just said. It's not clear. It's not consistent. And I don't mean that's purposeful. You know,

Sometimes guys, and all coaches know that they should keep it simple. Every coach will tell you that. They know that. They know keep it simple, you know, get the players to play fast. We don't want them to think. We want them to wreck. Every coach knows that. But then what happens, I think, my observation is that, and being simple, you also want to be complete.

And that's where I think things go off the rails is that somebody's definition is complete. start to expand, expand, expand, expand, expand, expand, because they want to cover all these different situations. They just have a different way of kind of kind. And before they know it, right, you've got this very large toolbox of what was supposed to be simple. When you're able to keep it simple and be complete, right, then that's it. And I think the thing about simple and complete is that at some point, whatever you're doing has to allow room for the players to kind of take over.

It's at the platform that they can understand a structure that they can understand. And then at that point, the kids are really smart. And football players, good football players are really smart. And then they'll start to come and tell you things that they're seen on the field. And then there's where the kind of adjustments come in. But that central core, ideally is simple. It's malleable. It's adjustable.

but it's that. You know, we've talked a lot about my basketball coaching experience. And, you know, when we taught the reading rack, I don't know seven years ago, eight however many years ago it was, if you remember, it was taught in lay. And that it had in that system a way to test whether your players really understood the layer

before you moved on to next, which I thought was really cool. And you know that we had some very talented teams that couldn't get beyond layer, three. Right. Right. I mean, they're good players, but the players are telling you like this, this sudden, we don't, as a unit, we don't do this very well. And so you remember, we just stopped, even though there's a lot of sexy stuff that was beyond layer three, you know, and stuff that we knew that, you know, big boys do and all that kind of stuff. This group was constantly telling us,

no, no, we're going to live right here. And then they made it work. And I think on some level, when you talk to the very best coaches, you know, that's where they get to and how they get there. You know, they just do. They just do. As I say that example, I'm firing off three, four coaches in my head who that's how they operate. They just kind of understand what the essence is. They're clear and concise when they can teach it. They're consistent in reinforcing the rules of what they're doing.

and then they all, you know, there's time, and that allows these players to become, it allows the players to increase their IQ. And then there's a flexibility in there. Oh, yeah, yeah, we can do that without, you know, running off the rail. Yeah, there's a fine line between all of it. And Jay and I were trying to land on what great coaches do consistently

and what great players do consistency. consistently. And in programs such as Nebraska's where they currently stand, there are a lot of question marks. Like I say, you can tell where a program stands by the number of questions that you have about it, right? Full questions about it. So in removing questions like that, removing questions about what Whipple wants to do is going to try to do, him communicating at Scott Frost, he's got Logan's mother's in the building. He's got, he's got, Christian Harburg in the program. He's got Torres coming in.

How difficult is the task going to be for those three quarterbacks? Because it's now January, and you don't know where you stand, you don't know what you're going to be running. You don't know. There's no chance. People call this the off season. We call it the improvement season. Improvement season, right?

How much handcuffing is going on by not having this thing fully loaded and locked and saying, look, we're going to go with what we got, or we can continually wait for Shane Falco to run through the door. Yeah, yeah. So my advice to them is advice that you always give to people, and it's just life advice. You've got to focus on the things that you can control. Right?

So we can't control when this information is going to be delivered to me, how it's going to be delivered to me, who's going to come from the portal or not. But every one of them, if you sat them down and looked them in the eye, you say, do you need to get better? And the answer is yes. Then get up and go get better. Go get more athletic, improve your footwork, improve your mechanics, become more accurate. And hell, you know, even though you don't know what information you get, go study some NFL systems.

Go study, just grab a playbook off a script or something and challenge yourself. They're really not that different. You know, a half-man slide protection or a four-man, slide, you're three down from the mic, two down for the mic. You can call it whatever you want, 300, 200, you know, Louis, Ringo. It doesn't matter. It's still a three-man slide zone, right? You still have to understand if they're sending from four from one side where you've got

three, you know, how do you alert and take that up? It doesn't matter what you call it. Cast concepts, you know, there aren't that many out there. You know, you're going to run some version of Hank. You're going to run. You're going to run flat curl. You're going to run post over curl, double post. You're going to run some dig post combination.

You may run some air raid stuff, dig shallow. Call it what you want. Call it bingo cross. Call it dig cross. Call it 82, 72. If that doesn't matter, those are the patterns. How are you reading it? You know, how do you understand rotation of defenses?

You know, what are you looking at? Do you understand fronts as it relate to coverage? They can do all of that. the board of Coach Whipple, you know, giving them a playbook. And that's what I met. The guys that really want this, they go out at a completely different way. And that's why, especially in the NFL, and I judge Jake can probably confirm this. If you went into an NFL locker room and just saw the physical disparity in bodies and what bodies look like, it wouldn't make it, it wouldn't make any sense to you.

Right. It would make zero sense to you. But what you do know is that those guys are professionals and they approach their work in their daily thing a certain way. And it's the same thing at the quarterback position. We're all hung up on these metrics. And, you know, I've never been a college coach. So they're hung up on those metrics for a reason.

But the reality is when you look across the stand of college football, again, at that one position, you know, goes from 6-7 to 5'9. So, you know, what are we looking for? What are we asking somebody to do? Can they do it? You know, that at the end of the day, that's a really important stuff. And then once you, let me put another way. I talk to my guys this way.

