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http://thelab.bleacherreport.com/the-forgotten-prodigy/
The Forgotten Prodigy
Lane Kiffin anointed David Sills the future of USC football at 13.
Six years later, Sills is still trying to get his career back on track.
By Matt Hayes
August 25, 2016
He didn't ask for this, you know. Couldn't have imagined it in three forevers.
Which is sort of what the past six years have felt like.
David Sills didn't ask for Lane Kiffin to show up and turn his life sideways. Didn't ask to be offered a scholarship to mighty USC when he was just 13 years old. Didn't ask for the national attention, and then scrutiny, that came with the offer. Didn't ask for all that uncertainty while still figuring out puberty.
"I never asked for any of it," he says.
All he ever really wanted was to play quarterback. That was the dream: to be the leader of a football team—not to be part of the Lane Kiffin Circus.
That's still the dream, which is why the one-time can't-miss prospect now finds himself at El Camino College, a dozen miles as the car drives and so much farther than that as the football flies from the famed USC campus in South Central Los Angeles. He's chasing the ghost of a moment that has defined his athletic life.
He was once the quarterback of the future at USC, the next big star among Hollywood glitz and glam. Now he's battling for the starting job at a local junior college in Torrance, California, a cold slap of irony in the warm, content embrace of Southern California.
But this isn't just a story of the ills of modern recruiting or of a young man getting caught in the seedy underbelly of college football. That would be too easy an out.
Sills' story is a story of life—a kick-you-in-the-gut, knock-you-on-your-ass, get-up-and-fight story of life.
A lot of the Sills narrative, from its contrived highs to its sinking lows, you might already know. It all began six years ago, when the new coach at USC, Kiffin, decided in the second week of his tenure that he'd offer a scholarship to a 13-year-old quarterback from Delaware, of all places, without ever having seen him play in person.
Three years later, Kiffin was fired, and his replacement, Steve Sarkisian, said Sills no longer fit USC's scheme. Then Sills missed a majority of his senior season in high school because of an injury, and the next thing you know, he's sitting in head coach Dana Holgorsen's office at West Virginia after his freshman season, and one of the game's most respected quarterback gurus tells him he can play a long time in the NFL.
At wide receiver.
"For someone who has worked his whole life to play quarterback," Holgorsen says, pausing to reflect, "yeah, that could not have been easy to hear."
"If you told me in seventh grade that I was going to be playing wide receiver at West Virginia, I would've never believed you," Sills says. "I'm not going to lie, it hurt."
That's your long story short for Sills, but it's not the end of the story.
Sills packed up and left Morgantown, transferring his lifelong dream of playing quarterback to the great unknown that is junior college football—in the very city where the crazy ride began with that unthinkable phone call from one of the most controversial and galvanizing figures in college sports.
Now 20 years old with twice that tucked away in real-life capital, Sills has gone from one of the most hyped recruits in history to waking up every summer morning and rounding up teammates to lead skeleton practices for the lost and unloved at El Camino.
"I've put too much work into doing what I love to let it crush me," Sills says.
"I know I can play this position. And I'm not giving up on my dream of playing quarterback."
✦✦✦
It's one of those perfect late-spring San Diego mornings, cool and crisp with just enough cloud cover.
The morning dew skips off Sills' cleats as they move around the artificial turf at Coronado High. It's 90 minutes before another day of Steve Clarkson's renowned quarterback camp—the very camp Sills has attended since he was 10 with the very quarterback coach who first introduced Sills to Kiffin—and Sills is out early, as usual, working on the same thing as usual: his mechanics.
In all the years Sills has participated in Clarkson's camps, of all the drills he has completed and the skills he has learned, nothing has been more important than this. Mechanics. That's why this journey has returned to where it began, with the teacher and the student—and no outside noise.
Sills admits he has developed a "hitch" in his motion over the years—one that Clarkson began tweaking on Memorial Day weekend and will continue to privately work on with Sills through this fall at El Camino.
The result of the hitch, Holgorsen says, is that the ball doesn't get out of Sills' hands with the needed velocity.
"You hear those words from a guy that knows quarterbacks like [Holgorsen] does, and you start to take inventory of who you are and where you're going," Sills says. "I'm not in denial. I know I have work to do."
A work in progress at 20, and a lifetime from the kid Kiffin saw at 13.
