Thurman#1

Um, no, Transplant was the guy who hated him with a wild and unceasing passion. Until about a week after the Bills drafted him. As I said earlier in this thread, and Trans will back me up - because he was arguing with me telling me that success by Allen was not even a possibility - I thought he had a good chance to succeed. I wasn't convinced he would, but I thought he had a good chance, and thought him being a top ten guy was reasonable. So, nice try.

No, Shaw. It really was not even close to a misunderstanding. He didn't just say that Allen had mechanical problems. He went into detail over and over again about what those mechanical problems were and what he was doing to fix them. As one of several examples, here is an excerpt of a pre-draft interview with Jordan Palmer, but after Palmer had spent months working with him. And it's very very clear that he sees at least one very very specific problem (though he's talked about several others at different interviews at different times as Josh developed. "Of course, the big question with Allen is his accuracy and his 56.2 completion percentage, which scares the heck out of offensive coaches. But guess what? " 'We've fixed it,'' said Palmer. "He said with Allen's poor completion percentage 'there are two ways to look at it: one, what he's doing mechanically, and then two what's happening around him, receivers and the concepts and the coverages that they're seeing and there's a lot of complexities that go into both of those.' " 'From a mechanics standpoint you have to be athletic enough take an old muscle memory and create a new muscle memory. Take something that was an old habit and replace it with the new habit. With Josh, it was tied to his base and kind of where his feet are placed and how short his front stride is. And so making a small adjustment has made a huge impact.'' He said "the growth in accuracy that you're going to see throughout the draft training process and throughout his transition into the NFL and to being a franchise starter, is going to be tied to that.'' https://www.cleveland.com/browns/2018/03/jordan_palmer_on_browns_candid.html He's referring specifically to the low completion percentage when he talks about other things than accuracy, like "... what's happening around him, reciever and the concepts and coverages ..." But he very specifically addresses accuracy, specifically in terms of replacing bad old habits with good new ones. There was no mistake in communication here. Palmer is a very erudite, well-spoken guy, specific and educated in what he's talking about. More: "When the ball comes out of a guy's hand crappy on a good player, it's the sequencing,'' said Palmer. "You actually have to fix the sequencing and build muscle memory around that. If he has a bad throw, he'll follow it with a really good one because he has the fix.'' And again, this is one of several times he's mentioned various mechanical problems he and Josh were working on and changing.

Well, yeah, but that's kind of what defenses are supposed to do. Using the defense to attack Taysom Hill is ridiculous. If you want to attack him, do it for his performance, not because some other group of guys is doing their job well. Did you attack Josh Allen last year when the defense played well? People did, and it made no more sense then. Hill played really well. The offense scored 24 points. There should be mostly good things to say about that game. Sure, as I said, he's still got a huge amount to prove. But so far so very good. Yup. Precisely. But it's like talking ... well, this isn't much of a metaphor but it's like talking to someone who doesn't get it.

This is far far far too early. I really hope you're being sarcastic, and naming Tommy Maddox and Randy Johnson and the rest of these wanted-to-be's "notables" makes me think you may be. But it's still a horrible idea.

It's not Hill's problem the Falcons scored nine. His own offense scored 24 in his first game as a starter. Respectable. A decent start, though certainly he still has a lot to prove.

Chris Simms said as far back as last season that he thinks Hill is being groomed as their next QB. He said if it didn't work out that it wouldn't hurt the Saints so badly since he can be a gadget guy as a fallback. But that he thought that Payton was confident he could put together an offense that Taysom could win in. Made sense to me. The age is indeed a drawback but perhaps not a deathstroke.

Right. In spirit anyway. You don't need to spend a first on an RB. But if the OL isn't holding up it's part of the bargain, nearly any RB isn't going to do all that well. Seriously? "All stats prove he is about the same as he was last year in production"? Really? To me, a guy who goes for 5.1 YPC (in all his stats) one year, which was third-best in the league that year and then ... 4.1 YPC (in all his stats), which put him at 28th best the next year has a pretty decent statistical argument that he isn't doing nearly as well the 2nd year.

