Drj820 wrote: ↑03 Jun 2021 20:00
Okay, based on your response I am guessing that I must not be doing an effective job making my point (Il blame myself). I am not going to call Love a failure if the first year he starts the packers go 8-9 or something like that. However,
1) do you really think the guys you mentioned above had terrible rookie years? I think they were just rookies and on bad teams and the teams recogízed early on they were worth building their teams around. Lamar can still barely throw but they’ve built a car he can drive to the playoffs.
Allen had a bad record on a bad team, the team still saw plenty from him to know he was worth committing to.
I do not think they had terrible rookie years. I think they had overwhelmingly good rookie years and that is still quite poor quarterbacking by NFL starter standards. I specifically disagree that Josh Allen showed enough in year one to know they had something. I think at the end of year one that could have gone either way. And yes, the Ravens completely retooled their offense to Lamar's game in a way that I've been dying for teams to do with mobile QBs in the past, but still isn't clear if it's sustainable (the offense tanked last year)
Drj820 wrote: ↑03 Jun 2021 20:00
2) all of the above teams besides the Ravens were not good teams. Love is going to a better situation with a better coach than all of them. What expectations are reasonable for him? I am fine with giving him all kinds of mistakes and losing games due to him that we would have won with Rodgers. But Love played multiple years as a starter in college, spent an entire year in the qb room with 12, spent an entire year practicing with the team...I don’t discredit that stuff. I think we will see this year whether he can play or not. It’s time to see. He was a first rounder, not a fifth.
I also do not discredit the year Love spent with the team in many regards and the undisputed "he looks so much better than last year" narrative proves there is much that he gained. What I AM saying, though, is the lack of regular reps that it takes to build muscle memory on the fundamentals lessened the potential impact for his rookie year. The comment above made that we could call it 0.75 years in the league seems right to me. He learned a lot. He improved a lot. But the on-field fundamental work was less in Love's rookie year than it often is for a rookie, both because of COVID and because of his role.
Drj820 wrote: ↑03 Jun 2021 20:00
3) the above guys may have had bad records with rough stats, they still all passed the eye test. All the coaches knew they had something they could work with, it’s not gonna take me 3 years to make a call on Love if whether we should give him the keys to the car, or be looking for another driver in the meantime. Allen, Watson, Mahommes, Murray, Lamar, Herbert, Burrow...all guys that their teams knew early they had their guy and all the guys learned a lot their rookie years..in game experience can be valuable and help a rookie. It doesn’t have to destroy the rookie, not every franchise is Adam Gase and the Jets.
Yes, there were a lot of guys who passed the eye test and it was clear early on that something really great was coming. There are also a lot of guys who early on did NOT pass the eye test and later it became really clear that the team had something. I consider Rodgers to be one of those guys, fwiw. Rodgers needed two years on the bench, by my eye test. Ryan Tannehill is another good example. You mention above that he is a first rounder, not a fifth, and that is valid but there is also a very big difference between a top-10 pick at QB and a pick at 26. Waldo harps on this all the time, but if you are a franchise QB who the NFL considers ready to play in year one, you're going top 10 without a doubt. If you're a franchise QB who needs a year, you're probably still going top ten but you might slip down into the teens. If you're a QB with elite talent and is a project to develop into a franchise QB (Lamar Jackson at the time of the draft, Jordan Love, Jason Campbell) you're in the 20s. And draft status can be wrong about readiness, but it's a good indicator. It's important, though, to take these cases individually. We drafted a guy whose mechanics were a mess from coaching changes and poor team play around him after the expectations on him were already high.
Drj820 wrote: ↑03 Jun 2021 20:00
4) I don’t think Love was number 3 and couldn’t hold a clip board on game day bc the packers wanted to ease the guy in that slowly. I think it was bc they wanted him away from Rodgers on the sideline, or Boyle was just so much better they couldn’t justify dressing love over Boyle.
