fieryprophet

That falls entirely into the chicken-and-egg of why is he not attempting those throws more frequently: is it because he can't make those throws, or because he isn't asked to make those throws? If the latter, is he not being asked to make those throws because the coaching staff doesn't believe he can be successful with them, or because they don't believe those types of throws fit their scheme anyways? We can eliminate option A because he clearly can physically push the ball 40+ yards, successfully or not, or there would be zero attempts of that nature. We have no way of determining which of the two factors are the reason for option B because we don't know what the coaching staff's ultimate assessment of both his abilities and of their own conviction about the value of those throws irregardless of player would be. Again, you will be hard-pressed to find many coaches that will value a play that has an 83% or higher failure rate just to "keep the defense honest" when they have more valuable and consistent options at their disposal. But the core of my argument is that it's not like it's an impossibility for Bryce to push the ball downfield, it's simply that it's not the amazing cure-all that some seem to imagine it to be even for elite QBs.

This "noodle arm" characterization just baffles me. There's way more involved in a successful downfield passing attack than simple air yards. Let's take two stat-lines for throws of 40+ air yards (no YAC) from the last 3 seasons: 5/29 (17%) for 3 TDs and 2 INTs 1/9 (11%) for 1 TD So with three times the number of attempts, you net +6% completion percentage, the same TD rate, and 2 arm punt INTs to boot. The first player is Mahomes, the second is Bryce. Clearly Bryce attempts these throws at a much lower rate, but his success rate is quite similar to one of the most talented downfield throwers of all time. The takeaway isn't that Bryce is Mahomes-lite (if he was his usage rate for these would be much higher) but that these throws by their very nature are extremely difficult, very scheme-specific, and even an elite thrower can have wildly differing success rates season by season. And before we get into the complaints of cherry-picking, this is far more substantial information than the various insinuations that Bryce struggles to even get the ball 20 yards downfield, much less 40+. And the wildest part of this is that every time Mahomes threw a bomb over the last 3 season, 83% of the time the end result was failure, yet many Chiefs fans complain that he isn't taking even more shots downfield.

The CBA changes to offseason rules regarding live contact, practice time limits, etc. over the last decade cannot be overstated on its impact for younger players in particular. The players union is heavily weighted towards the interests of veteran players, who are concerned with staying healthy and on the field, compared to rookies and bubble players who need more development time and live-fire experience, but that has been bargained out over the years. Not saying that absolves Canales of this team's clear tendency to show up unprepared for the start of seasons but it does mean the entire coaching staff gets less to work with to mitigate it (which should have meant adjusting by more reps in the preseason for the starters at least.)

I have never understood how the labels negotiated the kinds of deals they did for the paltry rates that Spotify pays until it became obvious that they were getting the lion's share of the revenue and the actual artists couldn't do anything about it.

Making millions in the coaching/analysis side of football is a lot like making it as a band in the Spotify era, you need a hell of a lot of luck and to know a lot of the right people. I know way too many excellent assistant coaches who live week to week barely supporting their families even for big-name programs at the college or pro level. While I enjoyed my time involved in it, it got old fast, the crunch is real, and I moved on to less demanding and more profitable fields.

No, when I said rage, I meant rage, which only applies to certain fans on this board. Your timeline of trying to assess whether he is the future or not is really tied to the discussions surrounding his second contract. If this team is going to commit to some monster contract while he has shown nothing but glimpses of brilliance would be deservedly worrisome, so the clock is genuinely ticking for him to settle into something resembling his final form. Perhaps a best case scenario is that he plays well, the team succeeds, but he does so with a more limited role that makes the rest of the league view him as a game manager, and his second contract value reflects that. Then he continues to improve and becomes a bargain comparatively while not handicapping the team around him, and we enter an era of consistent championship competitiveness that the fanbase has craved for decades and has never really experienced before. But that requires many, many things to go right and for Bryce himself to facilitate that if he ends up being the quarterback of the future.

