True, Elway’s number weren’t too bad, but a mediocre QBR of 70.2 if you believe it that sort of stuff. Completion rate of only 54% too. Led the league in attempts also, so put in context maybe the TD and yardage numbers aren’t all that great. Darnold’s would have been as good or better last year if extrapolated out to 16 games.

He’s a hall of fame QB, and the fact that he had Emmitt is kind of my point – Darnold doesn’t have an Emmitt and is left to do everything himself.

I’ll agree Young isn’t necessarily a perfect fit to my analysis, but I added him more as an example of how changing organizations can vastly improve a player’s performance.

He's 24 and has played for a team that has given him almost no help. Several hall of fame QBs didn't have their first good season as a pro until their age 25 season. I'm not saying Darnold will figure it out, but it's also not as impossible as you're making it out to be.

I don't see Ballard and Reich staking their careers on Trey Lance. He has an NFL arm but he's too inconsistent. Looks like he'd also have the problem Baker Mayfield has where he's not good if you force him to be a pocket passer.

That seems like a good risk, but it would depend on how the FO feels about him now, as well as how they felt about him coming out of college.

Steve Young was a late bloomer also I believe.

I’m not a huge fan of Lance. His accuracy isn’t great and that is usually a good barometer for nfl success. I think Dodd’s got caught scouting him. So that is why he is on everyone’s radar. Still Reich coached Wentz and might like the coaching from that school and that kind of QB.

I like the kid out of Florida, Kyle Trask.

He started out hot but has come back to earth. His decision making is questionable. I like Jamie Newman if I had to pick an SEC QB. Would like to see where he is at the end of the year. Mac Jones has been rising also.

Do you have an example of a game that illustrates this? Because my biggest issues with him are his quickness to give up on passing and his general reading of defenses (he sometimes misses wide open looks). But I've generally seen an NFL arm with good ball placement in his film.

I too. like Jaime Newman. Maybe his draft stock will drop due to skipping the season

So Lance will be pretty dependent on his pro day and combine. But he is such an athlete that those should be in his favor.

But my concern is his accuracy and I’m going off the pff metric explained here: QB accuracy metric explained. I think it is a better evaluation tool than just attempts / completions which really doesn’t tell the whole story. Using that metric his completion is 50% which doesn’t project well to the NFL where you need to be very accurate. Burrow last year posted the highest accuracy rating they have had since they started using this, which is partly why I was so bullish on him. Then the one game he played this season he was only at 28% which wasn’t the best debut. I don’t like using one game as a measure but it’s all we have to go on.

He certainly has the arm strength and his running will be a definite asset. Defenses have a lot of trouble with QBs of his type. But I wanted 60% accuracy from him, that is usually the break point. And I just haven’t seen it yet.

Not a big fan of PFF, and this yet again feels like it relies too much on subjectivity. They're assuming they know the route every time, and while a trained eye will get that right most of the time, it's not going to be right every time and therefore skewing is going to happen. I also believe PFF tends to let their biases creep in because most of their analysis is subjective.

One example where I think this grading system could get it wrong: There was a play in a game I watched where Lance had a TE running upfield. This TE was NFL open, he had a defender closing but they had their back turned to the QB and were on the TE's inside shoulder. An NFL throw is needed, and Lance makes what is in my opinion the perfect throw: he throws high to the TE's outside shoulder, putting the ball in a position where only his receiver can get it. The ball hits off the TE's hands. To me, PFF would grade that as a "high" throw or maybe even an "overthrow", because the TE had to go up for it and it was high and to the outside of the receiver. But based on the play and what was happening, it was the perfect throw, as it gave the defender no chance at an INT and would've been an easy first down had the TE caught a ball that hit his hands.

Yeah I’m sure he will. I was looking forward to seeing what he could do with Georgia’s talent. Hard to place these QBs now outside of Lawrence and Fields. The range i think he is at is late first to third round.

