Awakening the Storm: The Brett Dietz story
Tom Ando
Friday June 15, 2007
Like most of the league’s other out-of-nowhere stories however, it has been an interesting ride down some of the football world’s least traveled roads to get to this point. Those roads have included a small school in Indiana you’ve probably never heard of, a stint in Europe, and a pair of indoor football leagues that are far from the national radar, but each stop was far from a dead end. In fact they may have led Brett to the highway to stardom.
Growing up in Covington, Kentucky, Brett actually dreamed of someday playing wide receiver, maybe even following in Eddie Brown’s footsteps for his Cincinnati Bengals, but once he realized his lack of breakaway speed would become a problem, he quickly made use of that rocket he has for a right arm and started on his journey. After starring at Covington Catholic high school, he went somewhat overlooked by big-time college programs.
"That was a situation where I was getting a lot of letters from division I schools and then I guess when it came time to make the phone calls I didn't make the cut,” explains Brett. “I did get a few calls from University of Miami, Ohio and Marshall University, but then once I figured out that I wanted to go somewhere that somebody wanted me to be there, I started looking at smaller schools and Hanover was one of the main schools I was looking at.”
Taking notice to the fact that Hanover, just over an hour from his hometown, is one of the premier colleges in all of NCAA Division III, Brett looked more into the school and found out that the team is known for the pass oriented offense. It was a match for the ages.
After watching and learning his Freshman season, and suffering an injury plagued Sophomore season, Brett took the reigns all to himself during his Junior campaign and never looked back. Prior to the start of the Panthers’ 2003 season, Brett and a teammate received a visit from some Houston Texans scouts.
“They came to get our height and weight and they just said 'we're keeping an eye on you guys, but your division III and you need to put up huge numbers'. I led the nation in total offense, I guess that wasn't big enough.”
In the spring, Brett left a golf tournament in which he was ranked fifth after the first day to attend an open tryout in Cincinnati for the Canadian Football League’s Edmonton Eskimos, only to never hear from the team again. Putting the big league aspirations on the back burner, the 6'3" gun slinger, on advice from Hanover’s offensive coordinator Terry Peebles, took on his first post-collegiate challenge, a trip to Europe, but it wasn’t quite the same as most European football stories.
Actually, it wasn’t even in NFL Europa, the NFL’s sad attempt at a farm system, it was for a team in Finland called the Turko Trojans. Brett was a huge success as the team’s starting quarterback completing 160 of 272 passes for 2433 yards and 24 touchdowns as the team went undefeated, only to lose in the league’s title game, the Maple Bowl.
“It was a good atmosphere, I think we had about three thousand people there,” said Brett. “They played it in the capital city, Helsinki, and it was the two top teams, so it was a good atmosphere and we had some injuries throughout the game and I tried to force the ball too much and we hadn't lost up until that point, so it was disappointing to lose the maple bowl, but even though we didn't win it all, it was still good, it was still fun and I still talk to a lot of those guys through e mail over there. It was a pretty good experience, definitely one that I would never trade.”
Returning to the states, Brett would earn a tryout with the Louisville Fire of the af2, thanks in large part to offensive coordinator Adam Shackleford, a former coach at Anderson University, another Division III school in the same division as Hanover. The problem was that the Fire already had a starting quarterback in Matt Sauk, who has since played for three AFL teams, but just as it always does, another opportunity knocked, this time in the form of the National Indoor Football League and the Cincinnati Marshals.
“I heard there was a Cincinnati team debuting in the NIFL, and I didn't know what the NIFL was but some guy contacted me from the team and told me to come and try out and I was probably going to do that anyway, but it was good to have someone on the inside who knew who I was,” said Brett, who says the fact that he didn’t sign in Louisville as a blessing in disguise.
“They were actually trying to get Jared Lorenzen to sign and the New York Giants owned him at that point, so when they find out he wasn't going to sign, they signed me and then told me that they wanted me to pick out players at the workout and stuff like that because they liked me and trusted me and felt like I could be the man. That was a good experience for me because I got to work with the head coach and pick some of the players that I wanted to be with.”
While leading the Marshals to the conference finals, Brett would throw for 2226 yards and 41 touchdowns, while connecting on 198 of his 345 pass attempts. Once Sauk made the jump from the af2 to the AFL, Louisville once again had their sights on their man.
