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Bryce Petty is a heck of a guy.
But it was time for the Jets to move on.
Which they did this week. They didn’t announce it, but they did. They have become very secretive, but that is neither here nor there.
And he was claimed by the Miami Dolphins.
Players get screwed all the time on the NFL level, released before they can show what the can do. This happens all the time. A lot of politics when it comes to personnel matters in the NFL.
But Petty doesn’t fall into that category. He got chances in each of the last two seasons to show what he could do, and as Gertrude Stein once said, “There was no there, there.”
Last year he started three games, and appeared in four, and threw one touchdown pass and threw three picks. Another stats was substandard was his 49.1 completion percentage. You can’t win in the NFL completing under half of your passes. Think about it this way – How do you sustain drives when every other pass is hitting the ground?
Petty is another QB who was hurt a great deal by the playing in a simplistic college spread offense that didn’t translate to the NFL.
In those systems, you usually only have to make one read. In the NFL, you need to go through your progressions. That one-read stuff isn’t going to cut it on the NFL level. Petty wasn’t very going through his progressive scans. He wasn’t great at reading defenses.
Former NFL scout Daniel Jeremiah put it perfectly when Petty was coming out of Baylor – “There are things to like about his game: great size, strong arm and excellent character. However, he’s in for a major adjustment coming out of the Baylor system, and his accuracy tanks when his first read is unavailable.”
So true – when his first read wasn’t open, his accuracy as he attempted to go other places wasn’t great. Because, honestly, these one-read quarterbacks, they really don’t want to go another place. They want keep their eyes on that first target.
I hate saying about quarterbacks that a guy, “can’t read defenses.’ It sounds like you are insulting their intelligence.
I’m not. Petty is a smart guy with a good head on his shoulders. I’ve seen plenty of smart individuals at the quarterbacks position who struggled reading defenses.
Kellen Clemens and Mark Sanchez come to mind.
Guys like Petty, Clemens and Sanchez, who are smart guys in real life, and work their tails off preparing for games, however once the real bullets starting flying, they just can’t process the defense fast enough.
I recently asked a long-time Denver Broncos observer what’s wrong with Paxton Lynch, the Broncos first round pick in 2016. The guy said, “when he looks across the line, it’s a fog.”
This has nothing to do with putting the work in during the week. Nothing. It’s what happens when they play in real games with complex opposing defenses across from them. Their eyes let them down.
Not sure why Miami claimed him, but Mike Tannenbaum has had a dubious history with QB decisions.
I hope Petty proves me wrong because he’s a heck of a guy, but I just don’t see it.
Two years in a row he got a chance to play, and it just didn’t work out.
It’s hard to wean a guy off that old Baylor offense (which had no playbook), or any of those funky college spread systems. A few guys can overcome this, but most can’t.
May 4, 2018
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