Armed with knowledge, Jake Browning is ideal QB for Washington

SEATTLE — One summer night not far from Jonathan Smith’s office at Boise State in 2012, high school football players wolfed down pizza after a long day of workouts. Some relaxed by watching a movie.

Jake Browning’s eyes were trained on a different screen.

He asked Smith if he could watch tape with him, and from 10 until 11:45 that night they fast-forwarded and rewound their way through discussions of coverages, dropbacks, Boise State pass concepts and Folsom High pass concepts.

“It was just me and him just going through tape, and he wasn't batting an eye,” Smith recalled. “He loved it. He was energized. He was asking questions. It was like, ‘OK, this is kind of what we're looking for in a quarterback.’ ”

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Browning, then entering his junior season at Folsom (Calif.) High School, wanted to show Smith and then-Boise State coach Chris Petersen that he was what they were looking for. He looked at the camp as an interview opportunity as much as an instruction opportunity.

“I threw it well, but there were probably some other people that threw it just as well,” Browning said. “I remember sitting in the film room with Coach Smith until late that night. I think that’s when they thought I deserved an offer.”

Browning flew home the next day, and his dad was waiting for him at the bottom of the escalator at the Sacramento airport. He held good news on his lips and a gift in his hands. Petersen had called to offer a scholarship that morning. Browning’s father gave his son a Payday candy bar to symbolize the moment.

Four years later in his office as Washington's offensive coordinator, Smith affirms that Browning’s eager embrace and dissection of film was the final selling point for Petersen and the coaching staff. Browning’s high school coach Troy Taylor said the staff told him they were ready to go home that night but could tell Browning was being authentic in his desire to stay up late and watch cut-ups.

A dedication and love of film study helped Browning grow into a quarterback who tied the national high school record for touchdown passes, who was an All-USA first-team selection in 2014, and who has started for No. 9 Washington from his very first game.

“The only really good quarterbacks that I’ve been around are really high-level film guys,” Petersen said. “I’ve just never seen a quarterback that’s even pretty good that’s not obsessed with the stuff. And he certainly fits that mold.”

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Browning’s earliest experience with football video consisted of watching NFL games with his father, Ed, who played 14 games at quarterback for Oregon State from 1987 to 1991. His dad watched like a former player would, while Jake says he marveled at the big plays.

His evolution into a football film geek began in earnest at age 10, when he met Taylor, a contemporary of Browning’s father who held numerous Cal passing records, including career yards, until Jared Goff broke them last year.

Jake Browning had shown aptitude in the two years he had played quarterback, and Taylor had a private tutoring business in addition to his role coaching offense at Folsom High. A mutual friend who had seen Browning throw recommended he connect with the man who trained quarterbacks by the school’s baseball batting cages down the street.

Taylor videotaped Browning’s mechanics, and the next time they met he handed him a recording that pointed out what needed improvement. “He would take whatever I kind of showed him or told him he'd need to work on and when he would come back, he would pretty much have mastered it,” said Taylor, whose cause was helped by Browning having a smooth throwing motion and strong focus. “You could tell he was serious at a young age about being good.”

Despite Browning’s young age, Taylor welcomed having Browning as a student, and they collaborated once a week. By the time Browning was a student at Folsom High School, their film sessions were almost daily occurrences. Taylor remembers a freshman Browning frequently studying film during school lunch.

“Being good at something is about repetition and honing in on the elements that make a quarterback great, and it is not all that fun and exciting,” said Taylor, now in his first year as Eastern Washington’s quarterbacks coach and passing game coordinator.

“I worry a little bit about guys getting the fun kind of squeezed or wrenched out of them so they won't enjoy it, but that was never a problem with him. You could tell he had a real drive to be great, and he enjoyed that aspect of it.”

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Browning credits the drive to his father, who instilled a sense of the right and wrong way of going about things without browbeating him. Browning’s past and present coaches remark about Ed Browning’s determination to stay in the background and let others handle his son’s football education while he helps educate his son on school and life.

“He really let Jake kind of be his own person,” Taylor said. “I think it has been a big reason why Jake is very confident in terms of being around adults.”

