JojoTheWhale
CORN BOY
- May 22, 2008
- 33,790
- 105,383
The main problematic indicators in Wentz's 2017 were his numbers in the red zone and on 3rd/4th Downs. He was absolutely excellent and how he did it didn't matter unless we were talking about repeatability. In general, there's nothing magical about those Downs that should cause a massive spike in your play. The best offenses over larger samples are the ones that avoid getting to 3/4 D in the first place. The 2017 Eagles never did that. As I said to you when you asked me, my Wentz comp was Carson Palmer. Same indicators, although Palmer's spike was a little heavier on Under Pressure metrics than Wentz's.
Which leads me to a point about Hurts and why I'm more skeptical than many about his long-term outlook. Now in Hurts' particular case, the training wheels are on and there are a lot more runs on 1/2 D which makes it more difficult to avoid getting into 3rds in the first place. But still, his numbers on 3/4 D are fitting a 2017 Wentz-like pattern to some degree.
If you look at all of Hurts' throws together, it's quite obvious that the coaching staff doesn't trust him to make plays over the middle of the field and is forcing everything outside of the hashes. They're giving him one read plays and keeping him away from the toughest area of the field to decipher coverage. That type of offense is always going to have a cap on it. The main knock on Hurts was that he may never be able to do more than that, so if you're someone like me who thought he came into the draft with good accuracy but completely lacking in the type of experience necessary to run a potent NFL offense, you still think largely the same thing. It's important to be clear that it's also not a knock on him that he's got the same limitations he did 8 months ago. That takes real time. It's just that those limitations are impossible to overcome if you want to be a consistent top ~5 NFL QB, which is always what my goal is.
"Solid" shouldn't be good enough anymore at QB except in extreme corner cases of supremely talented rosters. I think we can all agree the Eagles are not that.
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