Manning Passing Academy is proving ground, incubator for quarterbacks of all … – NOLA.com

Thibodaux – The Manning Passing Academy is aptly named. The first family of football’s famed annual get-together, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this weekend, is less a camp than it is a summit meeting for players at team sports’ most unique and demanding position.

Nowhere else in the world do so many quarterbacks gather in one place to practice, study and share trade secrets. The collective quarterback expertise and signal-caller synergy is unprecedented.

Of the 1,200 invited campers, 900 are quarterbacks. Of the 120 counselors, a third are starting college quarterbacks and dozens of others are offensive assistants or quarterback coaches at the small-college level.

For the high school campers who attend and the college QBs who serve as counselors, an invitation to the MPA is a badge of honor, a pledge into a fraternity that counts dozens of former and current starting quarterbacks among its members.

The ad business has Advertising Week. The tech industry has the Microsoft Inner Circle Summit. Quarterbacks have the Manning Passing Academy, a unique four-day retreat.

“It’s an amazing event,” said Major Applewhite, the offensive coordinator at the University of Houston and a former MPA camper and counselor. “Where else can you go to get that kind of expertise? You spend four days being around people who are the very best at their craft. You can’t help but get better.”

The Manning Passing Academy is the place where Russell Wilson camped as an anonymous 17-year-old sophomore from Richmond, Va., and decided he wanted to one day become a quarterback rather than a shortstop.

Where Andrew Luck first saw the multi-faceted skill set of Colin Kaepernick and told his former coach, Jim Harbaugh, he’d be wise to draft him.

And where Odell Beckham Jr. first ran routes for Eli Manning and caught the eye of his future battery mate.

“If you’re a quarterback, this is where you go to learn the game inside out,” said former NFL quarterback Jake Delhomme, who has worked as a counselor at the camp several times since its inception in 1996.

The idea for the Manning Passing Academy sprouted in the fertile mind of Peyton Manning.

As the story goes, Peyton was dumbfounded each Saturday morning when he’d scan the prep line scores in The Times-Picayune and see the anemic passing statistics from losing teams. He wanted to do something about it.

“A team would get beat 42-0 and their passing statistics were 3 out of 5,” Peyton said. “They just weren’t throwing the ball. We wanted to help the passing game and help quarterbacks and receivers and tight ends and running backs have a better experience (at the high school level).”

About 185 players from Louisiana and Mississippi high schools attended the initial camp in 1996 at Tulane University. Tulane head coach Buddy Teevens and assistant Jeff Hawkins organized the camp in conjunction with Archie and Peyton Manning, who was a junior-to-be at the University of Tennessee.

In Years 2 and 3 the camp doubled in size and eventually outgrew its homes at Tulane and Southeastern Louisiana. By the time it moved to Nicholls State University in 2005, enrollment had reached 1,200 and the staff had mushroomed to 140. Camp officials have kept the numbers at that level since so they can maintain a 10-to-1 camper-to-counselor ratio and accommodate Nicholls’ housing inventory.

The format and fundamentals taught during the four-day, five-practice camp have largely remained unchanged, although the curriculum has been tweaked in recent years to incorporate the popular spread and read-option systems. The two-hour, two-a-day on-field drill sessions remain the meat and potatoes of the camp. But its lagniappe is the nightly Q&A forums with the college and pro QBs and the informal skull sessions that organically occur in the hallways, dorms and cafeteria around the Nicholls State campus.

Over the years, quarterbacks from all 50 states and from as far away as Japan, Guam, Mexico and Finland have matriculated to the sugar cane fields of Nicholls State University to compete against their peers and sponge knowledge from their elders.

And along the way, an impressive list of alumni has been established. Seven No. 1 overall NFL Draft picks, including five of the last nine – Jameis Winson, Andrew Luck, Sam Bradford, Matthew Stafford and JaMarcus Russell – have participated as campers or counselors. The MPA fraternity includes 54 quarterbacks currently on NFL rosters, including 17 projected starters. All four quarterbacks on the St. Louis Rams depth chart, from starter Nick Foles to backup Austin Davis to reserves Sean Mannion and Case Keenum, are MPA alums. Saints backups Luke McCown, Ryan Griffin and Garrett Grayson all attended at one time or another.

“That’s pretty impressive,” Eli Manning said. ” That was never the goal or the intention but that’s kind of what it’s become. A lot of them, they get to the NFL and they say, ‘Yeah, I was a camper at the Manning Passing Academy and we had no idea. We’re not keeping track or recruiting. We treat everybody the same.”

And each year another wave of potential NFL prospects joins the fraternity, thanks to the growing number of elite college quarterbacks who serve as counselors at the camp. 

The college counselor phenomenon took hold about a decade ago. As word of mouth about the Manning camp experience grew in quarterback circles, more and more of them sought invitations to serve as counselors. It was a unique chance to work on your skills, measure your game against your peers and pick the brains of a pair of NFL superstars, Eli and Peyton.