There's a reason Greg Maddux was never a flamethrower but still one of the most feared pitchers of all time, because accuracy beats velocity far more often then vice versa. Once you exceed a certain minimum capability, you can thrive with extreme traits elsewhere, its not strictly about power in any sport but powerlifting.

The majority of the velocity on a throw is based around a player's core, so developing "arm" strength is really a function of developing one's ability to rotate the entire body, accentuate the transfer of weight over the hips, and apply that momentum to generate force on the ball. All of these things alter the placement of the ball and accuracy without thousands of reps to realign to the new mechanics. The hope then with young quarterbacks is that they simply grow into their bodies and that experience allows them to optimize their natural mechanics to eliminate wasted motion and with repetition expand both their power and accuracy.

Even a player that bounces around repeatedly with no success might suddenly stumble into a situation perfectly tailored for them. Think Kurt Warner and how as long as he was on teams that thrived with his timing-based, quick throwing traits, he was able to play well, but outside of that context he was marginal. So even on the same team, once the schemes diverged from his strengths his performance fell off as well. The question then becomes is that a failing of his due to having only a specific skillset, or a failing of the teams for not properly utilizing his unique traits to allow him and by proxy the rest of the team to thrive?

That was fully intentional, because something people who engage in hyperbole can't stand is to be systematically told why and how they don't have a clue. It's the prevalence of this farcical idea that everyone's opinions are valid and the more impassioned they are about them, the more valid they are. And the point of the post wasn't merely to cut the knees of the exaggerators, but to illustrate why it shouldn't seem miraculous that someone like Mayfield and Darnold could come through Charlotte and fail and then suddenly seem much more successful elsewhere, when the reality is that there's far more to being successful at that position than one's own talent. It's also why young quarterbacks like Caleb Williams and Cam Ward deserve much longer leashes to determine their long-term viability and not be written off immediately, because the circumstances surrounding them are hardly conducive to success.

I don't think the average fan understands how much arm strength is considered a "nice to have" in NFL circles. This isn't the 80s, it's an accuracy-based league first and foremost.

JT says it better than me: "This is a ***ing laser. . .This for all the guys who say he can't make all the throws. That's the throw." Does he do this every snap? No. But to say that he can't drive the ball downfield is categorically false by any standard.

Every player has faults, and many times they can be categorized neatly into obvious traits that make analysis pretty straight-forward. A running back who thrives in zone schemes where their vision and patience is rewarded may struggle when asked to play a physical, violent, north-south style. A quarterback who can make every throw under the sun may never grasp the schematic purpose of the plays he is being asked to run and therefore constantly makes the wrong decision or no decision even with players running free. But the narrative for Bryce Young has almost consistently focused on his size and overall physicality in a league full of supermen, and how it places a hard limit on his ability to do things like shrug off blockers or throw tactical nuclear strikes from 80 yards out. Two seasons plus in hasn't put those concerns fully to rest, but if there is one underlining trait that could potentially derail Bryce's career, it's much more nebulous: his ability to recognize when a play is dead. The proclivity for turnovers that has haunted Bryce through his career doesn't always have the same underlying reasons as most typical young quarterbacks: adjusting to the speed of play, the tightness of NFL throwing windows, being able to diagnose much more advanced coverages, understanding the playbook, etc. One consistent thread is a defining trait that is both a curse and a strength: his ability to make plays off script, which has carried over from his Alabama days. For every miracle escape and razor-margin throw downfield like the 4th down play vs the Dolphins, you seem to have an inexcusable dropped fumble without even being touched (also see Dolphins game.) And the genesis of both is his underlying aggressiveness to make something happen with every snap, sometimes even when the play itself is simply unsalvageable. What often gets Young into trouble isn't an inability to execute a play, but his unwillingness to concede that the risk/reward ratio for a given decision simply isn't worth the attempt. There are few things that will drive a coach to putting a schematic leash on a player more quickly then when that player's outcomes become unpredictable, and even multiple miracle plays can be negated by a single colossal mistake. Where Bryce must find a balance is retaining the ability to conjure magic when needed, but to also keep his risk/reward instincts fully calibrated to what the team as a whole is comfortable with. No successful coach is entirely risk-averse, and many tend to be overly conservative in situations that decides the outcome of games, but "bad" Bryce sometimes emerges in situations where the only correct decision is to simply eat the ball and move on to the next play or next drive. If he can develop a better understanding of this flaw and work to overcome it without abandoning the traits that also make him special, he will take one step closer to becoming the player this franchise sacrificed so much for and redeeming that faith with the entire fanbase.