Kiffin never publicly spoke about Sills in his time as the USC coach—he couldn't, per NCAA rules—which ended on a fateful day in September 2013, when he was yanked off the team bus at LAX after a loss to Arizona State and fired on the spot. (He couldn't even walk back on the bus to get his briefcase.)
After laying low for an offseason, Kiffin took a job with Alabama, where coach Nick Saban allows his assistants to speak to the media about as often as the Crimson Tide lose games.
So from the time he made the offer to the time Sills realized it wasn't going to work at West Virginia, we heard nothing from Kiffin about why he offered a 13-year-old the chance to play quarterback at one of the top five programs in college football.
He can't comment now, either—Sills is technically a recruit again. But after speaking with former USC staffers, there's little doubt what Kiffin's intentions were.
"You have to remember: We had four losses the year before, Pete [Carroll] left, the NCAA thing was there, and we were losing [momentum]," one former USC staffer says. "[Sills] clearly had talent for such a young kid. Lane's thought was any news was good news. He knew it would be the lead story everywhere."
Says another former staffer under Kiffin: "Lane may as well have been P.T. Barnum those first few months."
This wasn't new for Kiffin, who did the same a year earlier as the new coach at Tennessee, where he took over a downtrodden program and did everything within his power to force the spotlight—negative or not—on Knoxville. He accused then-Florida coach Urban Meyer of cheating (Meyer didn't), got into a war of words with Steve Spurrier (never a winning move) and, by the time he had worked all of 14 months at Tennessee, committed numerous secondary NCAA violations (including using "hostesses" to help land recruits).
In comparison, offering a scholarship to a 13-year-old doesn't even move the meter. Even with the bizarre way it happened.
Kiffin is a longtime friend of Clarkson, who is based in Los Angeles and was a college star at San Jose State. Clarkson has tutored some of the best quarterbacks to play the college game over the past 25 years, including Andrew Luck, Matt Leinart and Matt Barkley.
Clarkson sent Kiffin a link to a video of Sills—a 6'0", 140-pound 13-year-old—and Kiffin called to ask if Sills was a sophomore or junior.
"I said, 'Lane, he's 13,'" Clarkson remembers. "He said, 'Get the f--k out of here.'"
Less than an hour later, Kiffin called back to tell Clarkson he wanted to offer Sills a scholarship. And just like that—on a whim, on a dare (Clarkson says he "taunted" Kiffin about Meyer beating him on the recruiting trail) or because USC was losing its mojo—Sills' life changed.
At the time it seemed like the change was for the better.
"My dad told me about the offer, and I said, 'What are you talking about?'" Sills says. "I was just out there playing football, doing something I love. The next thing you know, I'm talking to Lane Kiffin. I wasn't in awe. It was more, Wait a minute—what's going on right now? I still remember thinking, Is this even real?"
It was real, and it quickly turned for the worse. Before Sills reached the eighth grade—think about that, the eighth grade—he was already a media darling/villain. He was getting face time on SportsCenter and had television bobbleheads screaming at each other about the good and evil of a 13-year-old accepting a scholarship offer.
Clarkson already was calling him the next Tiger Woods.
"Seventh grade? All I cared about was video games," says Tate Martell, one of the top quarterback recruits in the 2017 class, who committed to Ohio State this summer. "He was 13? That's unreal to expect someone to deal with that kind of stuff."
The day after Kiffin called, Sills woke up at 5 a.m. and met his high school coach, Dwayne Thomas, for a 6 a.m. workout. Running, lifting weights, throwing to receivers.
✦✦✦
Sills' father, David Sills IV, remembers some of the earliest traces of this spirit and passion that just won't quit—the earliest traces of his son's dream.
When he was eight, Sills went to a weeklong overnight football camp offered by the Philadelphia Eagles. His mom was worried about him being away from home for so long. Sure enough, a few days after he arrived, there was a problem. A big problem.
"I asked David, 'How are you doing? Is it fun?'" David IV says. "He says to me, 'Dad, they're not teaching me anything. They're treating me like I'm an eight-year-old.'"
Winning the award for best quarterback in the eight- to 10-year-old group wasn't cutting it. The next question: What would?
It was then that David IV remembered a newspaper article his father sent him about a quarterback coach in Los Angeles. David III wasn't a big sports fan, but he never missed a game of his son's football career at Newark High School in Delaware and at Virginia Military Institute. He also had an uncanny eye for detail.
