Luke Falk

Originally posted by Bootlegger:
Luke Falk - Washington State University - QB - 6-4 - 205

Has looked very good in every game i've seen him play so far.

There's a Utah native guiding a Cougar passing attack who leads the nation through the air and is captained by a BYU graduate.

Unfortunately for the school in Provo, it's a Washington State quarterback, not a BYU signal-caller. Former Logan High quarterback Luke Falk is becoming a household name in the college football world.

Under head coach Mike Leach, Falk, the starting quarterback for Washington State, has led the Cougars to a resurgent 7-3 record thus far in 2015, including a 31-27 victory over then-No. 18 UCLA Saturday at the Rose Bowl. That win put Washington State back in the polls for the first time in nine years, at No. 24 in The Associated Press poll and 23rd in the Amway Coaches poll.

With just 13 career college starts under his belt, the redshirt sophomore is setting his sights on not only Washington State records, but on putting his name among the best to play the NCAA game as well

Falk has long modeled himself after Brady. However, Falk's admiration for Brady goes beyond a respect for his body of work on the field. Like Brady, Falk has looked to sports science as a way to hone his body for on-field performance.

The Cougars quarterback has worked closely with a sports scientist since he was in high school. He also judiciously monitors his sleep patterns, logs a record of everything he eats, follows the Bulletproof Diet — which emphasizes natural sources of protein, vegetables and good fats, and eschews carbs and processed foods — and checks in regularly with a Utah-based chiropractor and acupuncturist whom he credits for helping keep his body in tip-top shape.

In his quest to fulfill the dream laid out on his childhood vision boards, Falk has embraced modern science and natural medicine to help him meet the demands that come with being the quarterback of a Pac-12 Conference team.

Many elite high school athletes today work with personal trainers and strength coaches to prepare themselves to play in college.

But Dr. Matt Rhea is not your average strength coach. Rhea has a Ph.D. in exercise and sports science, and he runs a private conditioning and sports science company whose clients include the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Miami Dolphins.

Rhea first started working with Falk when he was the strength coach of the Logan High football team during Falk's junior and senior years, and he introduced the quarterback to the world of sports science: where a close monitoring of sports nutrition, sleep patterns, sleep quality and psychology related to sports performance can yield data that helps athletes understand their bodies better.

Rhea worked with Falk almost daily from his junior year of high school through when he left Utah to start college at WSU.

From the beginning, Falk struck Rhea as a special talent who demonstrated extraordinary focus and uncommon grit.

"Physically, he's gifted, but the way his mind is wired completely different from your average athlete and average person," Rhea said. "His drive to reach his goals is unmatched among any athlete I've ever worked with.

"That drive pushes him to complete very intense workouts, and that's the component that leads him to be who he is, and is why he will be successful in football."

For a five-month span leading up to Falk's senior season at Logan High, he trained twice a day with Rhea, completing what the sports scientist calls "very intense workouts" designed to put the body through the demands of a football game.

"A classic sample of one of the more challenging workouts was two and a half hours of a sequence style workout where one exercise follows another, and it's performed in a way that simulates a football drive where the average play lasts six to seven seconds and the average drive is about eight to 10 plays," Rhea says. "We would simulate the most aggressive stress he'd see in a game in a very long drive with fast plays."

The long sequence of plyometric and resistance-based exercises might include movements like squats, power cleans, or dumbbell work, and throughout the workout, Rhea was constantly monitoring Falk's physiological data, examining factors like heart rate and heart rate recovery.

"We'd keep pushing things until there were physiological signs that a workout needed to end," Rhea says.

The problem, however, was that "we had a hard time finding his point of exhaustion," Rhea says. "We'd do it for three to four hours and he was still going strong. (At that point) I would just shut him down."

Based on research showing that longer hours of good quality sleep can enhance athletic performance, Rhea got Falk interested in tracking his sleep patterns, and that's something Falk still does today with the help of a smartphone app and a FitBit.

"It shows how many times I'm restless or how frequently I wake up. I get as much sleep as I can, especially with the stuff I just dealt with," Falk said, referring to his recent concussion.

To enhance his sleep quality, Falk sleeps wearing earplugs and shoots for at least nine hours of sleep a night, though he prefers 10.

Falk then analyzes his sleep data to look for trends between that and his athletic performance, sometimes consulting Rhea for help interpreting what he sees and suggestions as to how he can use it to his advantage.

He's quick to make changes, too. Right after Rhea mentioned earlier this season that research has shown that a short nap in the middle of the afternoon can result in increased quickness and reaction time, a 30-minute nap started to show up in the quarterback's daily sleep data.

Originally posted by Kolohe:

Baalke, won't draft.

Originally posted by Phoenix49ers:

Originally posted by Kolohe:
Baalke, won't draft.

49ers could be bad enough that they wouldnt have to trade up.