The 2023 NFL Draft’s Biggest QB Sleeper Is Also a Descendant of Viking Royalty
David Morris, a private quarterbacks coach and the founder of QB Country, was in the gym one day, staring at the kid sitting against the wall doing an arm care routine. He was 6'4", pushing 230 pounds with white-blond hair and blue eyes.
“Dude,” Morris said to him. “I guarantee your great-great-grandfather is Viking or something.”
Holton Ahlers laughed. As a matter of fact, Ahlers’s brother had just done an Ancestry.com search. He wasn’t just part Viking, he was Viking royalty, a bloodline descendant of Ragnar Lothbrok. Lothbrok nearly took out the Holy Roman Empire with just a pair of ships, according to legend. He was such a revered warrior that he had to be killed via a pit of venomous snakes. In the television show Vikings, a George Kittle–looking Lothbrok is portrayed by Travis Fimmel.
“Legit the greatest Viking of all time,” says Morris, a self-proclaimed Viking guy. “It makes perfect sense. That’s kind of who he is.”
There is so much focus on the QBs expected to go in the first round, but surely a team would like to find a late-round sleeper.
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Ask around about Ahlers, who just finished his final season at East Carolina, and you’ll hear about an origin story that is, yes, part Viking and part Paul Bunyan. He may not be just the most underrated quarterback in this class—he may be an actual living folktale. Consider …
• When he was in grade school, he hit a Little League home run so far that it was covered by the local newspaper. The clip has more than two million views. The baseball smashed through a car windshield with such force, the parking lot sounded like it was under siege from redcoats (click here if you’d like to hear the audio of the woman who discovered that it was, indeed, her windshield that got destroyed). The ball went over a fence, over a walkway, over a small set of bleachers and over a hill that takes patrons into a pine-tree-guarded parking lot. Ahlers is still the most prolific home run hitter in Greenville (N.C.) Little League history (27 in 22 games). Parents wondered what a fully grown man was doing walking around in a kids uniform.
• When he was in high school, he turned down a meeting with the Yankees because he decided he wanted to play football. He didn’t tell his parents because, he says, “I didn’t want anything to get in my way.”
• While at East Carolina, he played his last—and undoubtedly best—season with a partial labrum tear in his nonthrowing shoulder. He spent most of his 55 games there piloting the entire the offense. He called his own protections starting his freshman year. Every run play would have three options Ahlers had to choose from at the line—an alert, a check or a check opposite. On each pass play, he had the green light to change anything based on what he saw.
One of those audibles that sums him up well? Against Navy in 2021, facing a clear blitz on a critical fourth down late in the fourth quarter, Ahlers checked to a certain pass play knowing full well he’d get demolished. One Navy defender screamed off each edge, and he got hit like a collapsible beach chair, high on his front side and low on his blind side. Before he went down, he fired off a quick slant that went more than 20 yards for a touchdown. East Carolina won the game by three.
• Then, this past winter, after just a few weeks of professional training, Ahlers went from throwing a personal best 58 yards to uncorking a 71-yard long ball. Ahlers and Morris made the back half of his throwing script the football equivalent of a longest-drive competition so scouts wouldn’t pigeonhole him as a short-armed Air Raid guy.
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Perhaps the most Viking part of Ahlers’s story? For most of his formative football years, he’d been working off passing drills he cobbled together himself off Instagram.
“Scouts were like, ‘Who is this kid?’” Ahlers says of the atmosphere after his pro day. “I feel like a totally different person and quarterback.”
The last part is what makes the already-budding legend of Ahlers intriguing. We’re coming off a season in which Brock Purdy, the 2022 draft’s Mr. Irrelevant, left Iowa State and found some help for his throwing motion, added serious velocity to his passes (as we wrote about even before his first start in December) and, combined with his already extensive library of game experience, proved himself to be a legitimate NFL-level starting quarterback and took the 49ers to the NFC championship game.
Ahlers started a professional-level arm care and training program just before his senior season. The lefthander’s touchdown-to-interception ratio went from 18-to-10 to 28-to-5. He threw for a career high 3,708 yards in 13 games. His completion percentage rose from 61.8% to 67.2%. He was the MVP of both of his showcase bowl games, the Hula Bowl and the NFLPA Bowl.
“It doesn’t make a ton of sense to me that he’s under the radar,” says Morris, who added that Ahlers reminds him of a more mobile version of Cooper Rush, another client. Morris said that, in terms of readiness, Ahlers is “right there” with fellow clients Sam Howell and Bailey Zappe, who may end up being the Commanders’ and Patriots’ starting quarterbacks in 2023.
While it’s not hard to get someone’s personal quarterbacks coach to say nice things about them this time of year, it’s important for teams to start realizing the realities of modern football development and why what Morris is saying may not be hyperbole. Ahlers, like so many quarterbacks across the Division I landscape, had largely been left to his own devices in the offseason. For example, not many college kids walking around have access to stop-motion cameras that can identify some hiccup along the body chain that can free some shoulder blockade and add almost 20 yards to their passes. Before he hired Morris, Ahlers had an iPhone and a few loyal friends who would catch passes.
When he was worrying about college football and not prepping for the draft, Ahlers was lifting, eating and working out like a linebacker might. As we wrote in the story about Purdy last year, he came out of college with the lower half of his body built like a fullback due to some of the quad-dominant regiments he was on.
Now, he’s actually understanding how to put it all together. Ahlers said he’s connected his top half and lower half to create a more fluid motion (even if you watch some of his senior highlights and highlights from the Hula Bowl, there is a notably truncated and more violent throwing motion). He used to throw a bit like a baseball player, but says, for the first time, he feels like a “real quarterback,” which is scary for someone living inside a tank of a frame which, like some of the NFL’s best quarterbacks, was conditioned by a youth focused on baseball.
“A lot of these quarterbacks have guys training them in the offseason since they were 6 or 7 years old,” Ahlers says. “I’ve been a look-it-up-on-YouTube kind of guy.”
So far, according to one person familiar with the draft process, Ahlers has received some serious interest from the Packers and Chargers. But as word of the real life Viking gets out (how can Minnesota not at least place a call?), the gawking might commence. We may not just be looking at the next Purdy, but the next Lothbrok as well.
