Quarterback Re-Evaluation

The very first post on Limited Interests was published on November 7, 2013. It’s a couple weeks past the six year anniversary, and this is the 300^th post I’ve made on this site. At around 2500 words a post, that means I’ve written roughly 750,000 words about football in that time, about the same number as in the first five Harry Potter books.

I’ve had a lot of takes on a lot of topics in that time. Some of them have been right. Others, less so. Most obvious have been my annual breakdowns of draft prospects, which over the course of the past five drafts have covered about 300 NFL players. There have been some big hits (Alvin Kamara, Derwin James) and some big misses (it’s a running joke that I was way too low on Odell Beckham, but for variety’s sake let me also toss out Ronnie Stanley and Christian McCaffrey). (Actually my best hit rate has been identifying players who won’t live up to the hype. Among top five picks I’ve been skeptical of are Greg Robinson, Solomon Thomas, Leonard Fournette, and Corey Davis.)

I don’t have the time or the attention span to reevaluate every prospect I’ve ever rated. But the quarterback position is important enough for me to take a look back at it, and the events of the past couple weeks have highlighted probably my most egregious error: Mitchell Trubisky.

I loved Trubisky entering the 2017 draft. He was my clear top quarterback prospect, and in the week leading up to the draft I even made the argument that the Browns should select him ahead of Myles Garrett (who has had a rough couple of weeks as well, but for very different reasons). Two and a half years in, that was very clearly a bad call on my part. And as Trubisky was sent to the bench late in the game against the Rams for reasons that may or may not be performance related, it looks like his time in Chicago is quickly running out.

So I decided that now was as good a time as any to look back on what I’ve had to say about the quarterback prospects who have entered the league over the past few seasons. I’ve read back through my scouting reports on each and every passer who was either a first round pick or who I rated as a first round pick, to see where I went right and where I was led astray.

(Current starting quarterbacks not included in this breakdown are Brady, Fitzpatrick, Roethlisberger, Tannehill, Foles, Rivers, Flacco, Carr, Ryan, Brees, Newton, Cousins, Rodgers, Stafford, Garoppolo, and Wilson, who were all drafted before I started analyzing this. I’ll withhold judgment on rookies Murray, Haskins, and Jones. Apologies out to Prescott and Brissett, who turned into quality starters despite not being on my radar before the draft. No apologies needed for Devlin Hodges, Brandon Allen, or Kyle Allen. They won’t be starters for much longer.)

Players are listed in each draft in the order I had them ranked. The number next to their name indicates the pick they were taken with in that draft. For each I read back through my pre-draft scouting report and picked something I said that I got right, and something that hasn’t held up great in hindsight.

2015

2. Marcus Mariota

Nailed it – “Mariota doesn’t have the same upside as Winston, but he has significantly less risk.”

Swing and a Miss – “He is absolutely lethal as a runner.”

Mariota was supposed to be a safe prospect, and yet it seems likely that he won’t make it to a second contract with the team that drafted him. And yet no one would necessarily call him a bust either. He’s been effective but unspectacular, which is what I saw as the likely worst case scenario for him.

The one part of Mariota’s game that has puzzled me is his lack of contribution as a runner. In each of his three seasons as a college starter he had at least 715 yards as a rusher. His best running season in the NFL was last year, and he still failed to reach even half that number. He was never a great scrambler, but his speed made him dangerous on called runs. Unfortunately in the NFL, his coaches have shown no interest in using him in that way.

This is going to be a theme as I go through this. So many of these players are defined by the situations they find themselves in, and Mariota has unsurprisingly become a bland quarterback in a bland situation. In five years in the NFL he’s had four different offensive coordinators, and the head coach combination of Mike Mularkey and Mike Vrabel has been uninspiring. I don’t know if Mariota would have prospered in a system that opened things up and let him use his legs, but I know he would have been a lot more fun.

1. James Winston

Nailed it – “From a football perspective, the biggest red flags are the interceptions.”

Swing and a Miss – “His incredible arm is his saving grace, allowing him to deliver a perfect pass no matter what base he’s standing on.”

The interceptions were always there for Winston. He threw 18 his final year in college, and he even had 10 during his Heisman winning freshman year. It’s no surprise that he has paced the league in that statistic since he arrived. He is who he is, and I doubt that will ever change.

