How to train your QB for the NFL combine

INDIANAPOLIS - Wearing a T-shirt, shorts and a pair of spikes, Idaho quarterback Nate Enderle gets down on his knees, carefully places his hands on the line, and then gets into a sprinter's position.

As soon as he hears trainer Brian Martin's whistle, Enderle leaps out of his stance and performs the three-cone drill, dashing five yards up the field to a cone, and then back. He then turns to run around a second cone, runs a weave around a third, and then comes back around the second cone and returns to the starting point.

Martin looks up from his stopwatch and is ecstatic: 6.99 seconds. That's the best time Enderle has run so far in a seven-week program designed to prepare him for the NFL's annual Scouting Combine, which runs through this weekend at Lucas Oil Stadium.

Enderle is one of more than 300 draft prospects whose talents will be on display, as teams prepare for the April 28-30 draft. Where players once did little more than attend regional workouts in advance of the draft, they now spend several weeks - and several thousand dollars - getting ready for this weekend's drills and interview sessions. It's all designed to give NFL general managers, coaches, scouts and other team executives a close-up look at the prospects. And most of those prospects - even those like Enderle, who is projected to go anywhere from the third to the seventh round - go through rigorous pre-combine programs to enhance their draft-day stock.

"When I came out, there was no combine," said former Giants quarterback Scott Brunner, the Giants' sixth-round pick out of Delaware in 1980. "There were regional programs where guys from a certain area would go to meet with teams. You didn't do any throwing or running. It was more like a physical before the draft."

Brunner is now one of more than a dozen people who are part of Enderle's training team at the TEST Sports Clubs of Martinsville, N.J. The company was founded by Martin, who is one of Enderle's trainers. Brunner was part of a generation of players who simply waited for a phone call on draft day to see if they'd be taken. No Internet. No cell phones. No ESPN.

"You just sat around and waited, and at some point the phone would ring," Brunner said. "You didn't want to leave the house, and we didn't have cell phones. You just hoped the phone rang on the first day."

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Now all you need to do is watch on television or read the Internet to see where a player is drafted. It's big business, and players have responded by going through intense preparation. Enderle ticks off the people involved in the process:

"Brian. Kevin [Dunn, another trainer and TEST's chief operating officer]. A physical therapist. Chiropractor. Sports psychologist. Agent [Joe Linta]. Four or five performance coaches. Scott [Brunner]. Massage therapist."

Anyone else?

"Oh, yeah, we do yoga, too," he said. "Oh, man, is that tough."

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There are orthopedic doctors who are consulted, and other medical experts if necessary. It's an incredible assortment of specialists, all devoted to preparing their clients for a weekend of drills that will go a long way toward determining where they're drafted. Or even if they're drafted.

They start out with a visit to Dunn, who closely examines each athlete and determines where they need to improve.

"From an anatomy standpoint, a kinesiology standpoint, it's studying movement patterns, and knowing what every player at each position has to do," said Dunn, who uses what he calls a functional movement screen to assess each player's physical challenges.

Enderle had his own set of issues when Dunn first examined him.

"With Nate and a lot of quarterbacks, they come to us with a lot of asymmetry," Dunn said. "They're not doing the same thing with one side rotationally. They're slinging the ball with their arm, rather than utilizing their hips. All these quarterbacks have a tendency not to use their hips, what we call their pillar strength."

Said Martin: "If a quarterback plants with his right leg, there will be quad dominance on that side, their hip flexors will be tighter on that side. So we spend a ton of time loosening up the hips and getting everything to balance out right to left."

Enderle appears to have benefited greatly from the program, according to Brunner, who also worked with Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco before the 2008 draft. Flacco's stock improved so much during the off-season that he became a first-round pick after initially being projected as a second or third-round choice.

"[Enderle] was like most guys, where their drops were inconsistent and he was off balance a lot," Brunner said. "We had to get him comfortable with three, five and seven-step drops and putting him with a good foundation where he could make the reads and get rid of the ball quickly, effectively and efficiently. Once we cleaned up his footwork, his body came back into line."

Enderle, 6-foot-5, 233 pounds, thinks he has the capability of getting into the third round if he has a strong performance at the combine. He threw at least 20 touchdowns each of the past three seasons at Idaho, and passed for 3,314 yards as a senior.

"There are so many great athletes across the nation, and you have to separate yourself in one way or another, and these drills are one way to do it," he said. "You have to try and separate yourself, because everyone can play football. All you have to do is get one team to like you."

Enderle is hoping he finds that team this weekend. Just like the more than 300 other guys here to show NFL teams what they've got.