He was a professional dog trainer and was on the board of the American Kennel Club for more than 20 years. He was meticulous and deliberate, and in a 1964 field trial, he had the youngest Labrador to ever win a national championship. If something was going to get done, by God, it was going to get done right.
That's why David III sent his son the article about the quarterback coach named Steve Clarkson. If his grandson didn't think he was being properly coached, why not try someone else?
"We just looked at it like a vacation," David IV says. "We had never been to Los Angeles, and never been to Disneyland, so we thought, 'What the heck? Let's go.' It really was nothing more than that."
It didn't take long for Clarkson to realize Sills was unique. His accuracy and understanding of the game on the field was impressive, his knowledge off the field remarkable. He was 10 years old and recognized defensive fronts and coverages many quarterbacks twice his age struggle to see. He was standing in front of a grease board diagramming plays to beat defenses—while standing on his tiptoes to reach the top of the board.
"I told his dad, 'Your son does things that can't be taught,'" Clarkson says. "Anyone can throw the ball through a wall. Not everyone can play the position."
So began the relationship with Clarkson and the idea that Sills, whose dream was to play quarterback in the NFL, had finally found a coach who could get him there. No matter the cost.
David IV says he has no idea how much money he has spent for Clarkson's services, including the latest work while his son prepares for the 2016 season. But does it really matter? It can't be more than the money David IV spent to help Red Lion Christian Academy and Eastern Christian Academy—two schools his son played for in high school—field football teams.
Long before his son even thought about playing quarterback, back when he was in kindergarten, David IV began spending thousands of dollars building the Red Lion Christian Academy football program. They wanted to play football, but they needed direction.
David IV's commercial contracting company built a new gym at the school in the late 1990s, and he grew fond of the academy. So when they asked for help, he initially bought equipment and helmets and pads. Later he would help build a 1,000-seat stadium and practice field.
Sills would play for Red Lion and start at quarterback as an eighth-grader, but in winter 2011, the new administration grew overwhelmed by the team's impact on the school and there was a Delaware Interscholastic Athletic Association investigation of the program. The most egregious charge—the alleged changing of a player's grade—was never proven.
By 2012, Sills and a majority of the football team had a decision to make: transfer to another school and sit out a season, or start another school and field another football team. David IV told his son he could play anywhere he wanted, and Sills responded that he didn't want to play at a private powerhouse in another state; he wanted to stay in Delaware and play with his friends.
So Eastern Christian was born, its student body more than 90 percent football players.
This led to criticism that David IV was a modern version of Marv Marinovich, a father whose legendary micromanaging of his star quarterback son Todd was the prototype of helicopter parents. Marinovich played at USC, never reached his potential and flamed out in the NFL. The USC connection made it easier for critics to draw comparisons.
"I feel sorry for the Marinovich family; I don't know how it is or was," David IV says. "I try to support my kids in a good way, and I'm not going to stop because someone thinks I shouldn't. I'm certainly not pushing my kids to be something they don't want to be."
He didn't push his daughter, Emma, to play golf at Delaware. He did, however, pay for private lessons in Florida because she asked for help.
He didn't push his son Jahmere, who, after earning a scholarship to Mississippi State, left Starkville when, Sills says, "he couldn't follow the rules" and transferred to FCS North Dakota. It didn't take there, either, and David IV spent this summer looking for a landing spot for the son he adopted in 2010 after his mother was shot and killed and his grandfather died of a heart attack.
When asked where he'd be without Sills, Jahmere says, "On the street or dead."
"When did it become such a bad thing for a father to help his son?" says Thomas, the Eastern Christian coach. "My son just turned eight, and he wanted this huge, 400-piece Star Wars thing put together. He did it, and I told him he has the qualities of an engineer. He can play sports or be an engineer or do whatever he wants. I'll help him in any way I can to achieve his goals. Frankly, more fathers should."
✦✦✦
It was September 2015, Week 3 of Sills' senior season. Eastern Christian had traveled to DeSoto, Texas, and Sills was suddenly at a critical point in his career.
Despite David IV's best intentions, the decision to create Eastern Christian hadn't done much to help his son achieve his dreams. Eastern Christian's officials made a critical mistake in the school’s first year: The Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association only recognizes private schools that play state public schools, and none were on Eastern Christian's first schedule in 2012. So they played only three games that season.
Sarkisian had made it clear that Sills didn't fit his quarterback profile, but Sills got a full season in 2013, and his recruiting process was in full swing again by that September.