I thought that he could make enough big plays with his arm to erase these mistakes, and there are times I can still talk myself into it. He is consistently near the top of the league in the percentage of his passes that go for a first down, one of the more underappreciated NFL statistics. But I think I probably overestimated his playmaking ability, particularly the strength and accuracy of his arm. He has always made reckless throws from unusual platforms with pressure closing in. The difference is that in college these often worked out, while in the NFL they have too frequently gone the other way.

2016

1. Jared Goff

Nailed it – “I worry that his ceiling might not be at a true superstar level, but I am comfortable with his floor as, worst case scenario, a league average quarterback.”

Swing and a Miss – “He’s light on his feet, and he moves well in the pocket, sensing pressure and shifting around to give himself a lane to throw the football.”

Three and a half years into his career, I think we’re all pretty much in agreement on the first part of this. Goff is good, and in the right situation he can lead an elite offense. But he needs that right situation, and as that has disappeared this year he has struggled to produce.

It's been three and a half years, so I can’t speak to what I actually saw when I watched his tape. But it is strange that one of the things I identified as among his strengths has been his biggest weakness in the NFL. Goff does not handle pressure well, and he does not move well in the pocket. Maybe it was easier for him in college, when he executed solely from a shotgun setup where he could always play downhill and see the field in front of him. Now in the NFL he is taking a lot more dropbacks, asking him to make more complex reads. Perhaps that could be a fix for him, at least in the short term, to play more from a spread shotgun formation in order to simplify the game for him again.

2. Carson Wentz

Nailed it – “This gave him plenty of margin for error, and he took full advantage of it, consistently struggling with ball placement.”

Swing and a Miss – “Wentz can become somewhat of a statue in the pocket, and he doesn’t offer much in the way of improvisational skills.”

Wentz has talent, and it’s still easy to talk ourselves into what he can be if he puts it all together. At times he looks like an elite quarterback on the level of other young stars like Patrick Mahomes and Deshaun Watson (both of whom are mentioned below), but every time I start to talk myself into him, he does something difficult to watch. He misses some easy targets, and he always seems just not quite all the way what he could be.

Strangely though, his most impressive moments are when the play breaks down and he has to make things up on the fly. He can make difficult throws from strange platforms, and he has an excellent understanding of where everyone is on the field and how to find his targets as he runs. This seems to be something he’s developed since entering the NFL, perhaps because he never needed to do this at North Dakota State, where the talent around him was enough to beat any opponent even if he played it safe.

26. Paxton Lynch

Nailed it – “Lynch has absolutely no idea how to play quarterback in the NFL”

Swing and a Miss – “He could turn out to be a quality starter someday, but that day is still several years down the road,”

This is probably one of my biggest hits as a draft analyst. Lynch was a first round selection, and I had him pegged as a sixth rounder. If anything I was too high on him, as he lasted all of two seasons before Denver gave up and released him. He was a disaster from the moment he entered an NFL facility, and the only real mistake I made was hedging my bets at the end and saying that he had the talent to maybe one day be a starter. The one thing I didn’t know about him—that I couldn’t know about him from just watching tape—was that he really had no interest in putting in the work required to succeed, an attitude that expedited his failure in Denver.

2017

1. Mitchell Trubisky

Nailed it – “He’ll become a little flustered under pressure and either run from a clean pocket or chuck the ball blindly down the field.”

Swing and a Miss – “His arm can get the ball to any spot on the field, and it usually ends up exactly where he wants to put it.”

As I mentioned above, this is one that hurt. Reading back through this scouting report, every sentence seems worse than the last. I didn’t even highlight the part where I said, “The most likely outcome is a comfortable top ten starter.” It’s pretty reasonable to say at this point that this is never going to happen.

So where did I go wrong? Contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t obvious to everyone who watched college football that this pick was a mistake. In his final year in college, Trubisky had a better completion percentage, higher yards per attempt, better passer rating, and fewer interceptions than Deshaun Watson. He was a very successful, very effective quarterback in his one year as a starter, and that simply hasn’t carried over to the NFL.

