It's quarterback whispering time

Photo courtesy Minnesota Vikings

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By Matthew Coller

A few years ago, a friend suggested the book The Quarterback Whisperer by Super Bowl-winning head coach Bruce Arians and writer Lars Anderson. For those not familiar, Arians coached Peyton Manning, Ben Roethlisberger, Carson Palmer and Andrew Luck at different points in his career either as a quarterbacks coach, head coach or offensive coordinator. The book is about his experiences with those great QBs and what he learned about quarterbacking along the way.

The first time I read Arians’ journey through the NFL, it was through the lens of Kirk Cousins joining the Vikings. The book came out amidst Case Keenum’s magical 2017 season and arrived in my paws just after the Vikings decided to give Cousins the most guaranteed money in NFL history. With every story that Arians told about his QB icon pupils (and some other QBs that he ran into along the way, like his one of his favorites, ex-Viking Kelly Holcomb), I would compare what I was reading to what I had seen and heard about Cousins.

Sometimes it was funny little things, like how Peyton Manning struggled to order food from restaurants on the phone and had his mom give him photographs of shirt-pants combinations that worked. That sounded very Kirk-Kohls like. Or Arians couldn’t stand it when quarterbacks patted the ball (Kirk was a ball-patter). Other times it was very insightful things that showed why Cousins was able to succeed in the NFL as a fourth-round pick, like when Arians talked about dogged Manning was about improving his throwing strength. Manning would throw 70-yard bombs through the goal posts every day in practice to develop the strength and technique of throwing long.

“Mechanics were s important to him as his assignment on the play,” Arians wrote of Manning.

That sounded a lot like Kirk. Obsessed with the details.

There were other elements of the all-timers that didn’t match up with the way Cousins played quarterback. Arians described Roethlisberger’s Super Bowl-winning throw to Santonio Holmes to beat the Arizona Cardinals.

“I couldn’t believe the throw,” Arians wrote. “To this day, I think that’s a play that only one player in NFL history was capable of making and that’s Ben. He pump-fakes and delivers a fastball on the money. That was unquestionable a Hall of Fame-worthy pass.”

I thought about how hard it is to win a Super Bowl that it took a Hall of Fame-worthy pass — one that only one QB could make — in order to win a championship. Sure, there were a few teams along the way that won titles (Brad Johnson’s Bucs, Trent Dilfer’s Ravens and Nick Foles’s Eagles) without having the pure talent to make Hall of Fame-worthy throws to win but those rings were few and far between. It made me think about whether there was enough size, arm strength, athleticism and moxie for Cousins to lead a team to a championship. As it turned out, as good as Cousins was as a Viking, the natural gifts were an Achilles heel, most memorably on a fourth-down checkdown in the playoffs against the Giants.

With just days to go before the Vikings hit the field for JJ McCarthy’s first training camp as the starting quarterback, I decided to read The Quarterback Whisperer again. Following last year’s 14-win season with Sam Darnold at the helm, Kevin O’Connell has overtaken the “QB Whisperer” title as a coach capable of maximizing the talents of his quarterback. What can I understand better what it’s going to take for O’Connell to get the most out of McCarthy by reading Arians’ stories with a different quarterback in mind?

There’s no better place to start that search than in Arians’ chapter about Manning.

Arians tells the story of when the Colts drafted Manning, they shipped film to him that arrived on a Thursday and by the time Arians arrived to meet with him on Friday the young QB had already mastered much of the playbook. At minicamp, Manning set up the tape machine in his hotel room and studied deep into the night. When he arrived at his first spring practice, he shouted out the offense as if he had been in it for years.

“The veterans just looked at him in astonishment,” Arians said. “I’ve never seen a rookie quarterback win over a team so fast.”

Not that McCarthy should be compared to Manning but the part about winning over the veteran players is vital to the success of the quarterback. When Harrison Phillips compared McCarthy to Josh Allen, he didn’t mean that he was going to play exactly like Allen, he meant that he was seeing the type of preparation and confidence from McCarthy that he had observed in Allen. When folks in the national media refer to McCarthy as “basically a rookie,” that isn’t even close to the truth, in part because he has already shown the stars on the team that he can run the offense in practice and preseason and can carry himself like a QB1.

