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Where do we start with this one?
New York Post Jets writer Brian Costello caused a stir today quoting a former Jets teammate of Sam Darnold saying, “Sam needs to step the F up.”
Jets fans on Twitter, commenting on the link to this story, went nuts, mostly trashing the premise and the writer.
Many fans are very protective of Sam and believe he’s a victim of a bad offensive line, not having enough weapons and coaching.
I’m not going to run any of the fan tweets here, but it was ugly. Costello took it on the chin.
Now personally, I wouldn’t run a quote like that, but I don’t work for a tabloid, and I’m not under pressure to get clickbait.
Remember, Costello is competing with a gentleman from another New York tabloid, who runs quotes like this all the time. A few months ago, the competitor ran a hit piece on Adam Gase, and in the story, the writer quoted somebody claiming the coach didn’t care about all the criticism because he’s “Rich as F.”
But putting the motive aside from running a quote like that, let’s cut to the chase here, is there any credence to the premise.
In a word, yes.
Darnold does need to take a big step this year. Going from Year Two to Year Three is huge for NFL players. Bill Parcells always used to talk about this.
Now of course, Darnold isn’t entirely to blame for his up-and-down first two seasons. There are number of contributing factors, aside from the offensive line issues, and perhaps the weapons (not having Chris Herndon in 2019 hurt him for sure). He’s had some illness and injury problems as well. Also, getting an entire new system, a massive playbook, thrown at him, in Year Two, is really bad for the maturation process of a young NFL QB. NFL playbooks are very involved. Staying in the same system from his first season to his second campaign, would have been helpful to his development.
But one of the biggest issues, that isn’t brought up enough, is that with NFL quarterbacks, you want passers not throwers. Darnold is too much of a thrower right now. What does this mean? Here is difference as described by the Tampa Bay Buccaneer coach Bruce Arians, a noted QB developer:
“Throwers wait to see a receiver break open and then sling it in that direction, usually as hard as they can,” wrote Arians. “Passers release the ball before the receiver gets open, usually with the right velocity and touch.”
I have written this many times, Darnold needs to throw with more anticipation. Right now, we often see a QB who waits for receivers to flash open, and then rockets the ball to the target.
Look, there are a lot of young quarterbacks in the NFL doing the same thing, like Josh Allen and Mitch Trubisky. Jacoby Brissett is another example.
So I would say in the case of Darnold, there is some merit to both sides of the argument. Yes, they need a better offensive line. Yes, they could use stronger cache of weapons. And yes, Darnold needs to step up in Year Three, with the biggest thing he needs to improve upon is going through his progressions more smoothly (stop locking on his first read) and throwing with more anticipation.
But if that former players felt so strongly about this, maybe he should have put his name on the quote.
February 27, 2020
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