How Drew Lock's pre-draft guru is helping Steven Montez prepare for the NFL

 

MOBILE, Ala. — Playing in the Senior Bowl and working three days under the watchful eyes of hundreds of team scouts and coaches was not the end point of the case Colorado quarterback Steven Montez wants to make for his viability as a draft prospect.

It was actually the beginning.

Like all prospects on hand, Montez answered the battery of questions from team personnel gathered for the practices. He also dealt with the fusillade of media questions at various points in the week – during the media-day Q-and-A sessions, after practices and in the lobby of the headquarters hotel in downtown Mobile.

It was in one of those sessions when he revealed his point of emphasis for the four months leading up to the draft. I asked Montez a question I often ask of players: “If a team asks you to share what you do best, but what areas do you need to work on, what do you tell them?”

“The thing that I do best is make throws that other people can’t make, just because of my arm strength and my arm talent that I’ve got,” Montez said.

That was it for the positives.

What got Montez rolling was discussing the areas in which he needs to improve.

“I think that an area of improvement that I’ve also had to talk about while I was here is my footwork, and just the lack of consistency that I’ve had over the years and how my bad feet tend to make me inaccurate and they tend to make my arm lack consistency,” he explained.

So much could have been better for him at CU with crisper footwork, he noted.

“Missing out routes wide because I was off-balance. Missing the easy checkdowns. Missing shallow [routes]. Those short routes because I’m not stepping into my throw or I’m short-arming it and not following through,” he said. “There are just a lot of different examples that I could show you if I had the tape.

“I mean, I don’t know how many times I was actually on-balance and followed through on one of my throws, and I’ve gotten away with that at the college level just because the guys aren’t as fast as they are in the NFL, so you have to tie it all together if you really want to finish those throws and really display what kind of arm you have in the NFL.”

The smartest and most self-aware prospects are the ones who confront their flaws and work to correct them. Montez clearly possesses this attribute.

But what also helps him as he prepares for the draft is the fact that he is one of three quarterback prospects who will spend the winter and early spring in daily workouts with noted quarterback guru Jordan Palmer, the brother of former Bengals, Raiders and Cardinals standout Carson Palmer.

“He’s really been trying to get me to start in the same area and finish in the same area and just do that consistently, over and over again, so that my stroke is the same every time,” Montez said. “We’ve only been working on it for two weeks together, but it’s already seen great strides, and if we get some more work at it, then it should definitely improve even more.”

The younger Palmer has carved out a niche preparing quarterbacks for the NFL. In 2018, Josh Allen and Sam Darnold were among his pupils. Last year, Palmer worked with Drew Lock, who said in May 2019 that the time spent with Palmer “helped a lot” as he worked to learn the intricate offensive scheme.

Now Montez joins that stable. In the two weeks leading up to the Senior Bowl, Montez and Hawai’i quarterback Cole McDonald worked side by side with Palmer. After Super Bowl LIV, the putative No. 1 overall pick in the NFL Draft, Heisman Trophy winner Joe Burrow of LSU, will join them.

Their work with Palmer starts with the feet.

“Different ladder drills. Different box-cone drills. Stepping over hurdles,” Montez said. “We’re doing some play-action footwork stuff. A lot of it is just trying to develop that consistency and just trying to develop that push from the back side of our hip to generate that power so I don’t have to generate it all from my arm, because when you generate it all from your arm, that’s when it throws you off-balance.”

Of course, not every quarterback trained by Palmer has hit the draft jackpot. One of his pupils last year, Tyree Jackson of the University at Buffalo, went undrafted and is now trying to jump-start his career with the XFL’s D.C. Defenders.

But another undrafted quarterback with whom Palmer worked eventually found his place in the NFL – Kyle Allen of the University of Houston, who started 12 games for the Panthers last season after making the team as a rookie in 2018.

Many quarterbacks want to work with Jordan Palmer. Few do. Montez receiving that opportunity shows that one of the preeminent teachers in the game today believes in him. That speaks louder than most scouting reports.

“He’s a bright cat and I’m extremely lucky to be working with him,” Montez said. “I’m glad that he decided that I would be a good fit for him to work in his camp.”

And if Montez can refine his game from the feet up, he could be this year’s late-round quarterback gem.