No, you're right. I worded or explained this quite poorly. What I mean is that in 2005 Craig Nall was better in camp than Rodgers, because knowing the offense and the speed on the NFL are the two biggest advantages you can have on a rookie, but the team decided that with Favre's uncertain retirement schedule, it was important to have Rodgers be ready more quickly; and it was less important to hang onto the stop-gap backup QB until Rodgers was ready. So even though by almost every eye test and by some reporting that has gone on, Craig Nall played better than Rodgers, the TEAM said to the coach, "no sorry, we need you to make Rodgers the backup and focus on getting him ready"
When Tim Boyle played better than Jordan Love in year one, because knowing the offense and the speed on the NFL are the two biggest advantages you can have on a rookie, the team was like "look, we have Rodgers for at least 2 more years. It's more important to have the best possible backup this year than it is to make sure than Jordan Love is ready asap." That was a team looking to win a Super Bowl, so it was not time to experiment with a rookie backup. It was time to put the better player
right now in the better position to play.
Drj820 wrote: ↑03 Jun 2021 20:00
5) When I say the pro game is easier to transition to now bc it’s more like the college game, kyler and lamar are perfect examples. QBs used to go to a team and the OC told them what to learn and they had to learn all new verbiage etc to fit the mode the OC sets. Now OCs run plays the QBs are familiar with, run what they are good at, the OC knows if the QB fails they are gone first. I think we see more and more young QBs play competent in the NFL due the college concepts making their way up to the NFL.
I mean yes, the Ravens completely went college offense and the Cardinals hired a college coach, but MLF is not teaching Jordan Love his college offense, but better. He's teaching an offense which does make life easier on QBs, generally, but only once they have the fundamentals down. There is a reason Aaron Rodgers improved DRASTICALLY from 2019 to 2020. Because it takes time to adjust your mechanics and fundamentals to a new scheme, and it takes time to fully understand the wrinkles of an offense, even for a high football IQ MVP.
Drj820 wrote: ↑03 Jun 2021 20:00
6) Love was a first rounder. He had a redshirt year. He should be able to throw to a stationary net and it not be breaking news that he hit the net. He can fail a lot next year and I won’t judge him by his stats, but the coaches, team, and most people that watch football will know if we have something we can work with or not. Lafleur is so qb friendly and the team is great around Love, if the team is 2-15 next year with Love at Qb I hope we look for another guy, not say “well just second year in league, original plan was to give him 4 before we decide”.
You seem to be focusing a lot on the stationary net stuff. Which is weird because a) Jordan Love is 24 for 37 in team drills according to Rob Demovsky, and b) we're literally watching OTAs for signs of progress and he IS throwing into a stationary net on a lot of these drills. What are we supposed to report? Nothing? You seem to want to "see" something from him, but when he does throw it into a net, no one is like "wow, a net throw!" We're just like "well, ok, at least he can do that one thing they're currently asking him to do." But he's also completing 64.8% of his passes (albeit not fullspeed) against our NFL defense with absolute scrub WRs out there. So, like, focus less on the net.
But in terms of KNOWING I think all the things you say about teams knowing what they have comes from seeing them in limited live action to confirm what's happening on the field. Like even when Mahomes was making "wow" throws on the regs, there are multiple multiple beat reporters at his second-year training camp fixating on his interceptions. And Mahomes played in his rookie preseason, his rookie season finale, and his second-year preseason. That's when people started saying "oh, OK." Jordan Love hasn't played a single snap against a live NFL pass rush, ever. How on earth do you think anyone can know what a player is when that statement is true?
And more broadly, as a response to your post in total, none of the things that put Love in a good situation in Green Bay (which I agree, are many things), do
anything to hasten the process or the number of reps it takes to build new muscle memory. That is still an ongoing process that is to be expected. We took a project and we treated him like a project. Maybe in retrospect, keeping Boyle over Love was a mistake because we needed to get Love better practice reps and better gameday preparation than we did. But we didn't know that Rodgers would stay healthy all season and that he would then take his ball and go home the next offseason.
Jordan Love needs muscle memory. Once his feet are good, we'll evaluate the rest. And from what I can tell, he's still thinking about his feet; so he's not ready. I mean, that's really an unsatisfying, unexciting, unsexy way to look at it. But that's really all there is to it. Dating back to the MM QB school, all I know about good QBing is that it starts with footwork. As long as that's not automatic and locked up, you're going to be holding yourself back.
(kidding)