OT: The Pittsburgher Thread: Sneaking up onto training camp

[WickedWrister]

For what it's worth, Fields has improved his completion percentage every single year he's been in the league, and he's comfortably above the mean in most deep-ball accuracy metrics. PFF gave him the 4th highest deep passing grade among all QB's last year.

I'm also not a huge believer in using raw completion % as the be all and end all of how to judge how accurate a QB is. There's a lot of things that effect that number besides QB accuracy including scheme, how well the OL holds up, and receiver drops. E.g. spamming short passes is a good way to boost completion percentage. Look no further than Jake Browning who led the league in completion % but had an average depth of target barely over 6 yards.

I was only able to find this passing chart for his 2022 season but I think it illustrates some of Fields strengths and weaknesses.

A while back I posted a tweet from Warren Sharp that looked at the highest rate of incompletions due to inaccurate passes-Fields was comfortably in the middle of the pack while Russ was actually one spot behind Mahomes for 5th best.

I like looking at CPOE (completion % over expected) too - Fields 16th, Russ 3rd in the league.

I'm not saying the guy is prime Drew Brees, but he legitimately has a pretty clean throwing motion and can deliver it off platform.

All this to say its that I don't think accuracy is going to be the thing that sinks him. It's will be his astronomical sack rate and decision making, if anything. I hated the Arthur Smith hiring at first but think his offense is perfectly suited for Fields. We'll aspire to be the most run heavy team in the league, go super heavy and try to make teams load up the box to stop the run and RPO game. Then hit them with the play action deep pass. At least that's the plan.

 

[lastcupever75]

Came across this. Tony Dungy was an absolute moron, but the media loves him for some reason:

**************************
Dungy: "One of our chaplains gave a chapel service before the game and talked about David and Goliath and said, 'The reason David was successful is he wasn't afraid. All the other Israelites were afraid of Goliath.' So I started thinking, am I putting fear into our guys' hearts? Am I playing this wrong? We can't be afraid of Devin Hester.


Devin Hester was as surprised as anyone that the Colts were kicking to him to open Super Bowl XLI. As the rain fell, Hester took the kick back and made history. Donald Miralle/Getty Images
So, at the last minute, I changed my mind and said if we lose the toss, we're going to kick off. We're going to kick it to him, and I want you to go down and pound him. And when we knock their champion down, that's going to send a message just like David.

"I talked about it with Russ Purnell, our special teams coach, and of course he said we can cover, we can do this. We'll get him in the Super Bowl. Everybody wants to have their moment. No one wants to go out there and just say, 'Hey, we weren't part of this, or we didn't contribute.' So it was mutual, but at the end of the day, it was my decision."

Reid: "Two or three days before the game I rallied the guys to convince Coach Dungy. I said, 'We can handle him. We'll be fine.' You could tell [Dungy] felt uneasy about doing it, but he's like: 'OK, I trust you guys.'"

'Devin Hester, you are ridiculous!': How one Super Bowl play turned Bears star into a Hall of Fame icon

It was one of the most electrifying plays in Super Bowl history. Here's how the people who were there remember it.

www.espn.com

tomlinesque

Yeah agreed. I don't think it takes someone who knows much about football to see that Justin Fields is a special player. He's special enough where it's totally worth a coaching staff trying to get him to play with a certain structure to minimize his mistakes and make things really easy for him.

you're banking on this coaching staff to accomplish that ?


and as far as Leal, just leave him at his natural position on the damn DL.
if he doesn't fit the system, and makes some plays in preseason, then look to a 4-3 team that may have liked him coming out in the draft and get a pick for him. End the experiment

 

[JTG]

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.





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.

Perfect. Thanks for explaining. I'm not on a high horse whatsoever. You can criticize and I can disagree with you. It's the beauty of the interwebz.

