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New Jersey – I want to emphasize again that winning the press conference means very little, but as I continue to go over Todd Bowles one-hour press briefing at the Arizona Biltmore on Tuesday, my gut tells me the Jets hit their head coaching hire out of the park . . .
I have covered a lot of coaches over the years. To hear this guy philosophize about football, you can’t help be impressed.
Working under so many really good football men over the years, including Joe Gibbs, Bill Parcells, Andy Reid and Bruce Arians, you can tell, he absorbed so much from all of these men. His football mindset is like a bouillabaisse, with a ingredients from all these impressive football thinkers.
When he talks, it’s not some guy throwing out football clichés or fortune cookie answers at you, it’s one answer after another where you say you to yourself, “Whoa – this guy gets it.”
I will give you perfect example of what I’m talking about.
The NFL has a serious quarterback shortage.
Serious.
I personally think they need to bring back a developmental league, like NFL Europe. They need a platform for young quarterbacks to play in games, help them move up the growth curve with game action elsewhere, not in valuable NFL games. They need to stop rushing guys. Let them develop slowly, like Aaron Rodgers was allowed to in Green Bay.
But I digress.
Somebody in Phoenix asked Bowles something like, “You guys signed a lot of players in free agency, including Darrelle Revis, but how far can you really go in this league without a franchise quarterbacks?”
Here is what Bowles said, and it makes so much sense . . .
“With 32 teams in the league, you aren’t going to have 32 franchise quarterbacks. That is just a fact. You can name five, 10 if you want to stretch it in two type of tiers. There are 12 playoff spots. There aren’t going to be 12 franchise quarterbacks in the playoffs. There are different ways to skin a cat. You have to try and win in different ways. It’s not that your quarterback is bad. As long as he understands not to lose the game and be smart with the football, you have a chance to win the ball game. You don’t have to win with a franchise quarterback. Every year there are playoff teams that don’t have franchise quarterbacks. You have to play team football and understand what your team is.”
This about the best summation of the current quarterback landscape that I’ve heard.
You have about five or six true franchise quarterbacks, and then you have four or five more that are very good, perhaps not franchise quarterbacks, but very good. And then the rest of the league is out of luck, no pun intended.
And since these franchise quarterbacks don’t grow on trees, you have deal with the hand you are dealt accordingly.
Joe Flacco is a perfect example.
No question he’s done some very good things, but he’s not a franchise quarterback. The Ravens have done a wonderful job of propping him up with a good overall team approach – good defense, special teams and running game.
The 49ers went to the Super Bowl with Colin Kaepernick (and lost to Baltimore). He’s not a franchise quarterback. They got there with that strong team approach like their opponent, the Ravens.
The Flacco-template is what most teams need to do, and it’s what the Jets will need to do
Until they find a franchise quarterbacks, and you never know when that might happen.
March 27, 2015
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