Enjoy Friday Reading
Nick Angelich
The prized arm and precious mind of J.T. Daniels
SANTA ANA, Calif. — After J.T. Daniels had won a national title and the Gatorade National Player of the Year award, after the attention had poured in following his announcement that he’d graduate high school a year early and join USC football this summer, after his jersey was retired at Mater Dei High and he had accomplished more than he had set out to do in his high school football career, Daniels came to a simple, but unexpected, conclusion.
“It just hit me like a brick,” he said. “I was like, ‘Be honest with yourself, you’re really not happy. You’re not finding the right things.’ So, it wasn’t like a hard, internal suffering for me. It was pretty obvious.”
Shortly before his 18th birthday, with the realization that football success had not equated to happiness, he began to seek an answer that would lead him there.
Daniels said he came upon the Buddhist philosophy of detachment (or non-attachment). He began working on the practice of separating his happiness from his achievements. He read up on Jay Shetty, a former monk turned motivational speaker and writer. He discovered meditation and mindfulness.
“As cliché as it is, happiness is a state of mind,” Daniels said. “I was worrying about other shit, like winning stuff, that I never took the time to create a peaceful mind space in my own mind.”
It’s in these moments, when Daniels can tap into his emotions or pontificate on the “myth of masculinity,” that it’s easy to forget he’s 18. Or that he has yet to graduate high school. Or that there is a growing expectation he will be the starting quarterback at USC this fall when he could’ve been starting for his high school team 40 miles south of the Coliseum.
During the winter heading into the 2014 NFL Draft, private quarterback coach Jordan Palmer received a phone call.
Daniels’ parents, Steve and Alison, had gotten Palmer’s number through the friend of a friend, and Steve was wondering if his son could come and train with Palmer during his next passing session.
Palmer’s next session was with the soon-to-be third pick of the 2014 NFL Draft, Blake Bortles.
And Daniels was 13.
“I said, ‘Absolutely not. Your seventh-grade son cannot just hop in on that workout,’ ” Palmer said.
Palmer agreed, however, that Daniels could come and warm up with them, catch some of Bortles’ passes and watch from the sideline (stay out of the way, please and thank you). So, that’s exactly what Daniels did.
“I can’t sit here and tell you that I thought he was a superstar the moment I saw him. I didn’t know what seventh-graders were supposed to look like,” Palmer said. “But I could tell by the questions he was asking me that he was really different from the other kids.”
One of those questions was whether Palmer had a book he could recommend to him about leadership.
Palmer recommended It’s Your Ship, a 240-page book written by a former Navy captain about how he had changed the leadership and management models aboard the USS Benfold. It was the kind of book that had circulated around Wall Street boardrooms and NFL quarterback circles, the latter of which Palmer was still a part. It was certainly not a book found on any seventh-grade English teacher’s reading curriculum, but less than a week later, Daniels called Palmer to say he had finished the book and hoped the two could meet to discuss what he had taken from the Navy captain’s writing.
“He had clearly got everything out of the book that the author had intended,” Palmer said. “I was like, ‘Well, all right, he’s really smart and he’s really serious about this.’ ”
The two began working together. Daniels didn’t instantly start throwing with Bortles and other pro quarterbacks during sessions, but it worked up to that. Daniels also kept working on his own and playing with Southern California 7-on-7 teams.
During his eighth-grade summer season, his father started noticing that a lot of the top high school quarterbacks at some of the camps were older. He learned that many had repeated grades before high school to come into their high school careers, when college football recruitment would really begin, more physically and mentally ready to compete.
Steve and J.T. decided they would do that, too. Expectedly, Steve faced criticism for the decision, but it’s not one he regrets, saying, “I held him back, for the love of my son, to give him an advantage at his biggest passion in the world. … I gave him an advantage. It’s a completely legal thing.”
J.T. Daniels describes it simply as “a business decision,” though he admits that his second run through eighth grade spent mostly between online classes at home and working out was “a pretty damn boring year.”
That year, he was introduced to Scot Prohaska, a sport performance coach in Southern California who was training many NFL and NHL players during their offseasons, in addition to younger athletes.
Prohaska made J.T. a deal — he could come and train with the professional athletes if on every Sunday night Daniels sent Prohaska his “gratitude journal,” detailing three reasons why he had felt grateful the previous week.
It was easy: Send it in on time, you get to train with the pros during the morning sessions. Don’t get it in by Sunday night, you train with the other high school athletes when they were done with school.
During the first three years, Daniels only missed the Sunday deadline twice. On those occasions, Prohaska said, “He was miserable during those workouts.”