Some of my mistake can be blamed on the scheme he played in. On the surface it looked like a fairly complicated scheme, asking him to work across the field and make difficult reads. But the hardest part of evaluating a quarterback on film is that you can never say what is going on in his head. Was Trubisky really getting three or four receivers deep on his progression, or was he just well trained in using his eyes as part of the same mechanical process? As he’s been put in more challenging situations in the NFL, it’s clear that I was tricked, and probably a lesson to be a little more skeptical of making an assumption about how the quarterback’s mind is working on the field.

52. Deshone Kizer

Nailed it – “The problem with Kizer is that once the ball leaves his hand, you have absolutely no idea where it is going to end up.”

Swing and a Miss – “He is the smoothest, most natural operator out of the pocket in this draft.”

As you can see above, I was always a bit skeptical of Kizer. I believe accuracy is the most essential trait for a quarterback to have, and Kizer simply didn’t have it. I knew this could be a career killing flaw, and I thought the risk was still worth it on the off chance this could be fixed.

This couldn’t be fixed, and it ultimately wasn’t the only thing that did Kizer in. Between college and the NFL, everything else good about his game disappeared. He wilted under pressure, he made reckless decisions with the football, and he threw away any hope he had off success.

This is where I have to mention the misfortune Kizer had to end up in Cleveland. And not just in Cleveland, in Cleveland during the worst period of their disaster years. Hue Jackson made life as difficult as possible for Kizer, and though I can’t easily say he could have been worth where I had him ranked if he had ended up elsewhere, he at least wouldn’t have been quite as embarrassing if he had gone anywhere other than Cleveland.

10. Patrick Mahomes

Nailed it – “There is something here, and even though it may take the best coaching staff in the world to reach it, the upside is almost immeasurable.”

Swing and a Miss – “He relies on this far too often, breaking from a clean pocket and running himself into trouble.”

This is one that hurts a little. I liked Mahomes a lot predraft, and the gap I had between him and Kizer was extremely tight. I should have trusted my instincts and ranked Mahomes higher, but I was scared away by the uncertainty I saw. And the truth is, I wasn’t wrong. What Mahomes has done in the NFL is unlike anything else we have ever seen in this league before, just as what he did in college was unlike anything we had seen on that level before.

That’s the difficulty with scouting one of a kind players. There is no template for knowing what will carry over and what will fail. Aaron Donald was a similar puzzle, and while these two may provide extraordinary examples, they can be countered with names like Corey Coleman and Greg Robinson.

I don’t think I was wrong about Mahomes. He ended up in a perfect situation with Andy Reid, and he has lived up to the best case scenario entering the draft. That doesn’t mean the risk wasn’t there. Projecting a prospect is always a probability game, and just because a player hit, that doesn’t mean the initial analysis of the downside risk was wrong.

12. Deshaun Watson

Nailed it – “He has moments of exquisite touch on jump balls to a receiver’s back shoulder on the sideline.”

Swing and a Miss – “As a long term prospect, I see virtually no upside in Watson.”

Okay, I was wrong on this one. Watson is so much more dynamic than I ever envisioned him being when I watched him in college, making multiple plays each game that elevate the mostly mediocre talent around him. The Texans are alive in the playoff hunt because of Watson, where I expected him to be a mere game manager, someone who could ride a talented team to a successful but ultimately fruitless season.

There’s a section of annoying college football fans who seem convinced that it was obvious that Watson would turn into a star as he has. After all, he was a star in college, a national championship winner and Heisman Trophy runner-up. But we only have to look at the track record of national championship quarterbacks to see that this doesn’t always transfer smoothly to the league. Just in the past ten years we’ve seen titles won by Greg McElroy, AJ McCarron, Cardale Jones, and Jake Coker. Watson was a step above all those players in college, but he was still a passer who turned the ball over at a disturbingly high rate and succeeded thanks to the stacked team around him, and looking back it isn’t hard to see his career going a similar route to Winston’s.

2018

10. Josh Rosen

Nailed it – “if you can generate pressure on him he will likely be unable to complete the play down the field.”

Swing and a Miss – “He might be the best pure thrower of the football to enter the league since I started scouting players five years ago.”