You know, I've got guys that are, you know, like I said, I'm on the field in just a few minutes with a guy getting ready for the draft, a big 10 quarterback, and a guy is a sophomore in America. Okay? and they all know that when they first entered that quarterback room, there were four guys that were just like them. Bring tourists in. Bring somebody else in. They're all the same guys, type-wise, statistically, the achievement-wise. Okay. So then how are you, what's the difference? Right? You know, Tours is going to get up and lift weight. You know, Logan's going to get out and throw. Whoever they bring in does the same thing. What's the difference? How are you going to become the guy? Well, it's from the neck up. And I mean, literally the neck up from the time that your eyes open up, right? What are your decisions?

What are your choices? How are you managing your time? How are you going about this? Are you in there with the G.A.? Are you asking the defensive coordinator some questions? I always tell my guy, if you don't understand defense, you know, no offense to your offense, corner, go ask the defensive guy. You know, they always have jokes that defensive players aren't very smart.

And I joke with my quarterback, and I play defensive not college. But I said, you know, go ask them. They have to teach guys that aren't very smart. He can explain it to you. And go sit down with them. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and last thing, you know, these quarterbacks, and I tell my guy,

most of your all-season time should be spent studying defensive. I mean, that's the opponent. Yeah. Why wouldn't you study it? It's not that complicated. There was a lot of conversation this weekend, Barry, about with Herb Street saying the players don't love the game. And look, yeah, I mean, look, we spent hours, just hours upon hours with kids who work at this thing at a deep level. So how much truth was in that?

Sir, and he's referring to Kenny Pickett. Right. Right. And that's what he said, that they don't love the game. First of all, Kirk knows. He knows. He knows the stuff that these guys go through on an 85-man roster, the guys on the back-end roster. He knows all the stuff that they do. Those guys, just so they can be a part of that team. Right? And then there's the front, you know, 53 or whatever it is, right?

All the things that those guys are doing. And the guys who are sitting there first year. not getting in, second year not getting in. And, you know, now he's a red shirt, you know, junior, and he's finally getting his chance. To say that those guys don't love the game, he just, it's not even worth paying attention to it. Now, specifically on the end where Kenny made a decision that he didn't want to risk

injury and he wanted to get ready for the draft. Here's my feeling. You know, some of the adults have a problem. problem with the kids making businesses. They don't have a problem with the adults making businesses, but they have a problem with the kids. The guys who are producing the product, they have a problem with them.

They don't have a problem with the adults guiding them. They don't have a problem with the adults making the rules. They've got a problem with the kids that are producing the product. And that just seems kind of screwed up to me. And, you know, can he making this decision? Fine. He made a decision. Now, here's the other thing.

suck. The guy who was getting ready who was behind Kenny, he and his people were like, man, I'm hoping Kenny doesn't play. Because that guy, I mean, nothing they used to. I'll throw him and Kenny are boys, but he's like,

man, if Kenny doesn't play, I'll get my first shot on NASA. I've been waiting three years for this opportunity. You know, and he called all his people. Kenny's not going to play, and they were all happy. And probably some boys on the team, I understand how hard he's, been working. They were happy for them, you know, and, and there's old Kirkhurstreet saying,

you know, they don't love the game. I'm like, I've never met Kirk, but you know. Yeah, he reached. He reached and missed, and I thought so. All right, B, T, before we let you go, what we eat, man. Oh, man, listen, I think, look, something really simple. This is, last night, we just had some chicken thighs. They were pan-feared and finished them off. in the oven and just tell you what it did with. First of all, we did a brine. So you can find it. There's a quick chicken brine.

Just look up quick chicken brine. You put some water, you put some salt in, you put some herbs if you want to add a little poultry season mix, you know, thyme and rosemary and all that. And then about, you know, three or four cloves of smashed garlic. You put that in a pot, you let it boil. And then once it boils, shut it off and you put the top on it, and you let that cool down. once that's cooled down after 10, you kind of pour it over ice to cool it down a little bit more. And then you get a plastic bag, your chicken thighs are in there, chicken parts are in there,

and you pour that brine over the chicken and just let it sit. Now, you can let it sit. You know, you don't let sit too long because usually the brines are a little salty, you know, and you don't want to get too salty. All right, so you do that. After a while, you take that stuff out, and you've got to really, in order to get the, this result, you've got to really pat the chicken dry. I mean, like, really let it dry, especially the skin. You want to dry. And meantime, preheat the oven to about 425, and while it's

preheating, you stick your cast iron skeleton there, so when it comes out, it's smoking hot. Put that on the stove. Take those chicken thighs, put them skin down. You let them go for about four or five minutes. You'll see around the edge, it's just starting the ground. When it happens, flip them over. Stick it. in the oven for about another 15. But let me tell you. Juice, moist, crispy,

flavorful skin. Had some rice and some Brussels sprouts with it, made some pan juice out of the pan gravy in what was left. It was good to go. When's the cookbook? When's the cookbook, man? It's funny to tell you,

my wife and I ate. You know, we all have done. How was it? She looked up to him, how come you didn't make more? There you go. There you go. That's when you know.

Barry Thompson, thank you, brother, for adding to you. You are appreciating the concert. Love you. Thank you. Bye, bye, bye, God. Barry Thompson, Fairfax Football Academy, will come back. More one-on-one, here on 93-7, the ticket. Download our app by searching 93.7.

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