And you never knew who else might show up. Last year, NFL owners Robert Kraft (Patriots) and Stephen Jones (Cowboys) visited to watch their grandsons play. This year NFL head coaches Sean Payton and Mike McCarthy attended as camp dads to support their sons, Connor and Jack, respectively. 

“It’s a double pay it forward,” Peyton Manning said. “Eli and I are here. Sean Payton is here. Mike McCarthy is here. We encourage the college quarterbacks to ask questions of me or Eli. Sean Payton has a piece advice for a college player. Or (ESPN NFL analyst) Mike Mayock, who knows everything about the Combine, can share some thoughts about with these guys that maybe want to go to the next level. That’s been an added bonus.”

In 1996, the lone counselors were Northeast Louisiana quarterback Bo Meeks, and the prolific quarterback-receiver tandem at the then-University of Southwestern Louisiana Jake Delhomme and Brandon Stokley and Peyton Manning, then a rising junior at Tennessee. By 2006, the numbers had grown to about 15. This year, 39 college quarterbacks will serve as counselors, among them Heisman Trophy candidates Trevone Boykin, Dak Prescott and Cody Kessler.

“A real fraternity has developed over the years,” Teevens said. “There’s a bond between the campers and counselors, who have been at the camp. It’s special.”

It’s a win-win situation. The high school campers learn from the elite collegians, who, in turn, learn from the NFL stars.

“It means a lot (being involved in the camp),” said Prescott, who attended the camp as a prep quarterback at Haughton High School. “I know what it meant as a camper with those quarterbacks Sam Bradford and Colt McCoy and the impact it had on me, so to be on the opposite side, it’s humbling.

“Anything like this, I benefit from. I’m going to listen to the conversations about the quarterback position. Peyton, Eli, Jake Delhomme and all the NFL coaches, and then my peers, just to pick their brain a little bit and see their rituals for the week. You can always learn something.” 

The Air It Out competition on Saturday night has emerged as a marquee attraction in recent years. The annual one-hour session pits the NFL and college QBs against each other in a Combine-type skill competition.  

“If you play the blues, at some point you have to take your ass down to New Orleans and see if you’re good enough to play with those guys,” Applewhite said. “If you play quarterback, you go to the Manning Passing Academy and see how you stack up.”

Yet, at its core, the Manning camp is less about the future NFL superstars than it is about the blue-collar Joes and hardcore ballers who pay their $595 entry fee and drive with their parents to the camp in an effort to improve their games for their hometown schools.

For every Andrew Luck, the camp has produced dozens of others who excelled at the lower levels of the sport, from high school to college.

Players like Alex Jenny, who led Wayland (Mass.) High School to winning seasons as a junior (7-4) and senior starter (9-2) and eventually became the starter at Dartmouth. Jenny is now an MBA intern at Under Armour.

Or Taylor Housewright, who camped at the MPA for all four seasons during a standout prep career at Ashland (Ohio) High School and returned as a counselor in 2011 as a college quarterback at Ashland University, an NCAA Division II power.

Housewright was Ohio’s Division II Player of the Year in high school and went on to quarterback his hometown college to an undefeated regular season and a playoff berth in 2013. He was the 2012 Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference Player of the Year and a finalist for the Harlon Hill Trophy, the Division II equivalent of the Heisman Trophy.

“The Manning Passing Academy was an awesome experience for me,” said Housewright, who is now a receivers coach at Division III Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. “I was a small-school guy and I’m there with Andrew Luck, E.J. Manuel, Kellen Moore and A.J. McCarron. It was amazing. I’m not sure there will ever be a way to measure the impact it’s had (on football). I learned so much and I use many of the things I learned there as I coach today.”

When the MPA launched in 1996, football had not yet become the aerial extravaganza it is today.

In 1996, 10 college quarterbacks attempted an average of 33 passes a game. Last year 40 did.

In 1996, three NFL quarterbacks passed for more than 4,000 yards. Last year, 11 did.

Yet, the Mannings deferred when asked if their camp has played some role in the proliferation of passing attacks at all levels of football. 

“I couldn’t say that,” Peyton said. “There’s a couple of different purposes to the camp. The main goal is to help these high school players have a better experience. … We treat the freshman quarterback who maybe doesn’t throw a very good spiral just the same as maybe a hot shot prospect. That goal has always been the same: Try to help the passing game.”

In the end, the Manning Passing Academy’s lasting legacy has proven to be more intangible than tangible. In a sport and at a position where knowledge has become power, the collective gridiron brain gain accrued at the camp over the years is incalculable. How many high school and college teams benefited from the leadership principles learned at the MPA?

“I have people come up to me all the time, parents of someone that wound up being a starting quarterback of his high school team, maybe won a championship and tell me that their kids had a great time at the camp,” Archie Manning said. “I hope that’s our legacy. That we have kids that look back on their high school careers, that they won some games and learned some things, made lifelong friends and that it was a pleasant experience.

“There are a lot of leaders out there in the business community that were high school quarterbacks.”

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