Where McCarthy sold himself to the Vikings’ brass (and even owner Mark Wilf) was last year when he made big strides from minicamp to training camp. He stayed in Minnesota and put the work in to master the offense. This offseason, TJ Hockenson posted on his Instagram video of McCarthy throwing with him during a time that both players could be on party boats and nobody would bat an eye.

Arians wrote of Manning: “Peyton was so obsessive that he even watched how to perform quarterback kneel-downs at the end of games. No detail was too minute. He put everything about football under the microscope. He needed to be the master of the mastery.”

Arians continued: “One thing and one thing only was important to him when he arrived in Indy: to become a great NFL quarterback.”

That reminded me of something McCarthy said upon arriving in Minnesota. He was asked when it finally hit him that he’d made the NFL and he said that he had “edited” his life starting in fifth grade to make becoming a pro quarterback his sole focus.

One anecdote about coaching Manning that stood out was about his pregame warmup prior to a matchup with the New England Patriots. Arians noticed that Manning was fidgeting around nervously, messing with his equipment and scowling. Arians was concerned that he was too uptight and needed to find a way to calm him down, so he told Manning that he needed to go over his footwork again, even though it had been perfect in his pregame routine.

“I always want to know what’s going on in the head of my quarterback,” Arians wrote. “Is he happy? Sad? Mad? Stressed? Pissed? Calm? Irritated? A good quarterback coach is a part-time psychologist. You have to know the emotions of your most important player because what’s going on between the ears is just as critical as the physical part of the game.”

O’Connell has had some pretty interesting test cases to work with prior to McCarthy. With Cousins, psychologists could probably study the difference in his confidence at the end of games while playing for Mike Zimmer versus O’Connell. And then with Sam Darnold, his growth in confidence and the ability to bounce back with KOC was all over his 2024 season tape until the biggest moment of the year in Week 18 against the Detroit Lions, where he was flustered into a no-show performance.

Navigating the ups and downs will be a challenge for O’Connell in different ways with McCarthy. Even if we look at last year’s impressive 2024 QB class, we can still see times where Bo Nix and Jayden Daniels struggled mightily. Arians mentioned coaching Manning through a game where the Hall of Fame QB wanted to be pulled from a game.

“F— no, get back out there,” Arians told him. And then a no-huddle touchdown drive after that helped Manning understand that he could fight through the tough moments.

O’Connell has seemed to handle his quarterbacks with a lot of trust and support. Does McCarthy need a little, “F no, get back out there,” in his life from KOC? The Vikings’ QB whisperer is going to have to find that out on the fly. There is no way to simulate what the actual stress of playing at Soldier Field on Monday Night Football is actually like. That can only be discovered in the moment.

There is a modern phrase for O’Connell’s ability to sense his quarterback’s disposition: Emotional intelligence. Arians doesn’t mention it in the book but he does talk about his previous experiences as a quarterback himself combined with his upbringing shaping his talent for understanding humans.

“Recognizing and understanding nonverbal cues in others is essential to coaching at all levels,” Arians wrote.

That’s just one part of the whispering process. Many of the other moving parts aren’t as mystical as being able to read your quarterback’s emotions. Arians describes the process of putting in a gameplan. Emailing the quarterback 150 plays on Tuesday night after a full day of writing up ideas with the coaching staff on a white board. Installing on Wednesday and Thursday and then on Friday meeting with his quarterback after practice.

“I pick the first 15 running plays we’ll call in the game but I leave it to our starting quarterback to select the first 15 passing plays,” Arians wrote. “I want my quarterback to feel — to believe — he’s got a key role in shaping the game plan.”

That is reminiscent of O’Connell’s “red pen” meetings with his QBs where they pick and choose from the concepts that they are most comfortable running. During the season last year, McCarthy participated in this type of meeting with O’Connell even though he wasn’t able to play in the games. This time around, that part of the operation won’t be new to McCarthy — though he may have a much better sense of the plays he’s feeling good about because he will actually be running them in games.

Arians would meet with the quarterback one more time on Saturday night to answer any final questions. Carson Palmer would bring 15 questions to the meeting each week.

All of this started to make me think about the value of having a former quarterback and play caller as the head coach. The entire week is built around the idea of creating the most comfort possible for the quarterback and playing to his strengths. Not that defensive coaches can’t achieve this with QBs — Belichick won a decent amount of games with Brady — but having the man in command of the franchise and its most important player tied at the hip would seem to be a cheat code.

