Tom Clements may not be a household name, but if you’ve followed the NFL at any point over the last 30 years, you have seen his work. Consider these names: Elvis Grbac, Kordell Stewart, Tommy Maddox, Brett Favre, Aaron Rodgers, Kyler Murray.
Every one of these NFL quarterbacks had their best (or one of their best) seasons when working with Clements. His latest student is Green Bay Packers starting quarterback Jordan Love, a young man thrust into the spotlight thanks to Aaron Rodgers’s move to New York.
Clements is the quarterbacks coach for the Packers, and the role he’s played in Love’s recent development cannot be understated. “Tom’s a great coach,” Love said at a recent news conference. “He’s been doing it for a long time, and he knows what he’s talking about.”
He is a man of few words. A spokesperson for the Packers said Clements just doesn’t like to talk about himself, which is why he declined to do an interview for this feature. That comes as no surprise to people who have worked closely with him. The people who know him use phrases like “straight-forward,” “unassuming,” “matter-of-fact” and “super-cool” to describe the 70-year-old coach.
“When he’s coaching, you are the most important person in the conversation, not him,” says retired NFL quarterback Elvis Grbac. In 2000, Grbac was the starting quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs when Clements was hired to be his position coach. It would turn out to be one of Grbac’s last few years in the league and Clements was a breath of fresh air. “He just kind of put me at a different level,” he says. “He’s a great coach.”
That season, Grbac put up the biggest numbers of his career. He threw for over 4,000 yards and was named to the Pro Bowl.
“Jordan is going to have a guy that’s in his corner 24/7 and a calming voice and character that’s going to take him through a lot of difficult moments,” Grbac says. “I just think Tom loves to coach. This will be kind of like a fun ride.”
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What to expect from the Vikings, Lions, Packers and BearsTrue to his character, Clements never really talks about the football journey he began in western Pennsylvania. “I’ve seen Tom close up and from a distance and he’s the same both ways,” says Bob “Jake” Jacoby, one of Clements’s high school football coaches at Bishop Canevin in Pittsburgh. “It was never about him. It was always about the team and his teammates.”
A three-sport athlete in high school, Clements had a stack of college scholarship offers by his senior year. His final choice came down to two legendary coaches in two different sports. Clements could have gone to North Carolina to play basketball for Dean Smith, but decided to attend Notre Dame to play quarterback for Ara Parseghian.
Clements was named the starting quarterback at Notre Dame as a sophomore. A year later, he led the Fighting Irish to an undefeated season and a national championship thanks to a 1-point victory in the 1973 Sugar Bowl over undefeated Alabama. It’s considered one of the greatest bowl games in college football history. “Tom Clements is the most underrated quarterback to ever play at Notre Dame,” says Fighting Irish teammate Robin Weber. “I cannot stress enough that he had one hell of an arm.”
During his last year at Notre Dame, Clements was a Heisman Trophy finalist and featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated, considered the bible of sports journalism at the time. “Tom led by example. He wasn’t a rah-rah guy,” Weber says. “He never said much in the huddle. Through his actions, he showed everybody how good he was. That gave all of us confidence and was a big part of the team’s success.”
Despite his success at Notre Dame, Clements went undrafted by the NFL and headed to Canada instead. He finished his 12 seasons in the CFL with over 39,000 passing yards, 252 passing touchdowns and a 60.35% completion percentage. He won two Grey Cups and an MVP, and was inducted into the Canadian Football Hall of Fame.
In 2001, Clements was moving to his fourth team as a quarterback coach, but this time he was going home to Pittsburgh to work for the Steelers. It was also Kordell Stewart’s first year as a full-time quarterback. “Tommy Clements was a huge piece to my success,” says the former NFL quarterback. “There could not be a better coach to be in Love’s back pocket.”
Like Grbac, Stewart had his best year as a pro under Clements, heading to the Pro Bowl and nabbing Steelers MVP in 2001. “Tom was always steady, especially when things seemed out of control,” Stewart says. “It didn’t matter if coach [Bill] Cowher was spitting, or the offensive line coach didn’t like what was going on, or the guys were yelling in the huddle. It was like Tom was so cool to where you had no choice but to be cool too.”
In 2006, Clements was hired as quarterbacks coach of the Packers by new head coach Mike McCarthy. In Green Bay, he began working with his most famous pupils: an experienced Brett Favre and a young Aaron Rodgers.
Favre, who was coming off a down season, bought into Clements’s focus on fundamentals and footwork. In 2007, Favre had one the best seasons of his career and led the Packers to the NFC title game. A year later, Favre was playing for the New York Jets and Clements was trying to help a young Rodgers fill the void left by a future Hall-of-Fame quarterback. Sound familiar?
“Tom doesn’t realize when I was a young player, I wanted nothing more than to make Tom Clements happy,” Rodgers told reporters last year. “Tom held me accountable in more ways than just the stat sheet. It was all about the fundamentals, the decision-making, the footwork and stuff that really actually has molded me into the quarterback I am today.”
Rodgers’s success with Clements in his corner is well-documented. The Packers won the Super Bowl in 2010 and Rodgers was the game’s MVP. In 2011 and 2014, Rodgers was named league MVP and established himself as one of all-time greats.
Fast forward to February of last year. Clements is talked out of retirement by Rodgers, who was about to sign a record-breaking contract with the Packers. He agrees to be Green Bay’s new quarterbacks coach and finds a dynamic similar to the one he faced in 2006. Instead of working with Favre and Rodgers, this time Rodgers is the veteran with a raw Jordan Love as his backup.
But while Clements returned to Green Bay to coach Rodgers, he ended up working extensively with Love as Rodgers skipped most of the Packers’ offseason practices. Then during the season, the vet rarely practiced after a Week 5 injury to his right thumb. As a result, Clements worked closely with Love, who took all the first-team practice snaps with Rodgers out. Just like Favre, Rodgers and all the other quarterbacks coached by Clements over the years, Love’s play moved to another level.
“Just watching him last year, I think Jordan’s made some huge strides,” Packers head coach Matt LaFleur told reporters this spring. “I think a lot of it is a credit to Tom. He knows how to train these guys. He knows how to drill them and he’s very, very consistent. He doesn’t sugarcoat anything. He just is matter of fact.”
When Rodgers was traded to the Jets, most expected Clements to go back into retirement. Instead, the 70-year-old assistant coach told LaFleur that he wanted to stay to finish his work with Love.
“I came back and enjoyed it, enjoyed working with Jordan and the other quarterbacks,” Clements told reporters this spring. “Any time you can coach a guy and you think you can help him, and it looks like you’ve helped him a little bit, that’s gratifying.”
The mountain Love is trying to climb is daunting. After all, the standard in Green Bay is extremely high. Between Favre and Rodgers, the Packers had 30 years of Hall-of-Fame-caliber play at quarterback. Love doesn’t have to be great, but anything less than good will be viewed as a failure.
In that sense, Tom Clements may be the wildcard for both Love and the Packers. His fingerprints are all over the team’s success at quarterback during the last three decades. Favre, Rodgers and now Love… all three coached by the quarterback whisperer who has a history of turning good quarterbacks into greats.
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