On his first few days with the pros, the 14-year-old homeschooled kid was mostly ignored. Prohaska noticed Daniels pacing before and after the sessions, seeing that he was hoping to talk with the pros but that they weren’t giving him much of an opening.
By the second week, Daniels had seen a moment and taken it, and then made his home in those conversations between the drills. He wanted to know what they had done in terms of their personal development and leadership growth at 14 and beyond to put themselves in a position to be professional athletes. He wanted to know what they thought about current events. He wanted to know about the nuances in their lives that they considered important to their journeys.
“It’s almost like he thought he belonged,” Prohaska said. “He felt comfortable enough to walk up and start asking questions. Then they looked at me like, ‘Who the hell is this kid?’ ”
Had Daniels not repeated eighth grade and instead gone right to Mater Dei High, he probably would have started at quarterback. But when he came in the next season, he was — like the other quarterbacks his father had seen on the 7-on-7 and camp circuits — ahead of the pack.
In the second game of Daniels’ freshman season, Mater Dei starting quarterback Matt McDonald went down with a season-ending injury. Daniels stepped in and had the job locked down, ending the season with 33 touchdown passes and four interceptions. McDonald ended up transferring high schools and Daniels finished his Mater Dei career throwing for more than 12,000 yards and 152 touchdowns in three seasons.
Daniels committed to USC in July 2017, and a few weeks later, he was asked if he was really going to reclassify from the high school class of 2019 to the 2018 class. Daniels laughed it off. He knew that college basketball prospects occasionally reclassify to accelerate their entry into the NBA Draft pool. But he hadn’t thought about it for himself with football.
He knew he was going to USC — the question now centered on whether he’d be there for the start of the 2018 or 2019 season. Daniels consulted his family and personal coaches about it.
Palmer said his conversation with Daniels was the same as the one he had a few months later with Sam Darnold as the USC quarterback was deciding between going to the NFL or staying with the Trojans for another year.
“The reasons to stay or go were similar,” Palmer said of the two conversations. “You don’t decide to go to the NFL Draft because you’re ready to start in the league. … I think really when you decide to leave college for the NFL, it’s, ‘What else do I have to accomplish and what else do I need to do to get myself ready for the next level?’ If you’re mature, mature quarterbacks are making the decision that way.”
Even if Darnold had stayed another year, even if Daniels hadn’t won a national title, Daniels knew that he would become better as a football player if he were on the USC team in 2018 instead of the Mater Dei team.
But the reclassification would mean that Daniels would have to take 11 classes during the fall — eight at school, three online at home.
Midway through his junior season at Mater Dei, Daniels decided he’d definitely go early, assuming everything fell into place with the NCAA and USC. Then word began to get out, and the quarterback who had been gaining the expected national recognition like every other top quarterback had become a player who was attempting to do something rarely seen at the college football level.
And though he had been showing himself as seemingly able to handle that increased exposure, he made a call to Prohaska.
“He called me and said, ‘Hey, Scot, I never thought this would happen to me, but I’m finding that the attention I’m getting is actually addicting,’ ” Prohaska said. “That awareness for a 17-year-old young man is pretty special in my book.”
Prohaska told him that although it was a problem, the solution was also pretty basic — Daniels could decide to use the attention for himself or use it to shed light on other teammates or issues that were important to him.
It was a reminder of what Daniels had read in A Season of Life, a book Prohaska said became almost Bible-like for them during the first few seasons they worked together — that football can and should be bigger than just a sport.
The addicting desire for attention, especially for an 18-year-old about to step onto a huge stage, is far more understandable than an 18-year-old who reads up on meditation and mindfulness.
When Daniels is thinking about his platform, he’s a bit more reserved. He’s calculated because he knows people will listen and read into what he says. He’s aware there are eyes on him.
“Athletes are highly valued in society,” Daniels said. “Josh (Rosen) has like 60,000 followers on Instagram, and he’s not even in the NFL yet. Odell Beckham has 10 million followers. If he wanted to say something, a lot of people would hear it. So, once I have that message and I have a platform, I’ll absolutely use it. Until then, I have to develop my message.”
Rosen has been a good example for Daniels. They’re both Southern California kids who came out of the Trinity League and were put in the spotlight early thanks to social media and their ratings and standings. Already, Daniels has 22,000 Instagram followers and 8,000 on Twitter.
Like Rosen holding the reins at UCLA from the moment he stepped on campus, many are predicting the same will be true for Daniels at USC. And Daniels knows that with that position comes an immediate platform.
Over the past few seasons, Daniels watched closely as Rosen voiced his opinion on the Trump presidency, the NCAA, sponsorships and even dormitory-styled hot tubs.