That was the vital thing during the Vikings process of scouting McCarthy and evaluating him last year as the franchise QB. O’Connell needed to know that he was going to have a quarterback who was an extension of himself on the field — that they could see things the same way on gameday. If they didn’t have that connection, Darnold or Aaron Rodgers would be your Vikings 2025 quarterback.

An interesting part of Arians’ journey is that he coached many different types of quarterbacks. Ben Roethlisberger was much different than Peyton Manning. The way they started their careers was vastly different. Where the Colts needed time to build around Manning, the Steelers had a monster roster when Big Ben came in. Manning was a genius X’s and O’s mind, whereas Roethlisberger was a baller.

Anyone would want Manning’s brain or Roethlisberger’s arm/size/mobility. McCarthy is somewhere in the middle of those things. He has high IQ and athleticism and playmaking/mobility. In his first year as a starter, he will likely need to lean into the playmaking and throwing on the run as he adjusts to this level.

“When you have a quarterback who move around the pocket and extend plays, it adds a dimension to your offense that is very difficult to defend against because a defensive coordinator can’t really prepare for it,” Arians wrote of Big Ben. “Ben had an elite arm, no question, what separated him from many others was his ability to pass with accuracy when on the move. So many times quarterbacks lose the ability to thread the needle once their feet start moving.”

That is one area that McCarthy noticeably adds to his game. He is strong when rolling to his right or left. There may be times where O’Connell has to lean into that ability in ways that he might not have done with Cousins or Darnold i.e. creating moving pockets and bootlegs to get McCarthy moving.

The other thing that stood out about Arians’ chapter on Roethlisberger is when he felt that his future HOF quarterback really “got it.” It wasn’t until 2008 that he thought Big Ben reached the peak of his powers. At that point Ben had gone 39-16 as a starter with a 92.5 QB rating (good for the era). More than 60 starts (including playoffs) and a Super Bowl ring and he still was coming around.

It’s a lesson about how we should all be approaching McCarthy’s 2025 season. Certainly there is immense pressure when the team is this strong but we should look at this season as the beginning of an era where McCarthy can grow over a number of years, not as a Super Bowl or bust, be-all, end-all, type of season. That’s not easy to do considering the long wait for McCarthy.

In Arians’ chapter about Carson Palmer, who saw all the ups and downs of the NFL in his career, he mentioned something that also struck a similar chord to McCarthy.

He said that Palmer used a virtual reality headset that worked with a 360-degree camera on a tripod next to the quarterback in practice. He used it to practice identifying blitzes and study his own throwing motion. Sound familiar? McCarthy used video from a camera strapped to Darnold’s head to put himself in QB1’s shoes while he was recovering from knee surgery.

Palmer, according to Arians, “always wanted more” information, even right up to the kickoff.

The other quarterback that Arians touched upon was Andrew Luck. The line that hit home in connecting these great quarterback stories to McCarthy was this: “Andrew is a voracious reader of books. It is as if written words speak secrets to him. No subject is off limits. Religion, politics, biography, history. During his rookie year, he revealed to a teammate that he was reading a narrative on the wild and riveting history of concrete.”

“That young man was committed to unraveling as many yarns of life’s complexities as possible.”

The curiosity of these great quarterbacks all stood out.

“After practice, Andrew would come into my office with a s—tload of the most wide-ranting and relevant questions about football,” Arians wrote.

What a second reading of The Quarterback Whisperer with McCarthy in mind, there were a lot of boxes from the all-time greats that have already been checked about his personality and approach to the game. There is a relentless energy to the Mannings and Lucks of the world that isn’t something that can easily be described, yet it’s understood when you see it or read anecdotes about it. McCarthy has it. Does he have the other freakish traits described like Luck’s ability to see a play once and then rehash every detail on the field? Or Roethlisberger’s ability to bounce back from any hit and fire bullets left and right on the move? Those things are not yet clear.

If McCarthy plays the way the Vikings are hoping and someday ends up as an entry in O’Connell’s QB Whisperer book, the narrative will start out with being impressed during last year’s camp and then having the relationship blossom over the next six weeks. KOC will write about the ways McCarthy watched film and studied the playbook and asked questions and grew up in front of his eyes during this summer. He will talk about the times where things got tough and the way he and McCarthy worked through it together. Yes, this year’s camp has the potential to be one that goes in a book someday.

Now it just has to start…

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