I still don’t believe the book is written on Rosen yet, but I will admit that the first couple chapters are looking pretty rough. Two teams, two terrible situations, and two equally awful performances by Rosen. He hasn’t been helped by his situation, but he hasn’t done anything to indicate he could look better in cleaner circumstances, and I think the days of him walking into a team with a presumed starting role are over.

We’ll never know what Rosen could have been if he hadn’t ended up on two teams committed to building the worst offenses imaginable. He was always a player who was better at taking advantage of a good situation than elevating a bad one, and more than any of these other players he couldn’t afford to end up in a place like Arizona or Miami. At the same time, he’s been worse than even I could have expected in the places he ended up, and I’m not particularly optimistic about what will happen wherever he ends up next.

32. Lamar Jackson

Nailed it – “The moment he steps on a field he will become the best rushing quarterback in the league, and there’s a reasonable argument to be made that he will be the most dynamic ball carrier at any position period.”

Swing and a Miss – “even if he can fix 90 percent of his flaws he will still top out well below the best NFL passers.”

I talked about the perfect situation with Mahomes above, and here we are again. Somehow, against all odds, Lamar Jackson ended up on a team that lets him be Lamar Jackson. The Ravens run an offense that is different than any other in the NFL, because they have a quarterback that is different than any other in the NFL.

Jackson has succeeded as a passer more than I expected this year, but so much of that is built around the threat of his legs. The Ravens throw to wide receivers less than any other team in the league, and they use their running game to set up quick, easy completions to their tight ends over the middle of the field. If Jackson had to drop back in a normal NFL passing game, I’m not sure he would be anywhere near as successful.

But he doesn’t, because what he brings with his legs separates him from every other quarterback who has ever stepped onto a football field. He’s not even Michael Vick or Randall Cunningham, he’s a step above either of them. Like Mahomes, he is a player who is succeeding in a way we have never seen before. And I’m glad that this time around I was willing to take a risk and grade him as a top ten selection.

7. Josh Allen

Nailed it – “A couple times each game he will pull off a play that very few quarterbacks at any level would even consider.”

Swing and a Miss – “I know what the numbers say, but when I watch Allen on the field I don’t see an inaccurate passer.”

It’s still probably far too early to really reevaluate the 2018 class, and no quarterback better represents that than Allen. A year and a half into his career, we still have very little idea of what he is going to be. Which isn’t surprising, since he was always a multi-year project.

Last season Allen was bad, but not as bad as many expected. This year he has improved, but not by enough for us to really say the Bills have found their answer at quarterback. He’s about where Trubisky was a year ago, which obviously doesn’t bode well for him. But considering how many people were willing to write him off entirely before he was even drafted, I’m feeling cautiously optimistic about how highly I had him rated.

3. Sam Darnold

Nailed it – “Darnold can make any throw you ask of him, which is why it’s so frustrating that he so often doesn’t.”

Swing and a Miss – “Darnold is at his best when things get messy.”

Allen is a puzzle because he’s been kind of middling for a season and a half. Darnold is a puzzle because he has bounced wildly between both ends of the spectrum. The ability is absolutely there, but the mental part of the game still seems very far away. It hasn’t helped that he’s been put in charge of a terribly mismanaged franchise, one that constantly demands he do way, way too much. Still, his recklessness when he does try to do too much is more than I expected entering the draft.

1. Baker Mayfield

Nailed it – “Even though I don’t think he will make many plays as a rusher in the NFL he is creative enough to wreak havoc behind the line of scrimmage.”

Swing and a Miss – “Of the top quarterbacks in the draft, Mayfield will have the toughest transition from college to the NFL.”

The biggest concerns I had about Mayfield were all related to the system he played in at Oklahoma. I saw him performing efficiently but unspectacularly in a scheme that made his life as easy as possible, engineering open receivers with a regularity I didn’t expect him to find in the NFL. I didn’t see him making the plays an NFL quarterback needs to make, or so I thought.

The truth is, after decades existing in very different worlds, the best schemes in both college and the NFL have come together. When Mayfield has had success in Cleveland—as sporadic as it has been—it’s come by doing the exact same things he did in college. It worked then, and it can work now too. And with offenses like Baltimore and Kansas City demonstrating a willingness to adapt to suit the strengths of their passers, we may be reaching the point where we have to retire the notion of judging a college quarterback by his system.