Hey You, You Don't Know Quarterbacking

[Basbear]

Welcome to the interwebz and message boards, I suggest hiring a guide. 

[Cpt slay a ho]

Respect the post but mid is mid, most that aren’t rage baiting etc can see the inconsistency in Bryce’s play, and it’s mostly due to watching bad qb play over numerous years in the nfl

We gotta stop the coddling of QBs, these guys are going to be taking up 1/3 of your overall cap space, to have shown what young has up to this point, there’s no way anyone should be comfortable getting ready to drop 40-50 mil per year on what we’ve seen on the field.

not his fault he got over drafted but no need to double down on a bad mistake(still has the remainder of this season to change the narrative)

[Mr Mojo Risin]

16 hours ago, fieryprophet said:

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.

Great post. Thank you for that

[Jon Snow]

1 hour ago, strato said:

Where does this completely new claim of people lying about his arm strength like this 5 yard claim, and another right now today that claims ‘people’ say he can’t throw 20 yards, where is this coming from? 

I've saw a few comments myself so he's not exaggerating. But I ignore outrageous takes.

[strato]

40 minutes ago, Jon Snow said:

I've saw a few comments myself so he's not exaggerating. But I ignore outrageous takes.

Thank you for speaking up.

I can’t see how anyone would take that to be serious. It is one of those exaggerations for effect I guess. 

I forget sometimes how people do when the are desperate to make a point. 
 

So you guys and your 5 yards and 25 yard claims, I apologize but also maybe you should consider the source on some of these things. 

 

Edited 2 hours ago by strato

[jb2288]

2 hours ago, strato said:

Where does this completely new claim of people lying about his arm strength like this 5 yard claim, and another right now today that claims ‘people’ say he can’t throw 20 yards, where is this coming from? 

It comes from this board. Nobody claimed you said it. 

[mc52beast]

11 hours ago, Icege said:

The world owes you many thanks for how much that entire uniform contest broke Dave Dameshek.

Forgot about that dude. Pretty sure he hated Cam more than Cowherd.

[fieryprophet]

8 hours ago, KSpan said:

I'm sorry, but "good-enough" physicality absolutely does not represent majority of championship-winning QBs since the rules change in 2004 or so, which is all that is relevant in this conversation about the modern NFL.

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.

Edited 1 hour ago by fieryprophet

[csx]

1 minute ago, fieryprophet said:

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 to 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.

They're all protypical qbs. Especially compared to Young.

[Jon Snow]

32 minutes ago, strato said:

Thank you for speaking up.

I can’t see how anyone would take that to be serious. It is one of those exaggerations for effect I guess. 

I forget sometimes how people do when the are desperate to make a point. 
 

So you guys and your 5 yards and 25 yard claims, I apologize but also maybe you should consider the source on some of these things. 

 

You can see a lot of outrageous takes on game days. Most get lost in the back and forth between the usual suspects. I try not to feed that beast.

[jb2288]

3 minutes ago, Jon Snow said:

You can see a lot of outrageous takes on game days. Most get lost in the back and forth between the usual suspects. I try not to feed that beast.

Yep. Just because they’re extreme hyperbole and obviously not factual, they’re still said. The dude saying “he can’t throw it more than 5 yards”, hopefully doesn’t actually believe that but it’s weird we have posters in here acting like that stuff isn’t said all the time around here.
 

I don’t know why we are doing this revisionist history now. 

[fieryprophet]

6 minutes ago, csx said:

They're all protypical qbs. Especially compared to Young.

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.

[Jon Snow]

1 minute ago, jb2288 said:

Yep. Just because they’re extreme hyperbole and obviously not factual, they’re still said. The dude saying “he can’t throw it more than 5 yards”, hopefully doesn’t actually believe that but it’s weird we have posters in here acting like that stuff isn’t said all the time around here.
 

I don’t know why we are doing this revisionist history now. 

A lot of stuff gets said online and 99% of it is bs. Its no different on a message board. 

[fieryprophet]

8 hours ago, kungfoodude said:

Also, has anyone noticed how legitimately insane OP's post actually is?

It's taking credit(tongue in cheek, hopefully?) for some funny event from Huddle past, then explaining that because they now work for PFF they have some sort of super brain knowledge of football that they hadn't before. 

It's actually mostly condescending in a way that lacks a lot of self awareness for.....a PFF stat nerd.

And I say that as a stat nerd myself.

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.

Edited 1 hour ago by fieryprophet