“I love what Josh did,” Daniels said. “A few things, he said he was a little impulsive and wish he didn’t say. … I’m really glad I got to watch Josh Rosen do that. That’s a big reason I’m not saying anything yet, because I don’t want to make an impulsive mistake.”
In a recent Q&A with ESPN The Magazine, Rosen discussed that outspokenness during his time in Westwood.
“Starting off, I was pretty arrogant,” Rosen said in the Q&A. “They handed an 18-year-old the keys to a D1 FBS-contending university. I blew up a little bit, said some things I didn’t mean, and that follows you. You get one chance to make a first impression. I made the wrong one.”
When Daniels thinks about what his first impression will be — outside of football — he has more hesitancy than with almost any other topic. He gets a second throw or start if the first one doesn’t go as well. He knows that the same doesn’t apply when expressing his views and in how people view him.
“It’s going to be personally developed. I have a lot of ideas, but I don’t know how to execute it,” he said. “Once I develop that, then I’m sure I’ll be very outspoken.”
Daniels threw 67 touchdown passes in his sophomore season, and during the evaluation period the following spring, college coaches visited Mater Dei daily to see him.
Mater Dei coach Bruce Rollinson remembers a practice with 10 college coaches in attendance, eight of them from east of the Rockies. They kept asking Rollinson whether Daniels was certain to stay in the West, whether they had any chance at getting him to even visit their school.
Rollinson called Daniels over to the group and posed the question to the player himself. Daniels, without hesitation, said he was looking for two main aspects in his college choice: stability in the coaching staff and the opportunity to study cognitive neurology.
“And as soon as he walked away, one guy from a prominent university said, ‘I don’t even know what cognitive neurology is.’ And another one said, ‘Shit, I don’t know if we even have it,’ ” Rollinson remembered. “I thought to myself, ‘Only J.T. Daniels.’ ”
Four months later, Daniels committed to USC.
USC coach Clay Helton, at the time, was under contract until 2020 (he has since been extended through 2023), which meant that even if Daniels had played his senior year at Mater Dei, Helton would still be under contract through Daniels’ first two seasons in Los Angeles.
Daniels plans to study psychology (his sister Madison is a psychology major at UC Santa Cruz) and explore USC’s five topic areas within that major — cognitive, developmental, clinical, biological and social.
The study of psychology fits, Daniels believes, into what he has really been building since he was a seventh-grader trying to throw with Bortles — how can his mind, and how it works, make him better? As a football player. As someone with a platform. As a human.
This past year, he used his readings on psychology and leadership to start a conversation with Rollinson about his coaching style. He asked Rollinson if, heading into Daniels’ junior season, the man who’s on the Mount Rushmore of high school football coaches could adjust his coaching style and just try to be a bit more positive.
“He says, ‘Take it for what it’s worth. It’s no problem. I know when you’re serious about motivating me and I know when I’m not doing well,’ ” Rollinson said. “But he said, ‘I function best in a positive environment.’ ”
Daniels held up his end of the deal, too. He began wearing short, throwback Mater Dei shorts to the team’s tough weightlifting sessions. “For some reason he’s addicted to showing off his legs,” Daniels’ quarterback backup, Bryce Young, said with a laugh. “I don’t know why.” Added Mase Funa, a linebacker and Oregon commit: “Those shorts are two sizes too small.”
To start every game last season, Daniels would break the first huddle by calling fake plays to make his teammates laugh. On the occasions when Rollinson thought the team was too loose before a game, Daniels would remind him that the team plays well when the players are that way.
Since 1989, every Mater Dei starting quarterback except one has gone on to receive a Division I scholarship. But Rollinson said he put more, from a football-perspective, on the shoulders of Daniels than any of them.
Daniels was able to handle it because of his curiosity, introspection and thirst for knowledge beyond the game.
“Once I found a purpose outside of football, I felt more fulfilled and happier,” he said. “And in general, my demeanor is more patient. I’m more calm. … It’s super freeing. I’m not worried and stressed.”
This comes from a teenager who knows of the expectations and anticipation emanating from the USC fan base. Those around Daniels, the people who have trained and coached him, are cautious when putting out expectations. Too often the words can sound hyperbolic. Sometimes they create excessive hype, which can lead to external perceptions that a player has fallen short before he’s even gotten started.
Not to mention a player who is entering college after just three years of high school football.
But there’s something about Daniels’ approach to the game that allows Palmer to say Daniels is “probably the most ready to play out of any high school quarterback” he has ever seen. That statement has more to do with what’s in Daniels’ head than any play he’s ever made.