Cameron and Jackson had worked out and coached some of the best quarterbacks in the world. Eli Manning, Drew Brees, Ben Roethlisberger, Carson Palmer all did their respective “Pro Day” workouts with them in attendance. DeCosta, admittedly, was not the supreme expert on scouting quarterbacks and deferred to Cameron’s expertise and Jackson’s feedback on the regiment.
Cameron, always the taskmaster, asked Flacco to do a variety of things that they hadn’t seen him do at the combine.
“Throw off the back foot.”
“Throw off the front foot.”
“Move your hands.”
Flacco took every command as a personal challenge. “I tried to do everything they wanted me to do but I really didn’t know what I was doing,” Flacco said. “It wasn’t like I was at USC. I had never really done anything like that before.”
“The ball never hit the ground,” DeCosta said. “He must’ve thrown a hundred passes to those kids and he was on target with every throw. It was amazing how accurate he was and how he saw movement, especially on a field with no lines.
“He kept trying to do it better and better every time. It was like it was fun for him. Joe wanted to do it the best he could. He kept saying, ‘Let’s do it again. Let’s do it again.’ He was like a kid throwing the football on a playground.”
Flacco had pride. He had a competitive spirit. And he clearly liked coaching. He wanted to get better.
Cameron said, “Now I know why you wanted me to see this guy. This is second most impressive workout I’ve ever seen, almost as good as [Ben] Roethlisberger.”
Here’s Delaware head coach K.C. Keeler story of that afternoon as an interested observer:
“I think a big part of the workout was how Joe would handle the work out. He had his football out there and they kicked his ball to the side and put a bag of balls out there and said, ‘Here use these balls.’ Some of them weren’t broken in and Joe didn’t care. Joe didn’t complain about a thing. Joe understood that he was just going to attack the workout and said, ‘I don’t care what conditions they put me under’ and I saw him go through every drill known that a quarterback could do for two and a half hours. One of the last drills I saw him do was when Hue Jackson was on one knee flipping a ball in the air, telling Joe to grab it and throw it to a wideout out on the hash as quickly as possible. I asked Cam later why he used that drill and he said, “You know in the NFL you’ve got to get the ball out of your hand very quickly, and we wanted to see how he grabs the ball and throws.’ Joe has huge hands and he doesn’t have to grab anything because the ball fits in his hands so he just has to get the ball out. And the last thing they had him do when the workout was completely done was to stand, take one step and let the football rip. Almost three hours in and he threw the ball almost 80 yards in the air at the end of a workout with just with one step. I mean one of the young scouts sitting next to me said, ‘Coach Keeler, we’ve never seen a quarterback work out like this!’”
