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How quarterback coach helped Garoppolo up his game

Technically speaking, Jimmy Garoppolo's quarterback coach - who has worked with him since he first started playing the position - taught him to throw the ball a certain way. Once they got to a certain level of mechanical expertise, Jeff Christensen essentially showed Garoppolo correct throwing dynamics.

The lesson for the Rolling Meadows High School grad, boiled down to layman's terms, was at the time: Throw like Tom Brady. Don't throw like Aaron Rodgers. Or at least how Rodgers was throwing back then.

That story, however, requires a giant asterisk. Christensen, 57, a former NFL quarterback who runs the Throw It Deep Training Academy in southwest suburban Lockport, was talking about how Rodgers threw the ball when he was coming out of Cal as a first-round pick.

Christensen stresses that he now considers Rodgers to have some of the best throwing mechanics of any quarterback. But that wasn't always the case.

"I met (Rodgers) at Bob Johnson's camp years ago, and he had singled out my son, (former Iowa and Eastern Illinois QB) Jake, as having one of the best throwing motions at the camp," Christensen told PFW last week. "Each counselor could draft two guys, and Aaron drafted Jake."

Jeff Christensen and Rodgers got talking about his son's throwing motion, and Christensen couldn't help but ask Rodgers about his own mechanics. He wanted to know why Rodgers held the ball so high and tight to his ear - an unusual-looking delivery that would appear completely foreign to anyone who has watched Rodgers throw a pass over the past decade.

This happened in the summer of 2005, right after Rodgers had been drafted by the Green Bay Packers.

"'Well, it's quicker,' he said. I told him I thought it was not quicker," Christensen sheepishly said. "I said, 'Here's my suggestion. You seem like a very nice young man. Everyone's had great things to say about you. But when you get to Green Bay, watch what (Brett) Favre does.

"'Watch where he holds it. See why he holds it there. And then imitate him.'"

About three years later, the two ran into each other again briefly. By then Rodgers was just about to get his shot as Favre's replacement. Christensen asked Rodgers if he remembered the conversation - and had he changed his mechanics?"

Rodgers had remembered. And he had two responses: "Yup" and "Yup."

Christensen isn't trying to be boastful, and he cringes at the idea of thinking he somehow changed Rodgers - he says he did not. It's just that Christensen believes so strongly in his system and what it takes for a quarterback to maximize his throwing motion.

And that's at the heart of what he wanted for Garoppolo, who is set to make his first start for the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday against the Chicago Bears, which Christensen is thrilled to be witnessing up close at Soldier Field. It will be just another view of how far he and Garoppolo have come together.

The then-sophomore linebacker - who was perhaps better known as a high-school basketball star at the time in 2007 - came to Christensen for a crash course on how to throw a football before switching over to QB before his junior year at Rolling Meadows.

Brady was one of the quarterbacks Christensen wanted Garoppolo to mimic. And as Christensen points out, he absolutely would have shown Garoppolo tape of how Rodgers throws the ball now, as naturally and smoothly as anyone in football, had he been throwing it that way back then.

"People are so enamored with quickness, getting rid of the ball so quickly," Christensen explains now. "But if it's not accurate, you can be as quick as you want. It doesn't matter. If you're taking the flow of your arm, and it's one-third of a second quicker but it's inaccurate, well, you're not playing."

Garoppolo was a quick study, and he had a natural gift for throwing from his days as a baseball pitcher. The longer he and Christensen got into the nitty-gritty of the mechanics, the deeper they got. Little did Garoppolo know at the time, but he was receiving graduate-level instruction on the matter before he ever took a snap in college.

"If you get the right information, it's going to come out the right angles, it's going to spin right and you're going to be accurate," Christensen said. "That's how it should look."

And that's what Christensen will be looking for Sunday when Garoppolo takes the field in his hometown for his first start with his new NFL team. He was traded to the 49ers just a few days shy of his 26th birthday and will make his third NFL start, the first two coming with the New England Patriots in replacing Brady twice to open the 2016 season.