Larry Fitzgerald actually didn't run at the combine at all. I certainly agree that 40 isn't everything. I went to the NFL's combine data site since I didn't remember such a slow 40 from him, and he wasn't listed at all as having a 40 time. That led to finding the above.

First, dividing things up by how many catchable and uncatchable footballs a guy throws is in no way measuring his accuracy. Accuracy is far far more nuanced than that, it has to do with how well you hit a guy in stride, how well you lead him away from defenders, whether you hit him between the numbers and so on. You're not measuring accuracy there. You're measuring whether or not some guy on the internet thinks your balls are catchable or not. And that's fine, it's just quite far from accuracy. As for whether your method is objective, it couldn't possibly be clearer that it is absolutely not. Saying that your method was objective is a joke. The fact is that we often have people on these forums arguing whether the ball in a given case is catchable or not and disagreeing violently. It's an opinion. Now, some cases are obvious and everyone would get them the same, but many are not. Many are very subjective. And it's a simple fact that beliefs, opinions and prejudices affect perception. You could've made your analysis bulletproof by pointing out what you thought of which plays. I challenged you many times to do that. You refused, for reasons that seemed pretty obvious to me and many others. And again, you're a guy who did many of these little studies, all of which seemed to produce results showing that Tyrod was a franchise quarterback back when that's what you believed. Which was basically the whole time he was here, except the long period of time when you thought he'd gone far beyond a franchise QB and was "near-elite." If you want to continue believing that Allen was as accurate as others, that's fine, but you have never given us any reason to believe it. You're pretty much alone on that. He certainly has improved a great deal on decision making as well, but that's not that unusual. Nearly every QB coming into the NFL takes quite a while to improve that, and if they don't, they fail. Impovement of deicision-making isn't that big a deal, as it's common among guys who become successful. Improvement of accuracy is far far less common. Many pundits, coaches and scouts have argued that it's not possible to do. That argument never made sense, as plenty of QBs have improved accuracy to some degree, from Brady and Rodgers on to many others. But very very few have improved it to a really large degree, which is I think what those pundits are really talking about. Luckily for us, Allen is one of those very very few exceptions who have made really large improvements in accuracy. But yeah, you're right, decision-making, too.

Yeah, I get it. You have an opinion, and nothing else. And you're telling us that opinion. Which is fine. But again, we knew your opinion before. Thing is, other than that opinion of yours, backed up by ... well, your opinion, there isn't any evidence or really anyone else saying the same thing. Allen had accuracy problems, which he has really successfully addressed. You don't think so. Both of those things are just fine.

Very unlikely. Barkley is a replacement level backup. And Darnold would be too expensive in trade and possibly in salary as well. A few years down the road? Well, who knows, maybe. But next year? Really unlikely.

I wasn't answering you, Bill. I was referring to something entirely different. As to your point, I don't find it worrying that Singletary didn't live up, particularly, to those first two games, during which he managed 17.5 YPC on four attempts in the first game and 9.5 yards on six attempts in the second game. I mean, in those first two games he managed 127 yards on 10 carries. He was absolutely never going to maintain anything close to that level. That was simply a small sample size. Did they figure him out after that? Well, enough to stop him from getting 12.7 YPC, yeah. But as for the rest of last year - leaving out those first four games just for the sake of argument - in the remainder of the season he went over 5.0 per carry in 4 out of 8 games and over 4.5 in 6 out of the 8. I don't find that concerning. Just the opposite. And again, that's leaving out the first four games, which contained his three best. Instead, I find concerning the weakness of the whole run game this year. I'm hoping that when we finally get Winters on the bench and the best five OLs out there things will look up a bit. That's my best guess as well, but we'll have to see.