Many examples of QBs going from one system to another and then succeeding. It's not unprecedented. Fields also started in one of the worst situations in sport as a rookie with a Matt Canada-level coordinator, a dysfunctional front office and a shit roster. He needed to sit and didn't. Is he too far gone? Maybe.

Ben barely threw the ball, he had a running game, and a generational defense. Chicago was picking 1st overall.

Probably better off just disagreeing here.

 

[JTG]

For what it's worth, Fields has improved his completion percentage every single year he's been in the league, and he's comfortably above the mean in most deep-ball accuracy metrics. PFF gave him the 4th highest deep passing grade among all QB's last year.

I'm also not a huge believer in using raw completion % as the be all and end all of how to judge how accurate a QB is. There's a lot of things that effect that number besides QB accuracy including scheme, how well the OL holds up, and receiver drops. E.g. spamming short passes is a good way to boost completion percentage. Look no further than Jake Browning who led the league in completion % but had an average depth of target barely over 6 yards.

I was only able to find this passing chart for his 2022 season but I think it illustrates some of Fields strengths and weaknesses.

View attachment 898855

A while back I posted a tweet from Warren Sharp that looked at the highest rate of incompletions due to inaccurate passes-Fields was comfortably in the middle of the pack while Russ was actually one spot behind Mahomes for 5th best.

I like looking at CPOE (completion % over expected) too - Fields 16th, Russ 3rd in the league.

I'm not saying the guy is prime Drew Brees, but he legitimately has a pretty clean throwing motion and can deliver it off platform.

All this to say its that I don't think accuracy is going to be the thing that sinks him. It's will be his astronomical sack rate and decision making, if anything. I hated the Arthur Smith hiring at first but think his offense is perfectly suited for Fields. We'll aspire to be the most run heavy team in the league, go super heavy and try to make teams load up the box to stop the run and RPO game. Then hit them with the play action deep pass. At least that's the plan.

Great post and sums up my side of things perfectly.

 

[robopigeon]

Biggest issue with Fields is that he almost never throws with anticipation, and didn't really in college. In the modern NFL that's pretty essential. That's neither an accuracy issue nor a decision making one, but some weird mix of both. The only way QB's tend to succeed without that ability are coaching staffs that are able to scheme open WR's in clever ways and Tomlin's Steelers aren't exactly known for details.

Obviously it would be cool if he worked out, though.

 

[OnMyOwn]

I just think fields will be fun to watch at least.

 

[Peat]

For what it's worth, Fields has improved his completion percentage every single year he's been in the league, and he's comfortably above the mean in most deep-ball accuracy metrics. PFF gave him the 4th highest deep passing grade among all QB's last year.

I'm also not a huge believer in using raw completion % as the be all and end all of how to judge how accurate a QB is. There's a lot of things that effect that number besides QB accuracy including scheme, how well the OL holds up, and receiver drops. E.g. spamming short passes is a good way to boost completion percentage. Look no further than Jake Browning who led the league in completion % but had an average depth of target barely over 6 yards.

I was only able to find this passing chart for his 2022 season but I think it illustrates some of Fields strengths and weaknesses.

View attachment 898855

A while back I posted a tweet from Warren Sharp that looked at the highest rate of incompletions due to inaccurate passes-Fields was comfortably in the middle of the pack while Russ was actually one spot behind Mahomes for 5th best.

I like looking at CPOE (completion % over expected) too - Fields 16th, Russ 3rd in the league.

I'm not saying the guy is prime Drew Brees, but he legitimately has a pretty clean throwing motion and can deliver it off platform.

All this to say its that I don't think accuracy is going to be the thing that sinks him. It's will be his astronomical sack rate and decision making, if anything. I hated the Arthur Smith hiring at first but think his offense is perfectly suited for Fields. We'll aspire to be the most run heavy team in the league, go super heavy and try to make teams load up the box to stop the run and RPO game. Then hit them with the play action deep pass. At least that's the plan.

