A couple of hours ago, Ross Martin of the St. Joseph News-Press tweeted out that the Kansas City Chiefs quarterbacks were running a (from what we've seen at least) new drill. As you can see in the picture above, the drill involves throwing giant silver exercise balls at the quarterbacks, forcing them to dodge and move as they would without the fear of contact from a defensive player.
I searched for some background on this and guess what? It's all Jim Zorn. At least in terms of bringing the drill to the Chiefs. Our Redskins blog Hogs Haven had a post on this Zorn drill way back in 2008 when he was the head coach of the Redskins:
Zorn, who has a reputation for "thinking outside the box" (hate that term but I'm kinda rushing here so I'm taking a lazy cop-out), brought out some huge silver exercise balls and started up a game of dodgeball. For real.
One quarterback held the ball in the pocket and the other quarterbacks chucked the balls at him from various directions. The QB holding the football - not the dodgeball - would have to slither and slide away from the big silver balls, simulating having to elude an oncoming defensive player ... without the obvious risk of injury.
Quoted in that same article, Zorn said in '08 about the drill, "It's (a drill) I've been doing to get the quarterbacks to be able to move without a real live guy (chasing them). It's been an effective drill to help improve the quarterback's feet and his lateral movement, and what's great with those big balls we use, if we were using smaller balls all they'd have to do is duck; here you really have to move your feet to get out of the way."
Jim Zorn was also doing the same drill when he was with the Seahawks in 2005. And when he was with Baltimore in 2008.
Thankfully, we had a nice picture of the drill today.