Um, no, comparing rookie Allen with rookie Brady or Brees is just fine, as is comparing college Allen with college Brady or Brees. More, it appears I never mentioned Brady or Brees. That was you, desperately trying to acquire a point. This is the post you replied to: Could you just quickly point out where I mentioned Brees or Brady? No, right? I said, "He had plenty of times when he made the right read, made the right decision, and airmailed the ball or threw far in front or far behind the reciever. He did this at a much higher rate than pretty much any successful pro QB did." Neither Brees nor Brady were anywhere near as inaccurate as Josh - even in college or early in their careers - and that's the comparison (to "any successful pro QB") I was making. Clearly, I was also comparing him to guys much further down the QB ladder, guys like Dalton or Derek Carr. Very very few QB as inaccurate as Allen was in college and early have done well.

Shaw, it would be reasonable to think that "the problem was not that he had mechanical flaws that had to be corrected," if it weren't for the fact that we have dozens of interviews from Jordan Palmer and from Allen himself talking about the bad mechanical habits he had that they were working on correcting, specifically over-striding, stepping in the wrong direction, not rotating his hips into the throw, etc., and that it would help his accuracy. Was some of the work they've done with Allen that they needed to tame him, calm him down? Absolutely. Without question. But was taming him anything to do with his accuracy? I don't think so at all. The taming part was much more towards getting him to take checkdowns when it made sense, to go with the design of the play rather than hanging on to the ball in hopes something would come open later down the field, and so on. And those changes have definitely made Allen a better QB. He's improved in so many areas it's incredible. Startling and wonderful. But he also had a lot of bad mechanical habits he'd fallen into that they have largely corrected that directly affected his accuracy.

You did state it. Unfortunately, that doesn't affect the fact that you didn't prove anything there but that when you look at film you came up with an opinion that is very very different from nearly everyone else in pretty much the NFL world. You went back and looked at old film from a lot of guys. You then gave us your opinion on what happened. And that's what it was, your opinion. Which is fine. You've proven what your opinion was by going and looking at film. At the time you were doing a ton of these studies. I did a few too, particularly to combat your opinion that Tyrod was "nearly elite." In my studies I went back and looked at every Tyrod pass. And I then posted a brief five or six word summary of each play so that anyone could check my opinions and find out if I was being unreasonable by going back with my work and finding any examples of plays where my opinions were unreasonable. Nobody ever posted a single example of something they found unreasonable. You kept on doing the same studies, and even though I again and again challenged you to do the same, to tell us what you thought of each play so we could find out how reasonable your opinions were by comparing individual plays, you never ever did any of this. That was a year or two before you did this Allen comparison, and you still didn't do a bit of it. So nobody can check you. What you've done there is prove that your opinion is that Allen wasn't more inaccurate than other QBs. And I can't speak for anyone else, but I already knew that was your opinion. I didn't need more proof of that.

That doesn't show he's not a 5.1 YPC back. It shows that he gets yards the same way everyone does, in larger amounts sometimes and smaller amounts in others. Statistics tend to work in the bell curve. You get a few very small values, a few very large, and more towards the middle. That's not Singletary. That's running backs, football statistics and in the end it's just the way the world works. Look at other RBs, you'll find that nearly all of them have a few games where they get higher stats than normal. So unless you're going to go around and cut off the top three games of every RB, don't do it to Singletary either. He is absolutely a 4.1 YPC guy this year and a 5.1 last year. It would make just as much sense (none) to say that Singletary had two games below 3.0, so he's not really a 4.1 YPC guy, he's actually a 4.4 YPC guy. You say he "wasn't getting a consistent 5.1 a carry." I'd bet you won't find a single player in NFL history with more than 10 carries who consistently gets their average carry. It's a virtual statistical impossibility. Should we say that Derrick Henry isn't really a 4.71 YPC guy because he had three games this year where he was over 5.4 and two when he was over 6.2? Sorry, this is the way stats work. You can't pull out the numbers you don't like, look only at the rest, and then think you've proven anything.