He was playing well and felt in control.
"My comfort zone has always been on the field," Sills says. "When you're there, you can see things and react. You can anticipate what will happen next and react. You have a plan, you execute the plan."
Until, that is, there's an obstacle that can't be avoided.
Three quarters into the game against DeSoto, Sills already had thrown for more than 300 yards and rushed for nearly 200, and Eastern Christian trailed 28-26. He talked Thomas into going for a two-point conversion to tie the game.
He would never play another down of high school football.
"He rolls out, gets to the corner and gets his ankle rolled and breaks it," Thomas says.
That play did more than just end Sills' season. It ended any hope of college coaches seeing the new Sills, free of his USC commitment and with a new skills package. The skinny pocket passer had become a dangerous dual-threat quarterback.
"If you put David in a 100-meter race with everyone on this team," says West Virginia wideout Daikiel Shorts, a childhood friend of Sills', "he's going to win nine times out of 10."
"What really made me mad was all of those college coaches weren't going to be able to truly see what David had become," Thomas says.
As most everyone else backed away from the uncertainty of it all, West Virginia moved in. The sales pitch was easy, considering two of Sills' closest friends and high school teammates were also in Morgantown.
Then a month into the 2015 season, WVU was short on receivers, and Holgorsen asked Sills if he could help out. A week later, he was on the field at Baylor—and caught a 35-yard touchdown pass.
He finished the season the same way it began, catching the game-winning touchdown pass in WVU's 43-42 Cactus Bowl victory over Arizona State.
Five months later, he was in Holgorsen's office absorbing reality.
"He has every intangible that you want from a starting quarterback," Holgorsen says. "He's tall, he runs well, he has good mobility, he's smart and knows the game of football and makes good decisions. But I told him the entire time he was here that until that ball goes from point A to point B when and how I want it to, I can't play him at quarterback."
✦✦✦
And so Sills is back in Southern California, working hard to correct that hitch.
He and Clarkson are working on a more compact throwing motion, on hip placement and fluidity, on shoulder framing and on receiving the snap with equal balance on each foot.
"Every movement affects every throw," Clarkson says. "When you have too many moving parts, you overcompensate, and the next thing you know, you've got a hitch and it impacts everything—from the way you perform to your confidence. If you're going to fix something like that, you've got to break it down and rebuild it."
It's basic math: more repetitions, more game experience, more one-on-one coaching—from Clarkson and El Camino offensive coordinator/quarterbacks coach Tim Kaub, who has worked with Clarkson (and Sills) for years—equals a better chance to play quarterback at the FBS level.
"It's not something that's insurmountable," Kaub says. "There are guys in the NFL with a hitch in their throwing motion. A lot can be attached to that stigma, but it can be overcome. He's not the first player to try to fix something here and move back [to the FBS level]."
Cam Newton did it. So did Nick Marshall and Chad Kelly. So did Skyler Howard.
West Virginia's starting quarterback initially walked on at FCS Stephen F. Austin before moving to a junior college in California to fix his mechanics and throwing motion. If that sounds familiar, listen to the rest of the story.
Howard left Stephen F. Austin because he was moved to running back during his freshman season and still believed he could play quarterback. He enrolled at Riverside City College, and a year later, Holgorsen offered him a scholarship. By the end of last season at WVU, the 5'10" onetime no-star recruit had accounted for 3,974 passing yards and 34 touchdowns.
"I know where he's at right now, and I know, just by being around him last year, he's going to make it back," Howard says of Sills. "I remember being in eighth grade at the time and hearing about this kid getting an offer from USC. He had every offer. I had zero. It's weird how life works."
And it's cruel how irony arrives along with it.
On September 3, El Camino will play host to Los Angeles Southwest College to begin the season in newly renovated Murdock Stadium. The $40 million facelift left the facility famous for Hollywood movies (see: The Longest Yard) with a capacity of 8,000.
USC will open its season the same day against defending national champion Alabama in Arlington, Texas, at the Taj Mahal of facilities, AT&T Stadium.
At some point, Sills will call his longtime friend and summer roommate, star USC offensive lineman Khaliel Rodgers, and ask about a game that seven years ago seemed like a birthright for the next great USC quarterback.
"I do wonder what it would've been like [to play at USC]," Sills says. "But I don't regret the decisions I made. I know what I have to do to reach my goals of playing quarterback. It's all within my grasp. There's a sense of peace in that, you know? I can control it again."
http://thelab.bleacherreport.com/the-forgotten-prodigy/
The Forgotten Prodigy
Lane Kiffin anointed David Sills the future of USC football at 13.