Perhaps, I tend to pick and choose what I like about pff. But judging ball placement isn’t all that hard. I’m sure they take placement into consideration when coverage is present. In fact I know they do because Burrow often had to put it in a position where only his WR could get it and that was not in that strike zone, and he had a great accuracy rating. Early in Peyton’s career he started throwing balls low just so there was little chance of int and to cut his int’s down. There was little chance of Yac with those throws but I knew he was doing it intentionally.

I’ve see Lance throw outs with great strength and precision. The problem is that he doesn’t do that consistently. Those issues can be fixed, we have seen Josh Allen and the Ravens QB improve. But if given a preference I would like to start with a guy with high accuracy. He does have a hitch in his delivery and it draws it out. He will need to fix that in the pros. His running will be an asset as long as he protects himself. But as we have seen with Andrew and Cam Newton, no matter how big you are taking hits will knock you out of the game. Be like Russel Wilson, not Cam Newton.

Subjectively picking subjective statistics to like is certainly fair. But that's where I say their biases creep in. I feel like especially with PFF, once they've decided a player fits a certain profile, they make their statistics fit the profile rather than being as objective as possible and letting the numbers tell the story.

I also like accuracy in QBs, but as you point out, Lance does this well already in several situations, and you can't have a 42 TD 0 INT season at any level without having some pretty solid ball placement skills. Russell Wilson is also the model I would look to in Trey Lance, specifically getting him to stop abandoning the pass so quickly and easily. That's my biggest problem with him, due to the injury risk.

You say it’s subjective. I think it’s well explained and makes sense as a more in depth evaluation. Is he a super accurate QB? No. That is not what he is known for. Even the regular way of estimating accuracy, he is below his peers. Do you have an example of their bias in action?

Also he had 28 tds throwing, 14 rushing. It’s not like NDSU is playing top competition. Their closest game was against South Dakota State. The one game they had this year against Central Arkansas he threw an int. I’m not saying there isn’t stuff to like about him. There are good tools to work with and he does have promise. I just don’t know if he is a top five QB like some are making him out to be. And I’m not sure about his accuracy which I think is the most important trait for a QB.

I say it's subjective because their main statistic that they're famous for relies on them "grading" each play for each player, with no objective criteria given for how a player earns each level of grade on a given play. That means they're going to inherently be prone to giving players they like more positive grades than players they don't like. Also each individual grader might grade the same play for the same player differently. For the particular accuracy metric you shared, the way I could easily see biases creeping into that is that they've defined target areas and what makes a bad throw, an okay throw, a good throw, and a great throw. But what if the ball placement is in between target areas? How does that get graded? Dependence on the grader and their personal biases is once again high. It's easy to imagine one of their graders dinging a QB like Peyton Manning early in his career hard for doing something you described positively with good reason. Low throws and underthrows are bad in their grading system, but a QB doing it to cut down on INTs is doing a good thing, we seem to agree on that. If PFF's grader just despised underthrown footballs or that QB for some reason, it's very easy for him or her to ding his accuracy heavily in that grading system. I don't have proof of their biases in action other than they have no objective criteria by which their numbers are easily reproducible.

I think you and I mostly agree on Lance. The biggest area of disagreement seems to be accuracy. Of course level of competition is a concern, but productivity mitigates that somewhat. My biggest concern is that he tries to play like Cam Newton but looks more like RG3. He needs to use his mobility to escape pressure and keep plays alive, but scrambling should be the last resort. That's my biggest reason for being hesitant to put him with the top QBs in the class, and as I said earlier, I don't know that Ballard and Reich will want to stake their careers on this kid.

At this point walk away. Not that you are wrong, you dont want to waste another minute of time better spent Fill in the blank.

Anything you chose for fill in the blank will be better time spent. That includes disarming WWII unexploded bombs

I see what you are saying. As technology increases, high-resolution cameras with high frame rates, the ability to pause and examine, I see this as the natural evolution of analyzation. We do this every game our selves when we see a well-thrown ball vs a bad throw. You asked about balls thrown in-between zones which is a good point, and it probably depends on which side the ball is more on. But the zones aren't hit/miss it's accurate/less accurate/inaccurate etc. If it was either-or, that is where a bias could hurt you more, but the levels of increment minimize the impact of a bias.