Yes, this.

Star is plenty of it, and as you say, his absence causes others around him to have to try to do more than they did last year, which destroys the ability to just "do your job." There's more, though, obviously. New d-line guys, the absence of Milano for much of the year, Edmunds' injury, Oliver's injury and the consistent injuries to CBs all hurt. A lot. What isn't mentioned nearly as often as those is maybe one of the biggest reasons, I think. This defense is one that requires everyone to be on the same page all the time. More so than most, it's varied and multiple. Every year they seem to have times when people are having problems with run fits, since responsibilities change quickly and often depending on the call and the offense's personnel and formation. We've seen a significant uptick in defensive performance the past three or so games. I believe the reason for that is that the lack of a preseason hurt this defense more than most that are more just see-ball get-ball styles. They weren't acting together. They needed time to get on the same page and I don't think they got it, and that all the injuries and personnel shuffling they caused has hurt their ability to cohere.

Exactly. You're precisely on target when you say that "inaccurate doesn't mean a QB cannot throw the ball inaccurately." Allen always had the capability, that was obvious. He just didn't do it as consistently as the others in his draft class or really as consistently as most QBs on a track towards NFL success do late in their college career. Interesting about the flicking. I'll look for it. I wonder if it's really a different thing he does sometimes or whether better mechanics just makes it all look easier. And yeah, he has dramatically improved, and it's wonderful to see. IMO his decision-making hasn't affected his accuracy. But better decision-making is indeed another step he needed to make and yeah, he has stepped up there too, by a lot. Myself, I'm thankful for those accuracy issues. If he'd been consistently accurate in college, he'd be in Cleveland right now throwing to Beckham Jr. Remember this offseason when Jordan Palmer said his accuracy on long balls could be improved and that a lot of it was a mindset of "sticking a pin in the map." In other words, not throwing hard and powerfully, instead putting more of an arc on it and thinking less of the reciever and more of throwing it to a spot where the receiver could go and get it. And early this season he was throwing dimes on the long balls. He's regressed a bit since the first four games in that aspect, IMO, but he's still a ton better than he was last year on his distance accuracy.

There aren't reasonable grounds to say that Allen was accurate coming out of college, or early in Buffalo. He wasn't. He had plenty of times when he made the right read, made the right decision, and airmailed the ball or threw far in front or far behind the reciever. He did this at a much higher rate than pretty much any successful pro QB did. He had to improve his accuracy a lot. And he did. You're correct that completion percentage does not directly and exactly equal accuracy. People who think use completion percentage and only completion percentage as their only argument on accuracy are missing the point. But Josh had problems in terms of inconsistent accuracy in every way. Brilliant throw, brilliant throw, awful throw, brilliant throw, caught but only because the reciever had to stop his route, nice throw, bad throw. That was Josh. Accurate only inconsistently. If you doubt this, go back and find anyone around draft time who called Allen consistently accurate. Anyone. You won't. And it isn't because they were all only using completion percentage. It was because he simply was NOT consistently accurate. He had accuracy problems, nearly all of it due to mechanical issues that pretty much everyone was aware of. That's a lot of the reason he was thought of as a developmental guy. Even the guys who liked Allen a lot (Kiper and Mayock, for instance) knew he had a lot of work to do on his accuracy. Yeah, they said he was inaccurate and yeah they meant far more inaccurate than other QBs, even other rookies. The reason they said this and meant this is simple ... he really was more inaccurate than other rookies. You say "he missed due to mechanics." Um, yes, precisely. And that is called inaccuracy. You say he threw into coverage. Yeah, sometimes he did, as do most rookies. But that is NOT called inaccuracy. It was a problem, but not an accuracy problem.