I hear you on not using raw completion percentage. But beyond sometimes being a tad lazy and it being a nice easy to find headline number -

a) If I'm comparing guys today with guys twenty years ago, I don't have all the fancy numbers - just percentage
b) There's so many numbers

The noise is just insane (if you want to get really insane, here's a ton of numbers from Fields' first three years - ) and nobody's managed to cut away all team and scheme stuff from the small numbers either.

So these days I kinda use it as a mostly accurate barometer unless I can see a reason to say it ain't so because it feels like the same sort of position I'd reach from looking at tons of numbers and looking up scouts' opinions... only quicker. (Actually watching enough tape myself to feel happy would be a damn job).

Does Fields deserve special consideration? He did throw a ton of short passes/checkdowns, and there's a number of sites slating his accuracy from a clean pocket (although not PFF) so it feels like not. Hitting a personal high in throwaways and being reluctant to throw at tight windows feels like a good way for a guy to preserve CPOE without actually helping the team (although he's not hurting them like he could be either).

All in all, it feels like accuracy is a problem. If the variety of stats available run between average and below average and you want the guy to be good, it's a problem.

How much of that is technical and how much of it is mental is a great follow up question, and if you think it doesn't look technical fair enough... but mental induced inaccuracy from slow processing, or inconsistent confidence, or whatever it isn't, is still inaccuracy in my book.

I do think the scheme will be good for him with slight caveats that play-action and the middle of the field haven't been strengths for him. I don't know he'll be good for the scheme. It's going to give him lots of rope to repeat some of his common failings in taking pressure and doing stupid things. Wait and see I guess. Those pass-only downs are coming though, even with Smith here.

Perfect. Thanks for explaining. I'm not on a high horse whatsoever. You can criticize and I can disagree with you. It's the beauty of the interwebz.

Many examples of QBs going from one system to another and then succeeding. It's not unprecedented. Fields also started in one of the worst situations in sport as a rookie with a Matt Canada-level coordinator, a dysfunctional front office and a shit roster. He needed to sit and didn't. Is he too far gone? Maybe.

Ben barely threw the ball, he had a running game, and a generational defense. Chicago was picking 1st overall.

Probably better off just disagreeing here.

Hey, Fields barely threw the ball and had a running game (himself) too

I think its perfectly plausible that he gives a better performance in a different scheme with stronger support (although his support wasn't awful last year and the uptick wasn't big). But when it comes to being a real deal franchise guy then, yeah, we're looking for different things and Fields' weaknesses are more or less all the things I want strengths.

 

[WickedWrister]

Day 8 Friday Night Lights

Gun to my head, I still think Russ retains "pole position" when he's 100% healthy, but Fields is making this a tough decision which I think can only be a good thing for this team. He's starting to stack together good practices and I think the idea of what this offense could look like with him at the helm has to be attractive to the coaches.

 

[TooManyHumans]

Fields is never going to last as the Steelers QB unless he figures out how to stop being a turnover machine. Tomlin simply will not accept a QB who turns it over like Fields has to this point of his career.

 

[xlm34]

Day 8 Friday Night Lights

View attachment 898941

Gun to my head, I still think Russ retains "pole position" when he's 100% healthy, but Fields is making this a tough decision which I think can only be a good thing for this team. He's starting to stack together good practices and I think the idea of what this offense could look like with him at the helm has to be attractive to the coaches.

Yeah I’m pulling for Fields to end up taking control of this thing somehow but I just can’t see it ultimately happening unless Wilson’s calf ends up being a problem or he looks terrible. Russ is probably going to look pretty good in a camp setting where he can’t really get sacked and players aren’t going 100%.

I just keep going back to the fact that Fields wouldn’t even be on this team if Pickett didn’t want out. Wilson being the starter was always plan A for them.

 

[Peat]

Yeah I’m pulling for Fields to end up taking control of this thing somehow but I just can’t see it ultimately happening unless Wilson’s calf ends up being a problem or he looks terrible. Russ is probably going to look pretty good in a camp setting where he can’t really get sacked and players aren’t going 100%.