Six years later, Sills is still trying to get his career back on track.
By Matt Hayes
August 25, 2016
He didn't ask for this, you know. Couldn't have imagined it in three forevers.
Which is sort of what the past six years have felt like.
David Sills didn't ask for Lane Kiffin to show up and turn his life sideways. Didn't ask to be offered a scholarship to mighty USC when he was just 13 years old. Didn't ask for the national attention, and then scrutiny, that came with the offer. Didn't ask for all that uncertainty while still figuring out puberty.
"I never asked for any of it," he says.
All he ever really wanted was to play quarterback. That was the dream: to be the leader of a football team—not to be part of the Lane Kiffin Circus.
That's still the dream, which is why the one-time can't-miss prospect now finds himself at El Camino College, a dozen miles as the car drives and so much farther than that as the football flies from the famed USC campus in South Central Los Angeles. He's chasing the ghost of a moment that has defined his athletic life.
He was once the quarterback of the future at USC, the next big star among Hollywood glitz and glam. Now he's battling for the starting job at a local junior college in Torrance, California, a cold slap of irony in the warm, content embrace of Southern California.
But this isn't just a story of the ills of modern recruiting or of a young man getting caught in the seedy underbelly of college football. That would be too easy an out.
Sills' story is a story of life—a kick-you-in-the-gut, knock-you-on-your-ass, get-up-and-fight story of life.
A lot of the Sills narrative, from its contrived highs to its sinking lows, you might already know. It all began six years ago, when the new coach at USC, Kiffin, decided in the second week of his tenure that he'd offer a scholarship to a 13-year-old quarterback from Delaware, of all places, without ever having seen him play in person.
Three years later, Kiffin was fired, and his replacement, Steve Sarkisian, said Sills no longer fit USC's scheme. Then Sills missed a majority of his senior season in high school because of an injury, and the next thing you know, he's sitting in head coach Dana Holgorsen's office at West Virginia after his freshman season, and one of the game's most respected quarterback gurus tells him he can play a long time in the NFL.
At wide receiver.
"For someone who has worked his whole life to play quarterback," Holgorsen says, pausing to reflect, "yeah, that could not have been easy to hear."
"If you told me in seventh grade that I was going to be playing wide receiver at West Virginia, I would've never believed you," Sills says. "I'm not going to lie, it hurt."
That's your long story short for Sills, but it's not the end of the story.
Sills packed up and left Morgantown, transferring his lifelong dream of playing quarterback to the great unknown that is junior college football—in the very city where the crazy ride began with that unthinkable phone call from one of the most controversial and galvanizing figures in college sports.
Now 20 years old with twice that tucked away in real-life capital, Sills has gone from one of the most hyped recruits in history to waking up every summer morning and rounding up teammates to lead skeleton practices for the lost and unloved at El Camino.
"I've put too much work into doing what I love to let it crush me," Sills says.
"I know I can play this position. And I'm not giving up on my dream of playing quarterback."
✦✦✦
It's one of those perfect late-spring San Diego mornings, cool and crisp with just enough cloud cover.
The morning dew skips off Sills' cleats as they move around the artificial turf at Coronado High. It's 90 minutes before another day of Steve Clarkson's renowned quarterback camp—the very camp Sills has attended since he was 10 with the very quarterback coach who first introduced Sills to Kiffin—and Sills is out early, as usual, working on the same thing as usual: his mechanics.
In all the years Sills has participated in Clarkson's camps, of all the drills he has completed and the skills he has learned, nothing has been more important than this. Mechanics. That's why this journey has returned to where it began, with the teacher and the student—and no outside noise.
Sills admits he has developed a "hitch" in his motion over the years—one that Clarkson began tweaking on Memorial Day weekend and will continue to privately work on with Sills through this fall at El Camino.
The result of the hitch, Holgorsen says, is that the ball doesn't get out of Sills' hands with the needed velocity.
"You hear those words from a guy that knows quarterbacks like [Holgorsen] does, and you start to take inventory of who you are and where you're going," Sills says. "I'm not in denial. I know I have work to do."
A work in progress at 20, and a lifetime from the kid Kiffin saw at 13.