Ed Browning’s understated approach manifested itself in his son in other ways, too. Though Jake threw 10 touchdowns in his first high school game and put up gaudy numbers each season at Folsom High, he did not attempt to build the broad and in some cases flamboyant national profile that has become common among highly rated high school quarterbacks. That decision reflects not only his father's personality, but that of his college coaches, too.

Browning spent the summer before his senior season — a time when many top prospects travel the country to attend invitation-only events and competitions — working out with high school teammates in hopes of getting beyond the NorCal regional playoff round where they had been blown out by De La Salle two years in a row.

“I had Coach Taylor there, who's an ex-NFL quarterback, so I don't know how much more coaching I needed. I didn't really get the whole appeal of it, the glam of it. I just thought, I'd rather win a state championship than be in the Elite 11.

“He kept everything focused, like this is our senior year, we want a state championship, and we ended up doing it, so I think it paid off. I don't think my dad was real into it, but I think some of these guys have parents or high school coaches that think it's a good thing to do, and for some people it is. We threw the ball 50 times a game, so for me it was like, if you want to recruit me, I have a highlight tape, I have a ton of film.

“I didn't really get the point of it, but looking back, it would have been cool to do as a social part, because I know a lot of these quarterbacks know each other through that, and a lot of these players know other players. I get the appeal of it. It's no slam on that. It's just a personal decision. I didn't want to do it.”

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Browning didn’t need to get his face in front of the camera to earn interest or recognition; his play and acumen did that for him. Plus, less time traveling for football meant more time to study football.

“To me, he was in that category of kind of, everybody knows who he is, but we always thought he was a little bit undersold,” said Stanford coach David Shaw, whose No. 6 Cardinal faces Washington on Friday night. “Some of the other guys got more hype, I think, but I think he was more ready to play college football than a lot of guys maybe that had more national hype. Footwork, accuracy, athletic ability, he had all those tools.”

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Petersen’s public appearances in the offseason included measured responses to huge expectations around the Washington program.

But Browning’s effort and the ability he’s shown in 21 months here have extended the coaching staff’s comfort zone.

The first time came in their willingness to embrace Browning as their future quarterback with an early scholarship offer. “We're pretty thorough, in regards to taking our time, especially at quarterback,” Smith said. “That was out of the ordinary for us to feel that comfortable, at that young of age for sure.”

The second time he inspired the staff to do something unprecedented was when he became the first true freshman quarterback on a Petersen-coached team to win the starting job. “I think they were looking at it like, whoever they think is going to do the best, they're going to play,” Browning said. “I remember Coach Smith made me the starter and was like, Hey look, I'm in a contract year and there's no pressure but, I'm starting a 19-year-old at quarterback and you've got to be smart off the field because there's a lot on the line.”

Browning decided the best chance to win and retain the job was to “try and outwork everybody.” So he combed film and crammed on the playbook from the first day he enrolled in early January, 2015.

“He's studied just as hard as anyone that I've been around,” Petersen said. “He was up here morning, noon, and night. He was just in here. He would go in there and you would see him the whole time, just getting film work done on his own, and it paid off. It gave him a fighting chance.”

In high school, Browning said, defensive backs often played one coverage. In college he sees a dozen, and they can change in a split second before the snap. There are first- and second-down looks, blitz and third-down looks and red-zone looks, and he assigns himself specific days of film study (usually Monday through Wednesday) for each. Sunday daylight hours include a review of the previous day’s film, with Sunday nights offering the first look at the next game’s opponent. On Thursdays he picks film of two games involving offenses that are similar to the Huskies’.

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This season all of that effort has led to the No. 3 pass efficiency rating in the FBS and a touchdown-to-interception ratio that has improved from 8:5 last season to 7:1 this season.

Washington had a nation’s-best streak of six 40-plus point games snapped last week at Arizona, but it remains unbeaten in its past seven games.

And Browning remains in the film room.

“He doesn’t look like a young quarterback,” Shaw said. “He looks like a veteran that’s out there running the show, and you see by the number of different guys touching the ball, he doesn’t have to just lock in on one guy.

“He stays in rhythm, he goes from No. 1 to No. 2, he can get the ball out of his hand quickly, which means he has great anticipation and awareness and patience. His progress has been impressive.”

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