wow...i'd give anything to have an aaron rodgers under center in miami...for real...gabberts a little soft to me...i need to see some toughness and grit...i also don't think gabbert can match aaron rodgers as an athlete...while gabbert can run once on the hoof he looks more like a straight line guy to me in that regard...not sure he'll make people miss under pressure with subtle movements and its hard for me to say he has feel for the pocket cause he's never really working in one to begin with...
You've got to remember that lots of people questioned Aaron Rodgers' deep ball in the run up to that draft. It wasn't just the Jeff Tedford thing, people straight up questioned his mechanics and his deep ball... even his athleticism. I remember a post from Awsi Dooger a few months back where he told a story about seeing Rodgers live at Cal and just laughing at his inability to threaten deep.
I don't know enough about the Packers to be sure, but the common line of thinking is that the Packers basically started over and rebuilt him. I'm skeptical of that personally, but one thing's for sure now: Rodgers has a beautiful deep ball, very good mechanics and is one of the more efficiently athletic quarterbacks in the game.
If we take a Gabbert, we certainly won't have the ability to sit him for a few years. But I'm not as scared off by guys who don't threaten deep as I used to. He's certainly accurate enough to improve on it. And his mechanics issues, which crop up every now and again, are stuff that can ironed out.
My only issue now is that -- in the last
10 years -- there's only been
one time that the top quarterback was taken after the 3rd pick in the draft. And that was in 2000, when Pennington was taken 18th. Frequently you see a quarterback go #1 and then no other quarterbacks for a while.
A few examples:
After Michael Vick was taken #1 overall, there wasn't another quarterback until the 2nd round (Drew Brees).
The aformentioned Aaron Rodgers was the 24th overall pick and the 2nd QB taken after Alex Smith.
Brady Quinn was taken #22 overall after JaMarcus Russell went #1 overall.
Just last year, Tebow was the 2nd QB taken and went at #24.
I think everyone agrees that Andrew Luck was the consensus #1 guy, and that while this is a good group of quarterbacks it's hard to see any of them being taken #1 overall. So the question is: is Carolina going to get it into their head to sell themselves about one of these guys and take him, reach be damned? And if so, which guy? Or are they going to take a Bowers and go the bargain or trade up route if someone falls?
Either way, history says that one or all of these guys is going to rise significantly. And -- most importantly for the Dolphins -- that if we're thinking that all we have to do is get in front of the 49ers to take the first quarterback off the board, there's a good chance we're deluding ourselves.
As it has been since Luck decided to go back to Stanford, Gabbert is my guy. The more I watch of him the more I like him.