It's absolutely on him to change his narrative, and fans deserve to be critical of perceived shortcomings when those shortcomings reflect actual performance failings. But those that just rage at any perception that he may be developing into the team's quarterback for the future (notice I said may, this is not a given at all) just need a reality check on their hyperbole, just like those who proclaim his proclivity for game-winning drives negates his failings that sometimes lead to those situations.

I'm going to be real, the reason that vote ended up so lop-sided by the end was directly due to my programming. So there's nothing tongue in cheek about it. Also I left PFF after the Collinsworth acquisition (didn't want to move to Cincy) but have stayed involved in analytics via backdoor channels, but I can absolutely say that the experience was eye-opening, not because those guys are unquestionable football savants and that I became one by proxy, but because the amount of information that becomes available outside of what the typical fan has access to is revelatory and also really drives home how much context is still being missed even with all of that information. You don't discover that you know everything, you discover how much you still can't know no matter how hard you try, hence my point about the NFL not being able to figure out what makes a QB good. There's a lot of AI work going into that now and even that only seems to further confuse things vs. actually enlighten the problem. In the professional realm teams don't really talk about quarterbacks as A strictly being better than B, but how A can potentially perform better than B given a specific context of C. Of course those contexts may be wider for A than B, but there's also contexts where B can outshine A, even with lesser talent surrounding them. So what good teams strive to do is ultimately define a process of how they want their entire team to operate under schematically, find players that fit that scheme, and hopefully find a guy whose skillset will be maximized running that scheme with those players. Where bad teams fall of the wagon is constantly shifting those schemes and chasing bad fits or fads vs. sticking with a core identity and developing it.

Absolutely not. Young is definitely an outlier for size and height, but in most other areas he's quite similar to the norm: above-average arm talent, good-enough arm strength, great anticipation, and plus mobility which has become more relevant in recent seasons. And there's nothing prototypical about players like Brees or Wilson, or were the physical outliers in their days that Bryce is now. Brady was a sixth round pick precisely because he looked like a camp body compared to the 90s era prototypes of Marino, Aikman, or Bledsoe. The Mannings fit those prototypes but would be considered more atypical for the physicality expected of modern QBs, especially in regards to their mobility outside the pocket. So however you are defining prototype, it's sounds very much like "I want my guy to resemble a Madden create-a-player" vs what any of these players actually look like.

Really? You have the winningest QB of all time in Brady, who we all can acknowledge was never an imposing physical specimen, and the Manning brothers (dad bod extraordinaires), the short kings in Drew Brees and Russell Wilson, the immensely talented arm of Rodgers, the unconventional mobility-driven Mahomes, the sturdy Roethlisberger, the gunslinger in Stafford, and then Flacco, Foles, and now Hurts. None of them are direct clones of anyone else, and they all have their various strengths and weaknesses, and the most talented arm of the bunch (Rodgers) has only one chip to show for it. Brady racked them up by playing with precision, anticipation, and the literal definition of "good-enough" physical tools, with a hindrance of a lack of mobility and heavy reliance on either good protection or players that can consistently win in short routes to succeed and overcome it. We all can see Mahomes weaknesses play out now that the Chiefs are boom and bust playstyle devolves more consistently to bust without the plethora of deep threats and running game to allow Mahomes to thrive. Some of the most physically dominant players in the league today (Allen and Jackson) just can't seem to close the deal come playoffs, so once again the correlation between physical tools and actually being a championship team is not as strong as people think.