That Garoppolo and Brady ended up as teammates in the first place blows Christensen's mind. The coach would show Garoppolo tape of Brady ad nauseam in order to demonstrate what he thought was textbook form.

"Like it was meant to be," Christensen said.

Garoppolo's ascension to becoming a second-round pick of the Patriots out of Eastern Illinois is a fascinating story. Just as natural as his throwing motion is, that's how tough it was for him to get bigger schools to notice him. Christensen and Garoppolo's head coach at Rolling Meadows, Doug Millsaps, took him all over, including to Big Ten schools, but to little avail.

Christensen won't say which schools passed on Garoppolo, nor will he say - out of respect - the less-than-glowing things those program's coaches said about one of his favorite protégés. But he does tell the story of talking to then Eastern Illinois offensive coordinator Roy Wittke, who was recruiting another QB prospect just down the road from where Garoppolo was playing one night.

Christensen had one favor: He wanted Wittke to leave that other player's game at halftime, drive the 20 minutes to Rolling Meadows that Friday night and watch the second half of Garoppolo's game. Christensen knew Garoppolo was a better quarterback and wanted Wittke to get his own version of the Pepsi Challenge. Wittke agreed to it, and it didn't take much convincing after that.

"I think (Garoppolo) threw eight passes in that second half. Three or four of them were missiles," Christensen said. " (Wittke) looked at me and said, 'Oh, my god, that's Tony Romo.'"

Wittke had coached Romo at Eastern Illinois also. He shifted gears and made sure he did everything he could to land Garoppolo at the school. It was a good match, and Garoppolo went on to do what Romo had done: winning the Walter Payton Award, given to the most outstanding college football player on the FCS (formerly Division I-AA) level. Garoppolo also smashed many of Romo's passing records in the process, as well as those of Sean Payton, the New Orleans Saints head coach who was a star QB there in the mid-1980s.

Christensen has gone on to work with a number of NFL quarterbacks, including Washington's Kirk Cousins and Miami's Ryan Tannehill, plus four others who started games in the league this season. The QB guru is always amazed at the success of his pupils, but he said what sets Garoppolo apart in at least one way is how he handles himself when things break down around him.

"Jimmy only knows one way of doing it," Christensen said. "When he started getting harassed in the pocket, he deviates back to normal. He gets chased around and banged around a bit, he will get better as a thrower.

"Ninety-five out of a hundred guys will start overstriding. But Jim goes back to the right way of doing it. He's the only guy I've ever coached who does that."

It goes back to their long training sessions when Garoppolo first cut his teeth at the position, those first seeds of hard work that helped launch him to where he's at now.

"I found a video of (Garoppolo) the other day throwing the ball in the park in the summer," Christensen said. "It was me, him and just three other kids. It was something like 105 degrees outside that day.

"We were just working on really simple routes. But even then at age 16, and you just see the engagement of his rotator cuff. It was so impressive looking back even now."

On Sunday, Christensen will watch his student go to work as he embarks on the second phase of his pro career. You get the idea that Garoppolo holds a special place in Christensen's heart, as much as the coach loves and respects all his students from every level of football. That has as much to do with Garoppolo's commitment to excellence as it does his natural ability, which he discovered more than a decade ago in their early sessions with no one else there to witness the budding greatness.

"Jimmy just 100 percent bought in back then," Christensen said. "I'd say, 'Do this,' and he'd just do it. If I could tell you the amount of times he'd be throwing balls at age 16 or 17 at a camp I was running, it would blow your mind. He'd just show up, make the move and throw the ball from Point A to Point B the right way.

"He kept getting better and better and better. And he still is."

The gist of Jimmy G

Jeff Christensen, left, part of the 1983 NFL draft class, now is helping others chase their quarterback dreams. Here he's working with a group of high school and college quarterbacks from the Chicago area in 2013. Courtesy of Jeff Christensen
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