A TALENT FOR IT
Kingsbury’s QB tree ‘major’ reason Cards came calling
NFL coaches are often praised or hazed for the branches, or lack thereof, of the extended coaching tree they’re able to sow and grow the longer they stay on the job.
Some of the most famous coaching lines in the last generation of pro football were built by the Killer B’s – Bill Walsh, Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick.
But nowadays, with the NFL delving more and more into the college-coaching ranks for offensive-minded head coaches, it might be just as important to find an innovative play-caller who is proficient at developing a “quarterback” tree.
And when you’re either smart enough or fortunate enough to uncover, recruit, polish and perfect a young quarterback into potential stardom, that can go a long way into getting you into the league in the first place.
Whether he was coaching at Texas A&M, Texas Tech or the Cardinals, Kingsbury had a hand in helping develop and mature three
Heisman Trophy winners
(Manziel, Mayfield and Murray) ... in addition to grooming a future NFL and
Super Bowl Most Valuable
Player (Mahomes).
Take Cardinals second-year coach Kliff Kingsbury, finder and procurer of the Magnificent M’s – Johnny Manziel, Baker Mayfield, Patrick Mahomes and Kyler Murray. Kingsbury had a major hand in finding them all, developing each of them, and yes, it’s a big reason why Cardinals owner Michael Bidwill and General Manager Steve Keim agreed to hire him in the first place in January of last year. “It was the major reason,” Keim said Tuesday, during a phone interview with The Republic.
Think about it. Whether he was coaching at Texas A&M, Texas Tech or the Cardinals, Kingsbury had a hand in helping develop and mature three Heisman Trophy winners (Manziel, Mayfield and Murray) at some point in their careers, in addition to grooming a future NFL and Super Bowl Most Valuable Player (Mahomes).
“Yeah, I’ve just been very fortunate like you said,” Kingsbury said this week as the Cardinals (4-2) prepare for Sunday’s showdown at State Farm Stadium against the Seahawks (5-0). “I’ve always been a big believer that it’s about players, not plays, and those guys that I’ve been fortunate enough to coach have made me look really good. A lot of those guys, you can call anything and they’re going to make it work.”
But how much of it is the coach and how much of it is the quarterback?
Murray, whom Kingsbury began recruiting as a freshman at Allen (Texas) High School, said Kingsbury deserves plenty of credit for being a qualified quarterback guru. Murray went on to win the Heisman during his junior season at Oklahoma in 2018 before joining the Cardinals last season as the No.1 overall pick in the draft,
“I think the three that he stems from, a very quarterback-friendly offense, obviously guys want to play for him,” Murray said Wednesday. “Him, along with a lot of other coaches that stem from that type of offense – quarterback-friendly, really creative, puts up a lot of points. I think that’s a testament to his coaching, his ability to connect with the quarterback and obviously coach them.”
Lest we forget, the Cardinals thought they had found their head coach and quarterback of the future in 2018 when they replaced the “retiring” Bruce Arians with Steve Wilks and selected UCLA quarterback Josh Rosen with the No.10 overall pick after making a draft-day trade to move up five spots and send a third- and fifth-round pick to the Raiders.
A year later, both men were gone and Bidwill and Keim brought in Kingsbury, who boldly had proclaimed earlier that fall that Murray would be the ideal choice upon which to build an NFL Super Bowl contender.
“Kyler is a freak,” Kingsbury, then still the coach at Texas Tech, said at the time. “I would take him with the first pick of the draft if I could.”
They did. But first, the Cardinals hired Kingsbury, who went 35-40 in six seasons with the Red Raiders before being fired by his alma mater and accepting the offensive coordinator position at Southern Cal. Keim said he knew right away that Arizona made the right decision, mainly because of Kingsbury’s ability to discover uber-talented QBs and turn them into winners.
“Yeah, it was his evaluation process, having a guy like Mahomes, where he was one of the early and first guys to offer him a (scholarship) and maybe the only team to do that, or at least one of them,” Keim said. “Baker Mayfield, same thing. All those guys had different skill sets and instead of just trying to jam a square peg into a round hole, Kliff was a guy who could adapt to their strengths.
“And again, being a guy that I thought, and Michael thought, was a dynamic play caller at that level, especially knowing the offensive trends from college were starting to trickle into the NFL. I’m not saying it’s completely a college game, obviously, but some of the concepts that they were doing, NFL coaches would go to the colleges to get some ideas and Kliff Kingsbury was a guy they went to see.”
Breaking down the QB tree
Asked how fortunate and fun it has been to coach Manziel, Mayfield, Mahomes and Murray, Kingsbury offered this quick breakdown on each of the four, star quarterbacks he had under his various watches:
On Manziel: “Johnny, one of the most popular, best college football players in the history of the sport, one of the most competitive people I’ve ever seen. Didn’t always love to grind out during the week, but on Saturday, he gave you everything he had, and his teammates loved him for it and you could see how they played around him.”
On Mayfield: “Baker, what an incredible story. When he got to Texas Tech, he got there that summer and earned the starting job. Just a phenomenal competitor who always has a chip on his shoulder and has had a great career so far.”
● On Mahomes: “Mahomes, there’s not much to say that everybody hasn’t said already. You watch him week in, week out and he’s like a Madden G (Genie) code. He makes everything look easy.”
● On Murray: “And then with Kyler, same type of deal. The playbook is really limitless because you can call your QBrun stuff, you can call your drop-back pass stuff and you can call your deep throws and he has the mental capacity and the ability, physically, to do it all.”
Keim said Kingsbury landed on his radar while on a scouting trip for the Cardinals in 2012 and he happened to watch an ESPN feature about the coach when Kingsbury was the offensive coordinator and quarterback coach at Texas A&M.
“Over the years, I developed a relationship with him after that and had a great deal of respect for him and when you look at the big picture and you think about developing quarterbacks, the play calling, and every one of those kids who had a different style, that was it,” Keim said. “I mean from Baker to Johnny to Mahomes to Davis Webb, whether it was guys who were traditional drop backs to guys who could beat you with their feet, that’s the unique thing.”
The fact that Kingsbury was also a record-setting college quarterback himself at Texas Tech was also universally appealing, Keim said, adding he’s never been more impressed with how his coach continues to attack, draw up plays and try to stay ahead of the NFL curve.
“Yeah, there’s no doubt,” Keim said. “And it’s like he’s so unique because he’s the kind of guy you could be sitting around with away from the building and if there’s a napkin, he’s drawing up a play because it just comes to mind. His wheels are always turning, and you can tell because, obviously, he gets in here at, I don’t know, 3 or 4 in the morning or whatever it is. It’s all football and it’s certainly opposite of what people may have perceived when you see a guy who’s single, good-looking and whatever it may be. The perception about him, in my opinion in many ways, was wrong, because he really is just a football junkie and a grinder.”
And a quarterback tree-builder, too.