Originally Posted by keg in kc
I think I saw him play 8 games this year. I saw at least that many again during his sophomore and junior seasons. I've seen a quite a bit of him. I was actually talking about him around the time of the draft last year.
He's not perfect, but I think some of his perceived problems have at least as much to do with the team he's on as they do with him. You can say a lot of the same things for WVU that people will say for Arkansas. Bad, bad o-line, not even a semblence of a defense so he's put under constant pressure to score. As many rushing yards as they got, they really didn't have any kind of legit threat at RB, at least not in my opinion (nobody on the team aside from Austin had a run over 30 yards the entire season). Bailey and Austin were tremendous receivers, so that obviously helped him, but I don't remember them ever really having a TE involved in the passing game this year, everything seemed to go through WRs and RBs, so he never really had a big TE safety net the way a lot of QBs do at least not that I remember. I think he was primarily throwing to guys in the 5'9-6' range, so obviously there's going to be a lot of short stuff.
And hey, they lost games. That's the killer. They lost games, and he gets the blame for that. Against K-State, I think he deserved it. Other games, I'm not so sure. They turn around a couple of 1-point losses where the defense gives the game up after he leads the team to late scores and we're talking about a QB on a 9-win team, and he probably looks a lot more like Griffin in the public eye.
But he can do everything you want. He's shown he can read the field, he's shown he can go through progressions, he's shown he can complete just about any throw you can think of, long, short and in-between, and he's shown he can do it with touch and with accuracy. He I think needs some work with footwork and mechanics, with consistency at times, but there just isn't anything that red-flags me. I think the odds are that he's going to be a good pro quarterback.
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