“That was an easy decision,” said Shackleford, now head coach of the Spokane Shock, “when Matt jumped to arena one, Brett was my first call. He’s a guy that we watched play in the NIFL and we knew that he could do it on this level and I realized very quickly that he could be an arena one quarterback too.”
Before Brett got to Louisville, he was picked up by the Storm, where legendary head coach Tim Marcum placed the up and coming quarterback on the team’s practice squad before finally encouraging him to join the Fire and get some game experience.
Once Shakleford’s new quarterback hit the Louisville scene, it was the field that was on fire. Brett Dietz hit 396 of his 559 passes for 4529 yards and 94 touchdowns for a rating of 126.74, all the while bringing home the league’s rookie of the year honor. It was clear where the next step was.
“I had a lot of Arena Football League teams on me in the off season,” said Brett, “and it was really a tough decision on what I should do and for whatever reason I felt that Chicago would be the right team with Hohenese there, being the offensive play caller that he is and with them just winning the ArenaBowl and not having a backup quarterback. I just felt that was going to be the best spot for me.”
And was he ever wrong. The Rush promptly released him before the season, leaving the 25 year old scrambling to a job and the first person to call was Shackleford, but just before he had a chance to join the Shock, the Kansas City Brigade signed Brett to their practice squad, making his decision where to play a little bit easier.
“I had pretty much told myself that I really wanted to be in the arena league this year no matter what it took,” said a determined Brett, “so it was a tough decision even to sign with Spokane, being that far away from just for arena two. So when I got that call from Kansas City it was a pretty easy decision for me just because it was in the arena league and I knew if I went to Spokane and the March 15th deadline passed that I was locked out of the AFL for the entire year and that was really big for me.”
Throwing yet another fork in the road, Brett received another call before he could even get to Kansas City, this time from the NFL and the Buffalo Bills. They told him that they would fly him in for a workout and then they would fly him to Kansas City to join the Brigade.
“Brett isn’t one to say he did well unless he did really well,” Said Donna Dietz of her son, “but he said he did really, really, really well.”
“He had a good workout,” added father Mike Dietz, “It was really exciting for him to do that, more for the experience than anything else. To go from being cut by the Rush to trying to find a team and all of a sudden be working out for the Bills, I think that really meant a lot for him.”
As promised, the Bills flew Brett to Kansas City to join head coach Kevin Porter’s Brigade where he just tried to improve as much as possible.
"I was just trying to take it one step at a time,” said Brett, “and I had to prove to that team and coaches that I could play and that they could dress me first as a backup before I could jump right to the field, so I was taking it one step at a time trying to prove myself in practice and I didn't feel that I was doing that as consistently as I wanted to but I was doing it. I really didn't know anybody on the team there going in there, but the team accepted me and treated me as one of their own and I really enjoyed my time there.”
One of their own just happens to be one of the league’s most respected quarterbacks, Raymond Philyaw, who made quite an impact on Brett.
“Raymond is a true professional, and I saw some of that last year with Shane Stafford. He goes to practice everyday, he's happy to be there, he's very professional about his business and he takes his job very seriously,” explained Brett of the Veteran signal caller. “He puts a lot more steam on the ball than most arena football quarterbacks that I've seen. He throws the ball a lot harder on almost every throw, so that's just his style of play. The ball comes out with a little bit of a lower trajectory, which might cause balls to get batted down a bit, but he gets it out so fast that the defensive linemen have a difficult time reacting to it, but he's a very efficient quarterback, and I also learned that he's great at forgetting about plays. If he has a bad play, he'll forget about it real fast and go back and even if you make a terrible pass on one play, you can completely make up for it on the next play. you can't worry about the play that you just had, you need to move on.”
Speaking of moving on, hit hard by an injury to quarterback Stoney Case, Marcum and the Storm came calling once again. Being brought in to be the backup to the savvy veteran John Kaleo, Brett did what backups do, prepared for the game as if he was going to be the starter, knowing that he was only one play away from being thrust into the starting lineup. Sure enough, that one play happened.
“Low and behold, the very first game John goes down and it was really a freak injury the way he fell on his wrist and that's a pretty rare injury,” said Brett. “So of course we had John hurt and I was concerned because you never want one of your own guys hurt and he was helping me a lot that first week. All of a sudden I never had any time to get nervous or anything like that, it was just being thrown into the fire right away and I think that helped out a lot, not having time to think about having to take time before playing and it helped with the nerves and the whole situation.”
