Great memory turns Gabbert into top prospect

[cruzg24]

Blaine Gabbert rattled through math problems so easily as a child, remembering everything from multiplication tables to batting averages, that his mother, Bev, began to imagine something magnificent going on in her oldest son’s head.

“He’s almost got a photographic memory,” she says over the phone from the family house just outside St. Louis.

This is the attribute that might just take Gabbert far in his pursuit to be a starting quarterback in the NFL. He already has those other things the NFL desires: standing 6-foot-5 with the ability to fling the ball three-quarters of the field in the air. But it is his mind that might push him farther, for in the complex world of football offenses little matters more than memory.

“Once you say it to him it is set in stone,” says David Yost, University of Missouri offensive coordinator and quarterback coach. “His ability to process the information is amazing. You give it to him, he retains it.”

The NFL has all kinds of tricks designed to test a quarterback’s intelligence. Over the past few weeks, as Gabbert has talked to the teams that need a quarterback in this draft – Carolina Panthers, Buffalo Bills, Arizona Cardinals, Tennessee Titans and Washington Redskins – the challenges have come out. Teams have handed him pens and asked him to draw from memory his offense from college. Then they dictate the elements of their own offense, often one he has never seen before. After he has scribbled this on the same board, they erase it and tell him to write it all over again.

Here is where the NFL men learn about the minds of their future passers. Can they learn fast? Can they adjust? Ultimately the result is often more important than if the quarterback can hit a receiver on the dead run with a 65-yard throw.

And the reports that have trickled back to Missouri where Gabbert played quarterback are that he has dazzled with his ability to decipher offenses. And it is probably the biggest reason he has risen as a junior who left college early to one of the top two quarterbacks taken in next week’s NFL draft.

“I guess I’m good at remembering and picking things up quickly,” Gabbert says over the phone with a bit of an embarrassed laugh. “I’ve always retained things quickly.”

Few characteristics are greater for NFL quarterbacks than their mind. Offenses have become so complex, with so many different variations and adjustments made each week that a quarterback who can understand what is going on becomes invaluable. The 700-page playbook Al Saunders introduced to the Washington Redskins when he was hired as their offensive coordinator in 2006 immediately became legend around the league, until it was revealed that 700 pages was actually normal for an NFL team and that Saunders’ book might really run closer to 1,000 pages with all the other options the plays demanded. Many others are similar in size.


At Missouri, Yost sometimes changed the Tigers’ offense depending on the team they were playing, a common adjustment professional teams make. He learned early that Gabbert, who reportedly scored 42 out of 50 on the Wonderlic test during the NFL scouting combine, could handle the change. Where most quarterbacks he worked with usually needed to see the play on a board or have it explained with video, Blaine almost always understood when the play was first described.

For instance, while preparing for the Insight.com Bowl against Iowa late last year, Yost mentioned a particular red zone defense Iowa likes to play to Gabbert and quickly offered a solution. Later that day, in practice, a red-zone situation arose and Gabbert immediately made the change even though it was something he had barely discussed with Yost hours before.

Source: yahoosports.com

My name is FPS and Im on the Blaine Gabbert bandwagon.