fieryprophet

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. . .

If I was a professional athlete I would never sign anything for anyone, period. Autographs are the dumbest thing ever and I have never asked for one despite meeting a number of celebrities.

Rookie camp, he's not allowed.

SCP is always worth a read. Mr. Scot is well-informed and thoughtful. LilSmitty09 makes some great videos.

Polian needs to get his head out of his ass and actually watch Cam play. I have called him before on Late Hits and had a few words with him before on the topic and the moron couldn't even recall plays that weren't on a game recap.

No problem VT, had fun and got to show you some fun tips. Now level up that sunsinger

Doh

You on PS4? I have PS3 too.

Bump, still looking for gamertags to add via party chat.

EVENT: Crota Raid, Normal Mode (Level 30) (PlayStation 4 only) TIME: Tonight, March 12th, 2015 @ 6:00 PM. WHAT HAPPENS: I sherpa as many as want to join through the whole raid. Will probably skip thrallway chest. REQUIREMENTS: Be at least level 27 to get into the raid, bring your best rocket launchers and some heavy ammo synths for the Crota fight if you are level 30+. If you are late to the event and room is available feel free to ping me via PSN and I will add you in to whatever stage we are at. HOW TO JOIN: Post your PSN gamertag in this thread and I will invite you to a party chat around 6:00 PM. We will start when either everyone in this thread has joined or by 6:15 PM, whichever is sooner.