Kiffin never publicly spoke about Sills in his time as the USC coach—he couldn't, per NCAA rules—which ended on a fateful day in September 2013, when he was yanked off the team bus at LAX after a loss to Arizona State and fired on the spot. (He couldn't even walk back on the bus to get his briefcase.)
After laying low for an offseason, Kiffin took a job with Alabama, where coach Nick Saban allows his assistants to speak to the media about as often as the Crimson Tide lose games.
So from the time he made the offer to the time Sills realized it wasn't going to work at West Virginia, we heard nothing from Kiffin about why he offered a 13-year-old the chance to play quarterback at one of the top five programs in college football.
He can't comment now, either—Sills is technically a recruit again. But after speaking with former USC staffers, there's little doubt what Kiffin's intentions were.
"You have to remember: We had four losses the year before, Pete [Carroll] left, the NCAA thing was there, and we were losing [momentum]," one former USC staffer says. "[Sills] clearly had talent for such a young kid. Lane's thought was any news was good news. He knew it would be the lead story everywhere."
Says another former staffer under Kiffin: "Lane may as well have been P.T. Barnum those first few months."
This wasn't new for Kiffin, who did the same a year earlier as the new coach at Tennessee, where he took over a downtrodden program and did everything within his power to force the spotlight—negative or not—on Knoxville. He accused then-Florida coach Urban Meyer of cheating (Meyer didn't), got into a war of words with Steve Spurrier (never a winning move) and, by the time he had worked all of 14 months at Tennessee, committed numerous secondary NCAA violations (including using "hostesses" to help land recruits).
In comparison, offering a scholarship to a 13-year-old doesn't even move the meter. Even with the bizarre way it happened.
Kiffin is a longtime friend of Clarkson, who is based in Los Angeles and was a college star at San Jose State. Clarkson has tutored some of the best quarterbacks to play the college game over the past 25 years, including Andrew Luck, Matt Leinart and Matt Barkley.
Clarkson sent Kiffin a link to a video of Sills—a 6'0", 140-pound 13-year-old—and Kiffin called to ask if Sills was a sophomore or junior.
"I said, 'Lane, he's 13,'" Clarkson remembers. "He said, 'Get the f--k out of here.'"
Less than an hour later, Kiffin called back to tell Clarkson he wanted to offer Sills a scholarship. And just like that—on a whim, on a dare (Clarkson says he "taunted" Kiffin about Meyer beating him on the recruiting trail) or because USC was losing its mojo—Sills' life changed.
At the time it seemed like the change was for the better.
"My dad told me about the offer, and I said, 'What are you talking about?'" Sills says. "I was just out there playing football, doing something I love. The next thing you know, I'm talking to Lane Kiffin. I wasn't in awe. It was more, Wait a minute—what's going on right now? I still remember thinking, Is this even real?"
It was real, and it quickly turned for the worse. Before Sills reached the eighth grade—think about that, the eighth grade—he was already a media darling/villain. He was getting face time on SportsCenter and had television bobbleheads screaming at each other about the good and evil of a 13-year-old accepting a scholarship offer.
Clarkson already was calling him the next Tiger Woods.
"Seventh grade? All I cared about was video games," says Tate Martell, one of the top quarterback recruits in the 2017 class, who committed to Ohio State this summer. "He was 13? That's unreal to expect someone to deal with that kind of stuff."
The day after Kiffin called, Sills woke up at 5 a.m. and met his high school coach, Dwayne Thomas, for a 6 a.m. workout. Running, lifting weights, throwing to receivers.
✦✦✦
Sills' father, David Sills IV, remembers some of the earliest traces of this spirit and passion that just won't quit—the earliest traces of his son's dream.
When he was eight, Sills went to a weeklong overnight football camp offered by the Philadelphia Eagles. His mom was worried about him being away from home for so long. Sure enough, a few days after he arrived, there was a problem. A big problem.
"I asked David, 'How are you doing? Is it fun?'" David IV says. "He says to me, 'Dad, they're not teaching me anything. They're treating me like I'm an eight-year-old.'"
Winning the award for best quarterback in the eight- to 10-year-old group wasn't cutting it. The next question: What would?
It was then that David IV remembered a newspaper article his father sent him about a quarterback coach in Los Angeles. David III wasn't a big sports fan, but he never missed a game of his son's football career at Newark High School in Delaware and at Virginia Military Institute. He also had an uncanny eye for detail.
