Quote:
Originally Posted by GTripp0012
My personal opinion of Ryan Harris isn't even that high. I didn't think he had a very good senior season at all.
I don't think there was any position that ND was better at in 2006 than they were in 2005. They stupidly benched their best CB last year, All their LBs graduated and they were playing converted LBs all year, the DL stayed consistently dominant, the OL regressed, and the offensive skill positions pretty much all maxed out their college potential in 2005.
Which brings me back to Quinn. Quinn reached the summit of the college game back in 2005. As in there's no way he could have been more dominant as a senior. The stats show he regressed a tiny bit, but I believe that's nothing but variance over a 13 game sample. I see Quinn as a constant from 2005 to 2006, and I would go as far as challenging the credentials of a scout who didn't see it this way.
The nature of college football is that many, many Quarterbacks will reach the games highest point every year. So how do you separate the busts from the NFL prospects? There's a simple theory I have to do so. I believe that in every QBs college progression, they will have a point at which they will max out (production wise), due to limitations of their own teammates, coaches, opponents, whatever. They can't get any more productive at the college game, because the people around them will not allow it. As the saying goes, "you're only good as your weakest link".
Scouts tend to see this as a red flag if a guy stops improving. But its my fundamental belief that the quarterback really is still improving all along, he just can no longer produce at a higher college level. He is however, bettering himself as an NFL prospect all the while.
So while JaMarcus Russell and Troy Smith had great final seasons in college, how can we be sure they ever reached the pinnical of the game? What if the talent around them at LSU and OSU respectively had allowed their games to reach so much higher than they had achieved, but due to Smith's graduation, and Russell's choice to leave school, a scout has no idea how this will translate to the NFL.
While its possible that Russell did plateou at his peak production last year, its unfair to ask a scout to be sure of this. It's hard to really quantify how much talent he had at LSU, so the correct scouting move is to leave Russell as an incomplete (and not use the first pick in the draft on an incomplete raw talent  )
Smith is not a prospect for many of the same reasons. We don't know how much better he would have gotten with another year in college, nor do we know how good the 2006 OSU QB was supposed to be.
sf69, you may now completely dismiss this as garbage so you don't have to reply, and Matty...happy to oblige. |
What you fail to realize is the other side of that argument, with Quinn in many scouts opinion's was made to look much better than he was because of what he had around him, he had maybe the best offensive mind in college football coaching him, playing a lot of inferior teams, do you really believe that a kid from a program like ND, with the college and pro hype machine working 24-7 to promote him was overlooked in the draft? Come on, the guy looks way to mechanical, he's not a natural talent at the QB position, that is why with the QB being such a premium position he fell all the way to the #22 pick, it was no mistake.
The nature of college football is that superior talent can make you look far better than you really are at QB. Troy Smith, all you need to know about him is to look at the national champ. game, he was under throwing receiver after receiver, he is no NFL QB. He was surrounded with superior talent all season and that's that for Smith.
I also think you are under the delusion that scouts don't have the ability to evaluate whether or not a QB is a product of the system, or has the system held him back? It's not that difficult to break that down, whether or not that projection actually cultivates into an NFL QB still remains to be seen considering most fail regardless.
If he was red flagged it wasnt because of his numbers, it was because they saw no improvement in Quinn himself as a QB.
See to evaluate a QB you can't look at numbers, what you have to do is see if he makes the right reads but doesn't have the talent around him to allow success, from WR's not getting open, to O-lines not giving him any time, and is he accurate when he does have time and a WR open? Obviously Quinn didn't show nearly enough to impress most scouts.