I just keep going back to the fact that Fields wouldn’t even be on this team if Pickett didn’t want out. Wilson being the starter was always plan A for them.

Without Ben, Tomlin has been very quick to change his mind on QBs so we should keep a balanced view on how much the original plan go. I agree it's not happening to start the season unless Wilson shits himself, but Fields can start cutting short Tomlin's fuse for in season.

 

[WickedWrister]

Day 9

 

[xlm34]

Without Ben, Tomlin has been very quick to change his mind on QBs so we should keep a balanced view on how much the original plan go. I agree it's not happening to start the season unless Wilson shits himself, but Fields can start cutting short Tomlin's fuse for in season.

Oh yeah once the regular starts, it’s a whole different story. I think chances are pretty high chance we see Fields at some point this year due to either injury or poor play.

 

[TooManyHumans]

Oh yeah once the regular starts, it’s a whole different story. I think chances are pretty high chance we see Fields at some point this year due to either injury or poor play.

I will be shocked if Wilson makes it through the entire season as the starter. I expect either injuries or poor play to get Fields on the field at some point, although I don't expect that to go particularly well either. He simply turns it over too much and is too inconsistent. I am not holding out a lot of hope that the Steelers are the ones to fix him.

 

[Shockmaster]

There's reports out there from Eagles training camp that Pickett is in danger of falling to QB3 on the depth chart.

 

[Coastal Kev]

Fields is never going to last as the Steelers QB unless he figures out how to stop being a turnover machine. Tomlin simply will not accept a QB who turns it over like Fields has to this point of his career.

I don't know how you can make any judgments based on practice. No one knows how Wilson or Fields are going to perform in this offense as it stands right now.... no one.

 

[Peat]

I dunno about these expectations. Wilson has been pretty resilient. I know things went south with Denver but I feel like things are different here in that Payton could afford to bench a guy in favour of the future where as Tomlin needs to win a playoff game sooner rather than later.

I guess it wouldn't be a huge surprise if things go south but I think I'd bet a little more on them not doing so.

I do also think that if things go south for Wilson, that's likely to involve the support cast not being up to scratch and if that's the case, that's a rough go for Fields too. If the offensive line doesn't gel quick and/or the receiving weapons are on the low end of our expectations this could be a long season.

 

[WickedWrister]

There's reports out there from Eagles training camp that Pickett is in danger of falling to QB3 on the depth chart.

There were people in this thread victory lapping an Eagles OTA practice where someone reported that Kenny looked "sharper" than Hurts.

Meanwhile I think Hurts has thrown something like 120 passes in camp without an INT

 

[Coastal Kev]

There were people in this thread victory lapping an Eagles OTA practice where someone reported that Kenny looked "sharper" than Hurts.

Meanwhile I think Hurts has thrown something like 120 passes in camp without an INT

No there wasn't; some simply pointed out that the Steelers never gave Pickett an NFL OC during his two years here.

 

[WickedWrister]

No there wasn't; some simply pointed out that the Steelers never gave Pickett an NFL OC during his two years here.

Haha sure, whatever you say man.

 

[Coastal Kev]

Haha sure, whatever you say man.

Please note that you’re taking a victory lap from a rando’s practice rant.

 

[WickedWrister]

Please note that you’re taking a victory lap from a rando’s practice rant.

I never said that I was more mature than Pickett propagandists.

This you?

OT: - The Pittsburgher Thread: Sneaking up onto training camp

forums.hfboards.com

OT: - The Pittsburgher Thread: Sneaking up onto training camp

forums.hfboards.com

 

[Peat]

Roman Wilson is already out of his protective boot

 

[WickedWrister]

Day 10

 

[JTG]

I hope both QBs do out right fail or succeed. I'd rather us know because this team is pretty well built. They can be uber-aggressive going after one.