He was a professional dog trainer and was on the board of the American Kennel Club for more than 20 years. He was meticulous and deliberate, and in a 1964 field trial, he had the youngest Labrador to ever win a national championship. If something was going to get done, by God, it was going to get done right.
That's why David III sent his son the article about the quarterback coach named Steve Clarkson. If his grandson didn't think he was being properly coached, why not try someone else?
"We just looked at it like a vacation," David IV says. "We had never been to Los Angeles, and never been to Disneyland, so we thought, 'What the heck? Let's go.' It really was nothing more than that."
It didn't take long for Clarkson to realize Sills was unique. His accuracy and understanding of the game on the field was impressive, his knowledge off the field remarkable. He was 10 years old and recognized defensive fronts and coverages many quarterbacks twice his age struggle to see. He was standing in front of a grease board diagramming plays to beat defenses—while standing on his tiptoes to reach the top of the board.
"I told his dad, 'Your son does things that can't be taught,'" Clarkson says. "Anyone can throw the ball through a wall. Not everyone can play the position."
So began the relationship with Clarkson and the idea that Sills, whose dream was to play quarterback in the NFL, had finally found a coach who could get him there. No matter the cost.
David IV says he has no idea how much money he has spent for Clarkson's services, including the latest work while his son prepares for the 2016 season. But does it really matter? It can't be more than the money David IV spent to help Red Lion Christian Academy and Eastern Christian Academy—two schools his son played for in high school—field football teams.
Long before his son even thought about playing quarterback, back when he was in kindergarten, David IV began spending thousands of dollars building the Red Lion Christian Academy football program. They wanted to play football, but they needed direction.
David IV's commercial contracting company built a new gym at the school in the late 1990s, and he grew fond of the academy. So when they asked for help, he initially bought equipment and helmets and pads. Later he would help build a 1,000-seat stadium and practice field.
Sills would play for Red Lion and start at quarterback as an eighth-grader, but in winter 2011, the new administration grew overwhelmed by the team's impact on the school and there was a Delaware Interscholastic Athletic Association investigation of the program. The most egregious charge—the alleged changing of a player's grade—was never proven.
By 2012, Sills and a majority of the football team had a decision to make: transfer to another school and sit out a season, or start another school and field another football team. David IV told his son he could play anywhere he wanted, and Sills responded that he didn't want to play at a private powerhouse in another state; he wanted to stay in Delaware and play with his friends.
So Eastern Christian was born, its student body more than 90 percent football players.
This led to criticism that David IV was a modern version of Marv Marinovich, a father whose legendary micromanaging of his star quarterback son Todd was the prototype of helicopter parents. Marinovich played at USC, never reached his potential and flamed out in the NFL. The USC connection made it easier for critics to draw comparisons.
"I feel sorry for the Marinovich family; I don't know how it is or was," David IV says. "I try to support my kids in a good way, and I'm not going to stop because someone thinks I shouldn't. I'm certainly not pushing my kids to be something they don't want to be."
He didn't push his daughter, Emma, to play golf at Delaware. He did, however, pay for private lessons in Florida because she asked for help.
He didn't push his son Jahmere, who, after earning a scholarship to Mississippi State, left Starkville when, Sills says, "he couldn't follow the rules" and transferred to FCS North Dakota. It didn't take there, either, and David IV spent this summer looking for a landing spot for the son he adopted in 2010 after his mother was shot and killed and his grandfather died of a heart attack.
When asked where he'd be without Sills, Jahmere says, "On the street or dead."
"When did it become such a bad thing for a father to help his son?" says Thomas, the Eastern Christian coach. "My son just turned eight, and he wanted this huge, 400-piece Star Wars thing put together. He did it, and I told him he has the qualities of an engineer. He can play sports or be an engineer or do whatever he wants. I'll help him in any way I can to achieve his goals. Frankly, more fathers should."
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It was September 2015, Week 3 of Sills' senior season. Eastern Christian had traveled to DeSoto, Texas, and Sills was suddenly at a critical point in his career.
Despite David IV's best intentions, the decision to create Eastern Christian hadn't done much to help his son achieve his dreams. Eastern Christian's officials made a critical mistake in the school’s first year: The Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association only recognizes private schools that play state public schools, and none were on Eastern Christian's first schedule in 2012. So they played only three games that season.
Sarkisian had made it clear that Sills didn't fit his quarterback profile, but Sills got a full season in 2013, and his recruiting process was in full swing again by that September.
