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It’s a really hard job, man – perhaps the most difficult in all of sports.
And very people on the planet can master it.
Mark Sanchez hung up his cleats today at the age of 32 to become an ESPN college football analyst.
He gave it his best shot, and it just didn’t work out. It doesn’t work out for most college quarterbacks transitioning to the NFL.
“Very few people can coach the quarterback, and even fewer can evaluate them,” the late, great Bill Walsh once said.
I have always been of the opinion, when it comes to scouting quarterbacks, I don’t think NFL decision-makers know a lot more than fans and reporters. Other positions they do. Not this one. It’s such a wild guess on whether these guys can make the transition.
College football is almost like different sport than NFL football for the quarterback. The NFL game moves so much faster and is a lot more complicated schematically.
Look, I know, once a while, a prospect like Peyton Manning or Andrew Luck comes around, and most of the football world is pretty sure it’s going to work out.
But with a lion’s share of college QB prospects, it’s a guessing game.
Sanchez is a good guy, he tried hard, but it just didn’t work out.
And we could fill up this page with names of first-round quarterbacks who just didn’t work out. Before joining ESPN, Sanchez talked to Fox Sports about joining a college studio show with Brady Quinn and Matt Leinert, both former first-round quarterbacks, both around Mark’s age, both out of the league, and both now in broadcasting.
First-round quarterbacks Ryan Tannehill and Blake Bortles left the team’s that drafted them this off-season and are now backups elsewhere.
It’s so hard.
In college football, most offensives coordinators ask the QB to read half the field and usually throw to their first read. That just isn’t going to cut it in the NFL, where you need to read the entire field and go through your progressions to be successful.
And how do you determine whether a quarterback prospect can go from a single-read college spread offense to an sophisticated multiple-read NFL offense, when they never did it before? That is why you are rolling the dice on almost all college QB prospects.
Sanchez was never great at reading defenses. When he had some success in his first couple of years with the Jets, the Jets had a good defense and running game, and Sanchez was asked to compliment that with a lot of simple passes. But when those other things weren’t working, he wasn’t good enough to overcome that.
I always hate to write that a quarterback isn’t great at reading defenses, because it sounds like I’m questioning their intelligence. When you hear the words “trouble reading” it connotes a lack of intelligence. But that isn’t the case with many quarterbacks who struggle reading defenses. Just look at Los Angeles Rams QB Jared Goff in the Super Bow; Bill Belichick’s defense had him totally baffled.
Hey, if I played football, I’m not sure I could read defenses either.
So what I’m saying is, somebody could be very bright, and Mark Sanchez is a bright man who just got hired to speak on television, and not be great at reading defenses. Bryce Petty is a very bright person. Struggled reading defenses.
In retrospect, the Jets over-drafted Sanchez. Based on his skill set. he was more of third-round QB prospect, and they traded up to boot.
And by over-drafting him, people expected an elite, franchise QB, and he wasn’t that kind of prospect.
July 23, 2019
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