5-Star Advice - The Journey Begins

Introducing our newest feature to Y-Option, all about the top quarterbacks in the history of recruiting

There have been 140 quarterbacks in the history of recruiting who were dubbed ‘5-Star QBs.’ While only 1 of those won a Super Bowl (Matthew Stafford in his 13th season and his 2nd team) all of these signal callers can offer brilliant insight and advice. 

Years ago during the Elite 11, myself and good friend Joey Roberts were sitting down for a cup of coffee and in that meeting we realized that over the course of our time around quarterbacks most, if not all, were asking the same questions year after year. So were their parents and guardians. So we set out to write a book to serve as a tribe of mentors for anyone going through the process of recruiting. During our time researching for the book, we learned that the wisdom directly from these quarterbacks' life experiences was absolute gold. 

We then began to ask the people we respected most in and around the game to offer their advice as well. It was NFL coaches, college coaches, NFL GMs, parents and broadcasters. 

When we came up for air we had about 600 pages of advice!

After starting Y-Option we decided that we wanted to share that advice, in small parts, each week in a new column titled 5-Star Advice. 

Each week we will take you inside the minds of those who play quarterback, coached quarterbacks or covered quarterbacks at the highest level. 

We hope you enjoy our new column within the Y-Option community.

To start, we want to share with you more about the origins story behind 5-Star QB with an excerpt from the Amazon Best Selling book, 5-Star QB.

Excerpt from the book, 5-Star QB

Imagine: you’re in 10th grade, walking through the halls of your high school. You’re looking left, looking right. And you see friends, classmates and teachers, engaged in conversation, planning school activities or the movie they hope to see this weekend. You, meanwhile, cut straight to your locker, open it and grab your phone: 17 missed calls, 95 unread text messages. Plus alerts on social media that read 32 unread direct messages. All because of an awkwardly shaped ball. A football.

You also have 35 scholarship offers. Coaches with names like Carroll, Saban, Shaw, Petersen, Swinney, Riley and Day are calling you constantly, reminding you that you can be the next special player within their program. It’s your dream come true. It’s your vision manifesting. And it’s your life, changing before your very eyes before you can even process what’s happening.

Yogi coaching at Elite 11

You’ll get a free education, possibly even a master’s degree, and you’ll learn football in facilities that cost over 100 million dollars and you’ll have fans chanting your name at every pass. Your potential, on the field and in your bank account, seems limitless.

This is the life of an elite high school quarterback prospect, or in sports vernacular, a “5-Star QB.” On one hand, wild to think of. On the other, even wilder to think of. How does a teenager manage that type of attention, expectation and hype? How incredible is it that a teenager gets all of this newfound attention, expectation and hype for how he throws a ball? Those dueling questions and individual journeys are the subject of this book, 5-STAR QB. 

Joey Roberts and I have been involved in high school recruiting, college football, the NFL and the Elite 11 in some form since 1996. We’ve seen the first rankings come out, the first bust, and over the last 15 years, the top quarterbacks in the most intimate settings in the Elite 11 camps. There we began to notice one transcendent aspect of each QB experience every year: their love for the game. As their star shone brighter, their joy grew dimmer. As their hype intensified, their game fell apart. Simply stated, the recruiting rankings may have elevated their persona, but it led some QBs to crumble as young men. They, and often their families, struggled to manage the weigh of that ranking and would seek counsel from us. After a decade, we recognized that we were often answering the same questions and with the growth of the transfer portal and Name, Image and Likeness (NIL), there were so many things that parents and players were evaluating outside of the X’s and O’s.

So... Joey and I met at a coffee shop to brainstorm. When the caffeine kicked in, we decided it was time to do something. That something is in these pages.

We present an oral history of the 5-Star QB, in which over 50 of the best high school recruits share their paths as recruits and college players. They each answer the exact same questions, but with strikingly different responses. Our one goal: to help those going through the recruiting process now, as we give each 5-Star QB a platform to share who they are and what they experienced. And each chapter will include two letters from Ambassadors of the Game, giving their advice to 5-Star QBs and 5-Star parents, along with some key takeaways and advice from us.

We hope you lean in, take notes in the margins, and snap quotes to text to your friends. But most importantly, we hope you appreciate that the names in this book, as well as the names that could be in this book, represent human beings. They each have a heart, a mind, a soul. They love a game and at times, may hate the same game. They are perfect on some weekends, yet drastically miscalculate on others. Each one has had his own life journey set out in front of him, and will realize only later that his actual lived life doesn’t always follow that path.

We hope you enjoy, learn from and grow to respect the oral history of the 5-STAR QB.