Quote:
Originally Posted by burt
Yeah...I bet he does real well at reading defenses and making second or third reads.
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He does. Most of his reads are pre-snap, and he will progress if his initial options are not available. Which admittedly isn't often, because his first reads are usually Austin or Bailey, and they're both really ****ing good.
People can say whatever they want about his mechanics or his footwork or how he looks quirky to them in some intangible way, but the reality is that he's really good at knowing where to go with the ball and how best to get it there. There's a reason he completed 70+% of his passes and had 40 TD against 6 INTs, and it's not because of competition. The guy is really good. He had the kind of season people would be talking about as historic if only West Virginia had fielded a defense that could actually stop anybody.
It's like people trying to use the Oklahoma game against him. The guy throws for 320 yards, has 4 TD against 2 picks against one of the highest ranked passing defenses in the country, but he lost 50-49. So he must suck.
People talk about the TCU game as a bad one, too. I mean yeah, the guy only had 260 yards passing, 3 TD and 1 INT and they lost 39-38 in double overtime. Awful.
Defense makes
one stop in either of those games, they're an 8-4 team, ranked somewhere in the top-25. Make a stop in both those games and he's in the Heisman discussion at 9-3, with the same exact stats that he has on a 7-5 team.
You can point to Kansas State, he turned the ball over in that one (it was one of TWO 2-int games he's had in the past two seasons - and only the third game in 3 seasons as a starter where he had more INTs than TDs.), and you can point to Texas Tech (although I would argue against that one). But at the end of the day, the problems with WVU were not Geno Smith. He did his part.
Let me reiterate something: in three seasons as a starter he had three games where he threw more picks than scores. Three. And this is a guy regularly throwing 30+ times a game. This isn't Greg freaking McElroy riding the best defense in college football. This is a guy that's excelled playing in both a pro-style offense (in 2010) and a spread offense (2011-12), a guy who's been asked to be the focal point and done it at a high level for three years.
And yet somehow he's not good enough for the #1 pick? When he shoots up the board in March after all the workouts are done, people are going to talk about him like he's some kind of workout climber? Right. It's not like he's completed more than 65% of his passes for his career, or thrown for more than 10,000 yards, or thrown 96 TDs against 20 INTs. He's not a top QB, not with a mediocre performance like that.