Whatever the reason for his calm before the Storm fans, Brett stepped up big time on his biggest stage yet by throwing for 165 yards and two touchdowns, both to star receiver Terrill Shaw. He would also add a rushing score on a night that was a tidal wave of emotions for the Dietz family.
“We were in the parking lot of a hotel listening to the game because we couldn’t find it on a TV anywhere,” said Donna, “and we were just jumping up and down because it was so amazing what was happening to him and how well he did.”
The Storm beat the Destroyers and their tenacious defense 34-32, just the second victory in a season that, at the time, appeared lost with six losses, but the pieces finally fell into place for both the team, and the newest in their long line of talented quarterbacks.
The team has since won five more contests while dropping just one against the Georgia Force, arguably the league’s best team. Along the way, Brett has connected on 155 of 233 passes for 1840 yards and 28 touchdowns, good for a rating of 119.28, and he even has started collecting accolades as well. In week fourteen, he was named the league’s offensive player of the year by throwing for 315 yards and eight touchdowns, while completing 23 of 30 passes in a 61-55 road victory against the New Orleans Voodoo.
Last week, with a 69-59 victory over the Philadelphia Soul, the Storm did the unthinkable and clinched a playoff spot as they look to capture their sixth ArenaBowl title.
“It's going good, we're having fun, we're back to winning,” said Brett. “We definitely have a lot of talent, from receivers to the offensive lineman, plus our fullbacks are good as well, so we have the talent on offense and it's just a matter of executing and me getting the ball in the right guy's hands. We've got the talent and we've got to keep producing, so we know if we keep working hard that good things are going to keep happening.”
Should the Storm win ArenaBowl XXII, the man that would viewed as the most integral part of the turn around won’t be collecting a ring for an empty hand. On August 4th, Brett will marry his fiancé Dana Brock, who claims that the plans have not been affected by the Storm’s success.
“I'm pretty much doing the wedding plans from here and he's just along for the ride at this point,” said the future Mrs. Dietz, “but he's in charge of the honeymoon, so I guess the only thing that could change is that we might have to push back the date of that.”
Regardless of when the Storm season ends, the Storm seemed to have struck gold in Brett Dietz, whom Marcum says is not only the quarterback of today, but for the future as well.
“Absolutely, he’s the guy,” said Marcum. “He’s the quarterback right now and he will be until somebody else can beat him out for the job, that’s how it goes for starting quarterbacks.”
Luckily for Storm fans, that shouldn’t happen anytime soon.
Take it to the house; Touchdown Tom’s Tidbits
-Now that the Storm are back in contention, it doesn’t hurt that Brett Dietz has a receiver that has an ArenaBowl MVP to his credit in Terrill Shaw.
“He's a huge help and Lawrence Samuels has been to a few ArenaBowls as well,” said Brett, “so those guys have such valuable experience and they help me out every day and in the games, so I rely a lot on those guys and I'm going to keep doing that because they're the ones that got me here and I'm going to keep using them.”
-While at Hanover college, Brett lettered in four, count ‘em, four sports. Football, Golf, Baseball and Basketball. A busy man indeed, but he still found time to front a band called Spilt.
“It was just him and group of friends, but they had these silly concerts in the summer,” explained Brett’s Fiancé Dana. Donna Dietz claims the band was “kind of like a Maroon 5.” Well at least he had this football thing to lean back on.
-Last season, Brett threw 12 touchdowns in one game against the Albany Conquest, a record that has never been achieved in either the af2 or the AFL.
“That was awesome,” said Brett, “that was like a dream game and I was coming off of the sidelines with a huge smile on my face, almost laughing, and not because it was that easy but because me and the receivers were on the same page it was almost freaky and our receivers just made some unbelievable catches. Albany was trying to press us at the line trying to get a stop and we were just beating them deep where I was putting a good ball up there and they were making good catches, plus they kept onside kicking it at us so that's where we got extra possessions for me to throw 12. It was just awesome, we were coming off the sidelines laughing and I had no idea how many touchdowns I had, so it was just a fun game to catch fire.”
Better keep a close eye on those record books Clint Dolezel.
"Touchdown" Tom Ando is a free lance writer from South Buffalo, NY and has been covering the Arena Football League in one capacity or another since the 2000 season, when he was 17 years old. Tom Currently writes for Sports & Leisure Magazine in Buffalo covering the NLL's Buffalo Bandits and NCAA Division I football. In 2001, Tom was the only writer in the country to cover the Houston "Travelin' " Thunderbears, where he befriended his mentor John F. "Hondo" Hahn.