What's up gents, the OGs remember me, the guy who single-handedly gave the Panthers the greatest uniform in history moniker. Not too long after that I got involved with Pro Football Focus (pre-Collinsworth acquisition) and ended up taking backseat here to preserve some objectivity. But from a distance I noticed a lot. After the end of the Cam era this place devolved into the most un-fun, petty, negative cesspool of whining and bitching that has ever graced the internet. The worst part of it all is that the level of discussion turned into the most ill-informed, hot-take, unnuanced crap, rife with people talking out of their posteriors as if they have any clue about what they are watching. Once you get into the professional side of the sport and actual film rooms, you start to understand there's an absurd number of moving parts to pretty much every snap and the details you are privy to are truly only half the picture. The absolute most important thing I learned from being part of professional level football analysis is that quarterbacking is literally the most intricate and difficult position in all of professional sports, and that the NFL itself is struggling to develop any workable model that allows them to understand what makes one succeed vs what makes one fail. Because of this paradox it has also made the quarterback position itself grossly overvalued from a fan and media standpoint, creating an absurd fixation on the results delivered by a single player who has to rely on the contributions of everyone around them. This also drives the dreaded inflation of QB salaries that inevitably cause even elite teams to lose key talent all to pour cash into the one player supposed to be able to single-handedly elevate the entire team (and defense and special teams and coaching and ownership by some mysterious proxy), yet without those same players even talented teams can wander the wilderness searching for the right guy to take advantage of their talent window. The discussions the last few years around Bryce has personified this insanity, as this board has devolved into some sort of electronic civil war between the hyperbolic Young supporters and the vitriolic Bryce haters. The reality, like practically everything in this world, is somewhere in the middle. He has traits that can absolutely elevate a team with creativity, play recognition, off-arm angle throws, mental toughness, etc. He's also physically limited, with mostly "good-enough" qualities for most situations that a professional quarterback is asked to do, and will never be an overpowering physical force like pre-injury Cam. But "good-enough" physicality represents a large majority of championship-winning quarterbacks, even in the modern era. There's a reason the corpse of Peyton Manning took the chip from elite physical specimen Cam, because the team surrounding him was talented enough to get him there, while we all know Cam was the driving force of that 2015 team. That's no knock on him, that's just how the game of football tends to work: the more complete team usually wins. The summary is this: if this team lives or dies solely on the performance of its quarterback, then it is absolutely a paper tiger even if he plays brilliantly week in and out. There are no superheroes in this sport, there are only conduits that proxy the collective efforts of much of the team around them. And no one alive can tell you how the position is played perfectly, it's all a confluence of circumstance and what unique collection of traits each player brings to the position, which can never be truly recreated season after season, even for the same player on the same team. If this place remains a raging hellscape of idiotic hot takes I will happily remove myself again and do something more productive for yet another decade, but maybe's there hope that we can all get back to the old adage, and keep pounding.

You going to do this nitpicking adjustment for every other QB's GWD stats? No? Then everything you said is irrelevant.

Still one of my all-time favorite endeavors, my laptop at the time ran at 100% for hours at a time

New boss same as the old boss.

On the screen passes note, our defense has always had great success against screens. Our linebackers are just too damn smart.

My nerddom is showing, but that was Bilbo. Frodo was actually very reluctant to leave the Shire. EDIT: Ahh, I see my fellow nerds beat me to it. Damn, we're a enlightened lot, aren't we? ;)

What's strange is that we never really were that strong of a running team this year. Take Cam away and the run game would have been middle of the pack. This year's offense was explosive and aggressive without having to hurl it 50 times a game. It really can't be stressed at how efficiently the offense scored while retaining that ball control flavor.

Haha, long time. I haven't been video gaming anywhere near as much of late, got a lot more "real life" things to take care of these days :) And I will admit Destiny kinda burned me out when HoW dropped and I realized I would have to go through another leveling slog. . .