I agree with most of this but also the successful QBs in the league are extremely talented too.
Burrow comes to mind as the only one without an absolute bazooka arm and big picture he’s a 6’3 220 lb guy that moves pretty well.
You need both nowadays.
When we say extremely talented, what do we mean? Extremely talented for QBs? For football players?
Because Burrow runs a 4.8 40 while not carrying as much weight as your average 6'3" NFLer. I suspect that for most of the guys who try to be an NFL QB he's a pretty talented athlete, but compared to most of the guys who are NFLers, he isn't. Which is kind of the point with Fields. If Fields woke up tomorrow screaming he hated throwing the football and was done, coaches would beg him to become a RB/WR. He is a special athlete, no doubt. A guy like Burrow - or even Mahomes - would be kind of done.
Don't get me wrong. You do absolutely need a bunch of talent. Even guys like Brock Purdy and Kirk Cousins who are below average as athletes for an NFL QB are nevertheless pretty good athletes overall.
But after a certain point, physical talent just doesn't seem to matter any more. None of the most successful QBs in the league are just extremely talented by NFL standards. Or at least not in that way. You can make the case that being built like an outside linebacker is very helpful for an NFL QB and that fits the data. It's a big part of what makes Josh Allen. But the WR type guys? Not to date.
Hence me asking the question at the top.
How many QBs are built like Fields - i.e. 6'3 230 and run a 4.3.
Richardson. Watson? I think we differ on how athletic Fields is, which is quite literally the only reason I'd want them to take a chance on him. And there are many QBs who came in and played a certain way and then their came settled down and they learned the position and became more efficient. Shit...Ben did that. He was running around like an idiot taking 60 sacks a year much like Fields was, except Ben had a Super Bowl contender and Fields had nothing until the past year.
We've lost nothing by bringing him in We lose nothing by hoping he pans out and turns into something respectable. You can piss on everyone's fire though.
Leal just isn't going to get it here.
Well first off, you can get off your high horse you giant hypocrite. Everybody here grumbles about players they don't like.
Second, Fields' athleticism... well, he didn't run a 4.3. He ran a 4.45. At 227 lbs. Small differences, but lets be accurate.
But no, boy is he athletic. In terms of speed, we're talking Vick, Griffin, Jackson... that's kind of it who's played a bunch of games. Griffin is the only one of them about the same size. Special athlete.
But all of those guys have sub 60% throwing percentages in the playoffs. Which is my point.
We don't disagree on how athletic Fields is. We differ on how much use being athletic is to a QB. If none of QBs who ran sub 4.5 40 times before Fields could do dick in the playoffs, why are we expecting Fields to be different? Because he's heavier?
We watch this team take Jackson's legs away and beat him like a toddler's drum every year because when he can't run he can't win, but think other top teams couldn't do the same to our version (when we know they do the same to Jackson in the playoffs)?
That's where we disagree. Whether his athletic talent is worth getting excited over. Whether it's the clay for the pot, or it's the glaze that goes over the clay.
Justin Fields is maybe the best speedster athlete to play a full season at QB in the NFL (i.e. excluding the Richardson freak show). It has done him no good.
Finally, third, the comparison with Ben... it doesn't hold up.
Ben played with a 66.4 completion percentage his first year in the league. He proved he could be accurate immediately. Fields has never done that. 2 of Ben's first 3 beats all of Fields for completion percentage and the third was when Ben's role radically changed. His two highest touchdown percentages beat Fields' best.
Fields has had a sack to dropback ratio of higher than 10% every NFL season. Roethlisberger was below every one of his first three seasons. In terms of sacks per start every season comes below Fields. Roethlisberger wouldn't really start bringing his sack ratio down until he was 28/30 and just no longer as fast.
The only area where Fields can feel good compared to Ben is interceptions and yeah, Ben cleaned up his act plenty there.
But cleaning up interceptions as a guy who has demonstrated his ability to be a good QB and well, learning to be one is just wildly different.
So there we go. If people want to go on about the potential that a special athlete has at QB, and how all of the QBing fundamentals can be picked up, I will continue to sporadically point out that just hasn't really worked very well to date. I'm happy with him as a back-up but a look at NFL QBs says its a miracle if there's much more there. He can maybe push himself into the Tannehill journeyman starter with occasional system boosted great years, but it'll be a miracle if he's the lynchpin of the next decade.
And if that miracle occurs, it won't be because he's really fast, it'll be because he's made unprecedented strides in accuracy and processing for a guy in his position.