Remember they are:

• absolving quarterbacks from getting downgraded for throwaways, spikes, batted passes and plays in which they're hit while throwing.
• Did the QB put the slant route on the front number for optimum yards-after-the-catch opportunity? Did he hit him with an accurate pass on his frame? Did he leave it in a catchable spot, but in a less-than-desirable YAC location?
• are also careful to add proper context to passes that appear to be off-target but are thrown away from the leverage of the defense. Such passes get an “away from coverage” designation that falls into the proper bucket of accurate passes.

Manning would have fallen into the last two categories there, which he was doing on purpose. I would assume they would know that if the announcer knew it and talked about it in-game. So Manning would fall into that area of accurate passes as well.

Finally, the whole argument depends on the presence of bias in the system, but there is no evidence of any bias. Just because there is a possibility for something to be corrupted doesn't mean it is. For example, the president and the GOP has lawsuits in every swing state trying to remove mail-in ballots arguing that there is corruption. They have not won a single case though because there is no actual evidence that there is mass mail-in voter corruption (that isn't caught) to discard the system, just their theories. (and before this turns into a political debate for some of you, yes I know the examples the pres said in the debate the other night, all those have been explained and you can look it up.) Bias would ruin the results if the same person did all the evaluations for one QB and no one else and no one checked the results. OR, the entire organization is biased against that QB and everyone working on that QB skewed the results. I find either unlikely because PFF is staking their reputation on the accuracy of their analyzations. If someone found bias it would taint everything the company does. Therefore they have a vested interest in being impartial. I would change my mind if something did actually come out about it. But I can't assume it is happening because it could happen.

Yup we largely agree in Lance, except for the accuracy issue.

I have no doubt that PFF is trying their best to get it right, but this boils down to the problem I've always had with them: the subjectivity in their analysis in my opinion creates odd results, like the year they had Ben Hartsock as the #1 TE in the NFL. Statistics are useful analysis tools, but they should never lead us to conclusions that are not in line with the results we see on the field. That's not to say I expect zero variance in the results. For example, I could see a statistical analysis determining that the Chiefs, Ravens, or Steelers are the best team in the AFC, but I would immediately dismiss one that said the Jets were the best team in the AFC. PFF's methodology would typically produce the former result, but has the capability built in it to produce the latter.

I can’t attest to their other models, I don’t know how the other ones work. Like any agency I’m sure they get stuff wrong. I believe the Hartsock thing was bc they were rating him the best blocking TE in the league and his grade was so high it was pushing him to the top despite the other average areas. At least that’s what they said, not that he was the best receiving TE in the league as well. I’m not going to defend everything they do, just so far I agree with the results in this particular QB model.

"Darnold is not a good QB"...YET.
The guy is only 23 and can still turn into a good player with proper coaching.

According to Florio, most trades will be consummated by tomorrow or Thursday, due to the impact of the COVID rules this year:

https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.co...y-or-thursday/

With regard to Darnold in particular, Sports Illustrated is reporting that the Jets won't trade him until this offseason, at the earliest:

https://www.si.com/nfl/2020/10/25/nf...-during-season

That number one pick isn’t a sure thing yet. Plus they would want to see what they could get in a trade for the number one pick if they got it. I expect a coaching and front office purge might happen as well.

And there's also this:

https://www.espn.com/college-footbal...ting-nfl-draft

Haha yup. Jets fans are calling it pulling a Manning. Also there are rumors Quinten Williams is on the trade block. That guy was a monster in college I wonder what is up.

Jets just released Quincy Wilson. Couldn’t find a role for him on defense.

But I thought they were teaching him make plays and not cover grass...

Should have stuck with grass

The Jets are 0 and 8. I'm sure they're confident they can continue their Trevor run without him.