Cal’s Webb bearing down
Graduate transfer QB, who will start vs. Hawaii, is a student of the game
BERKELEY — Dawn outside Memorial Stadium: a misty silence, low clouds, available parking, and Davis Webb.
Dressed in a blue sweatshirt and gym shorts, his baseball cap pulled low, Webb descends the pavilion stairs into Cal’s football complex. He makes a quick stop at his locker, grabs a notebook, then heads to the office that houses the Bears’ virtual reality device.
He pops open the laptop and puts on the VR headset. The previous day’s practice appears on the screen.
“A couple plays kept me up last night,” he says.
Long before the Bears opened training camp, Webb, a graduate transfer quarterback from Texas Tech, was lifting weights, playing catch with teammates and obsessively studying film. If he walked into the football offices after 7 a.m., he was late. If he left before 10 p.m., he was loafing.
“His work ethic has been unparalleled,” said coach Sonny Dykes, who named Webb the starter on the fourth day of training camp.
Unparalleled and purposeful: Raised in the Dallas suburbs, Webb’s swift rise at Texas Tech — he was named MVP of the Holiday Bowl as a freshman — was followed by a dramatic fall. Derailed by injuries as a sophomore, benched as a junior, and cast aside to a dead-end future in Lubbock.
With degree in hand and one season of eligibility left, Webb, 21, chose Berkeley as the place to resurrect his career.
“I went through a lot of adversity, and that led to me becoming a backup,” he said on a recent morning. “I don’t want that to happen again.
“That’s why I come here every day at 7 at the latest and don’t leave until 10 or 11, so I’m prepared to play my best every Saturday … I want to make sure I have no regrets.”
Different paths to Cal
It doesn’t take long for Webb to find the play he wants: A wheel route to receiver Ray Hudson that was intercepted by linebacker Ray Davison. Was it an errant throw, or did Davison make a first-class play?
Webb’s conclusion: “Ray got me. The throw wasn’t great. But he made an unbelievable play.”
From there, Webb heads into the office of offensive coordinator Jake Spavital to prepare for the season opener against Hawaii in Sydney, Australia (Friday, 7 p.m.).
Both are new to the Bears this season, but their interaction is easy. Sons of football coaches and the Southern Plains, Spavital and Webb came to Cal at different times but with a strong connection.
Spavital, a well-regarded young playcaller, was hired in February. One of his closest friends is Kliff Kingsbury, the Texas Tech head coach who advised Webb on his transfer options out of Lubbock.
Dykes wanted Spavital regardless, but he knew the hire would improve Cal’s prospects for landing Webb and filling the void left by Jared Goff’s departure.
“I talked to (Kingsbury), and he said that Davis was just obsessed with football, that he was in the facility from 7 until 10,” Spavital recalled. “You hear that a lot about players, and I like to believe it when I see it.
“But there are a lot of nights that I have to tell Davis to go home. And his mentality has rubbed off on our other quarterbacks.”
Word of Webb’s work ethic comes as no surprise to Kent Scott, who coached Webb during his senior season at Prosper (Texas) High School.
Scott recalled all the nights that he would walk to the Prosper football fieldhouse with intentions of locking up, only to find Webb inside.
Sometimes Webb’s father, Matt, an assistant coach at Prosper at the time, would be guiding him through drills. Other times, Webb was alone: Throwing to a target, running cones to improve agility, honing his footwork.
Back then, as now, Webb was a newcomer with one year of eligibility remaining.
“He earned the immediate respect of his team- mates,” Scott said. “They saw his work ethic, how he carries himself off the field.”
Webb received a scholarship offer from TCU but opted for Texas Tech, where he joined a quarterback contingent that included Baker Mayfield, now a Heisman Trophy contender at Oklahoma.
Webb started six games and threw 20 touchdown passes as a rookie and entered his sophomore season as the Red Raiders’ starter. (Mayfield had departed for Oklahoma.) But injuries intervened — a shoulder in September, an ankle in October — and Webb failed to reclaim the starting job as a junior.
“I thought nothing would happen, that this is my team,” he said of the early portion of his career at Texas Tech. “I’d ride off into the sunset.”
Facing another season on the bench, he took advantage of the NCAA’s graduate transfer rule. In late January, he committed to Colorado. Two weeks later, Spavital joined the Bears with plans to deploy an offense similar to the one Webb used at Texas Tech.
“I had three years in the system and wanted to finish that fourth year,” said Webb, who is pursuing a master’s degree in public health at Cal.
“Once I saw what (Spavital) believed, I was all in.”
Not a quick study
It’s now 7:30 a.m. — wake-up time for the rest of the team. Spavital and Webb end their pleasantries and get to work. The topic for this morning: goal-line options for the season opener.
On the big screen in Spavital’s office, Boston College is playing Wake Forest. That would seem irrelevant to the Bears except that Boston College’s secondary coach in 2015, Kevin Lempa, is now Hawaii’s defensive coordinator.
What Boston College did last year, the Rainbow Warriors will likely do Friday night.
“They choked people,” Spavital said of Boston College, which led the nation in total defense last season.
For 20 minutes, coordinator and quarterback run the video back and forth. Webb offers suggestions and jots down notes as they prepare for that day’s practice.
Next on Webb’s jammed schedule is breakfast with teammates, who are just now filing in. Then comes weight training, followed by a quarterbacks meeting. Again, the video rolls, and Spavital fires questions at Webb. The responses come in rapid fashion.
“He already knows what every player should be doing on every play,” Spavital said one day early in training camp. “His film study definitely helped him make the adjustment. He understands which runs we should use against certain looks, which perimeter screens, which downfield passes.”
Webb watches film of every practice at least twice. The first time through is about mechanics (footwork, throwing motion, etc). Then he’ll rewind and study the tactics: Did he make the proper read? Did he slide the pass protection the right way? Was his mesh point with the running back correct?
It’s not all about Cal. During his late summer nights in the football office, the 6foot-5 Webb watched film of every NFL team, with an eye, of course, on the quarterbacks. He studied Tom Brady, Carson Palmer and Ben Roethlisberger — passers with frames similar to his own. But Webb also watched 5-foot-11 Russell Wilson.
“All film has value,” he said. “You just have to understand what you’re watching.”
The more he studied, the more clear it became that the traditional three-step drop is vanishing from the NFL. The so-called quick game, with shotgun snaps and short timing routes, requires quarterbacks to essentially use a one-step drop.
Webb spent dozens of hours in June and July adding the one-step to his repertoire and believes it will make his game, and the Bear Raid, more efficient.
Sitting in Spavital’s office, surrounded by video screens and whiteboards, he leans back.
“After my career, I’m going straight into coaching,” he says. “I’m never going to leave the film room.”
For more on college sports, see Jon Wilner’s College Hotline at blogs.mercurynews.com/ collegesports. Contact him at jwilner@bayareanewsgroup.com or 408-920-5716.