To respond to your introduction, Josh very clearly was inaccurate early, While like most rookies he had problems in many areas, certainly including decision-making, his early accuracy was consistently inconsistent. He wouldn't argue, nor would his QB coaches. In fact, Josh and his coaches have often said that they addressed his mechanics, which then helped make him more consistently. And that work, and the improvement in his accuracy, continue to this day. They still talk about connecting his lower and upper body, about shortening his stride, about stepping in the right direction and otherwise working on his footwork. The reason they're working on those things is because it improves his accuracy and the consistency of his accuracy. He certainly didn't need to improve his arm strength. And the results have been very easily observable. He really was not accurate as a rookie. Or rather, he was extremely accurate on some passes and then wildly inaccurate on others, and what that amounts to is inaccuracy with the possibility of improvement. I was on record before the draft as saying that I thought he had a good chance to be successful, but that I agreed with the experts that he would take a lot of develoment, but that with work on his mechanics he might be a good pick. (Full disclosure: he sure wasn't my #1, he was my #4 but I did think he was worth a top ten pick, though I thought all four of them were). But he needed a lot of work on mechanics and accuracy. And there were a few guys who had gotten more accurate after college, including Brady and Rodgers, but others also. There were even two guys who had improve their completion percentages by 10% or more after bad college stats. (Favre, for one, and there was one other guy, dang it, but I forget.) And yeah, completion percentage is NOT equivalent to accuracy, but it certainly can be an indicator. It was a huge argument at the time. (I believe you were on the other side, arguing that he was wildly inaccurate and that accuracy couldn't be improved, though I don't remember for sure on that. Please, correct me if I'm wrong.) He's followed right along the path of improvement that he seemed to need, but has done far more than was needed, at every step, improving accuracy, decision-making, knowledge of defenses, touch, and a million other little things, really. Anyway, good article. Thanks for posting it.

No, again, yards per drive is related to field position virtually not at all. On each drive yes, but that's not how the stat is compiled. It combines every drive, so there's virtually no impact from field position. You look at total possible earnable yards for offenses and it will be pretty close for all teams, particularly when looked at on a per drive basis. Every year the teams with the best complimentary units have an average drive start around their own 31 yard line. Every year the teams with the worst complimentary unit have an average drive start around their own 23 yard-line. This is a miniscule difference, especially as the average NFL drive is somewhere around 20 yards. And your defensive turnovers argument is also wrong. If your defense gets a lot of turnovers giving the offense field position and the offense scores a lot, that's a great thing ... for the team, but not particularly for the offense. If they get the ball on the three and score a TD, about 90% of that TD comes courtesy of the defense. If they get the ball on the six, get three straight sacks and score on a 55 yard field goal, scoring-based stats would indicate that the offense did a good job by scoring three points. Yay offense!! Scoring stats are far more team-related than yardage-related stats, which are almost completely unit-focused. Beyond that, if your star CB intercepts a pass and runs it back for a pick six, scoring-based measures say, "Way to go offense. Nice job scoring seven there, offensive unit! Congrats on that, you probably have a good OL and a solid QB, offense!! Oh, and congrats also on that punt runback for a TD that you as an offense are also completely responsible for," says the points-based system. "A pick-six, a fumble run back for a TD, a kickoff runback TD, a punt runback TD and a blocked punt recovered in the end zone????? Wow, what a sensational offense this team has, as the 35 points scored in one game conclusively prove." Yes, all phases of the game go together. No, not all statistical measures reflect that anywhere near as much as others do. Looking at yard-based measures almost completely eliminates the other phases. And looking at pre-drive stats evens out the effects between teams which had far fewer or more drives, which is often effected greatly by how good the other units of each team are.

Fair enough. So could everyone else. Not all at once, of course, but any team could. Unlikely but possible.

Ah, I see. Fair enough.

Agree about the re-litigation but it isn't clear that Flutie was significantly more effective than RJ. If we'd had him before he lost his arm strength he might really have been something. But we didn't. Teams could strangle Flutie-led teams as they didn't have to defend the whole field against him. Neither guy was very good.