He was playing well and felt in control.
"My comfort zone has always been on the field," Sills says. "When you're there, you can see things and react. You can anticipate what will happen next and react. You have a plan, you execute the plan."
Until, that is, there's an obstacle that can't be avoided.
Three quarters into the game against DeSoto, Sills already had thrown for more than 300 yards and rushed for nearly 200, and Eastern Christian trailed 28-26. He talked Thomas into going for a two-point conversion to tie the game.
He would never play another down of high school football.
"He rolls out, gets to the corner and gets his ankle rolled and breaks it," Thomas says.
That play did more than just end Sills' season. It ended any hope of college coaches seeing the new Sills, free of his USC commitment and with a new skills package. The skinny pocket passer had become a dangerous dual-threat quarterback.
"If you put David in a 100-meter race with everyone on this team," says West Virginia wideout Daikiel Shorts, a childhood friend of Sills', "he's going to win nine times out of 10."
"What really made me mad was all of those college coaches weren't going to be able to truly see what David had become," Thomas says.
As most everyone else backed away from the uncertainty of it all, West Virginia moved in. The sales pitch was easy, considering two of Sills' closest friends and high school teammates were also in Morgantown.
Then a month into the 2015 season, WVU was short on receivers, and Holgorsen asked Sills if he could help out. A week later, he was on the field at Baylor—and caught a 35-yard touchdown pass.
He finished the season the same way it began, catching the game-winning touchdown pass in WVU's 43-42 Cactus Bowl victory over Arizona State.
Five months later, he was in Holgorsen's office absorbing reality.
"He has every intangible that you want from a starting quarterback," Holgorsen says. "He's tall, he runs well, he has good mobility, he's smart and knows the game of football and makes good decisions. But I told him the entire time he was here that until that ball goes from point A to point B when and how I want it to, I can't play him at quarterback."
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And so Sills is back in Southern California, working hard to correct that hitch.
He and Clarkson are working on a more compact throwing motion, on hip placement and fluidity, on shoulder framing and on receiving the snap with equal balance on each foot.
"Every movement affects every throw," Clarkson says. "When you have too many moving parts, you overcompensate, and the next thing you know, you've got a hitch and it impacts everything—from the way you perform to your confidence. If you're going to fix something like that, you've got to break it down and rebuild it."
It's basic math: more repetitions, more game experience, more one-on-one coaching—from Clarkson and El Camino offensive coordinator/quarterbacks coach Tim Kaub, who has worked with Clarkson (and Sills) for years—equals a better chance to play quarterback at the FBS level.
"It's not something that's insurmountable," Kaub says. "There are guys in the NFL with a hitch in their throwing motion. A lot can be attached to that stigma, but it can be overcome. He's not the first player to try to fix something here and move back [to the FBS level]."
Cam Newton did it. So did Nick Marshall and Chad Kelly. So did Skyler Howard.
West Virginia's starting quarterback initially walked on at FCS Stephen F. Austin before moving to a junior college in California to fix his mechanics and throwing motion. If that sounds familiar, listen to the rest of the story.
Howard left Stephen F. Austin because he was moved to running back during his freshman season and still believed he could play quarterback. He enrolled at Riverside City College, and a year later, Holgorsen offered him a scholarship. By the end of last season at WVU, the 5'10" onetime no-star recruit had accounted for 3,974 passing yards and 34 touchdowns.
"I know where he's at right now, and I know, just by being around him last year, he's going to make it back," Howard says of Sills. "I remember being in eighth grade at the time and hearing about this kid getting an offer from USC. He had every offer. I had zero. It's weird how life works."
And it's cruel how irony arrives along with it.
On September 3, El Camino will play host to Los Angeles Southwest College to begin the season in newly renovated Murdock Stadium. The $40 million facelift left the facility famous for Hollywood movies (see: The Longest Yard) with a capacity of 8,000.
USC will open its season the same day against defending national champion Alabama in Arlington, Texas, at the Taj Mahal of facilities, AT&T Stadium.
At some point, Sills will call his longtime friend and summer roommate, star USC offensive lineman Khaliel Rodgers, and ask about a game that seven years ago seemed like a birthright for the next great USC quarterback.
"I do wonder what it would've been like [to play at USC]," Sills says. "But I don't regret the decisions I made. I know what I have to do to reach my goals of playing quarterback. It's all within my grasp. There's a sense of peace in that, you know? I can control it again."
